leliel Mirihi

Phil Deakins wrote: The Out-Law page is very interesting, Innula, but the fact remains that no country can make laws that people in other countries have to abide by, and so companies in the US do not have to collect VAT unless they choose to do so. Most don't choose to do so, and there's nothing the EU can do about it. LL does choose to do so, and it's entirely their own choice, unless they really do have a business presence in the EU. A company outside of the EU doesn't have to abide by EU law, but in order to do business with EU citizens money has to be transferred from EU to where ever. The EU has full control over the money transfers, they can seize any assets they want, impose fines on banks that transfer money to companies that don't abide by EU laws, etc. So they can't directly force LL to collect VAT, but they can prevent LL from getting any money from EU citizens until they do.

Perrie Juran wrote: This is only part of the picture. The seller is required to collect sales tax from you IF you reside in the same state. Now I can only speak for two states where I have resided, but when you file your yearly State income tax the forms include a line for reporting on line purchases from out of state that you are required to report and pay state income tax. I don't know what percentage of people comply with this rule, but I'd bet it is pretty small. The States claim that they do it in order to provide a more level playing field for their in-state business. And I also have a bridge for sale..................... It gets even more complicated that that. For instance NY requires people that don't live in NY to pay income tax for money earned from an NY company for work done out side of NY (telecommuting). Taxes are the one thing guarantied to send you to an early grave. But none of that applies to people living out side of the US.

Exavor Diesel wrote: However, what the EU government appears to have overlooked is that foreign countries like the US already charge their own form of sales tax. This means that European residents effectively pay two of the same taxes. Again, this is completely absurd. This is false for the US at least. The US has not federal sales tax for online transactions and the state level sales tax only applies if the seller has a physical location with in the same state as the buyer, which is obviously impossible for people that live outside of the US. So you aren't paying any US sales tax, tho some of the money you give LL goes towards other taxes, such as property tax, income tax and payroll tax, but there's no getting around that.

Drongle McMahon wrote: How on earth they expect to be able to enforce that is left to your imagination (until we get the undoubtedly forthcoming internet censorship, of course). Presumably a business not charging VAT is breaking EU law and might be liable to sanctions if the VAT authorities were ever to get the chance to impose them? Enforcing it is pretty easy actually, and also the answer to Exavor's question. All the EU has to do is tell the banks, which do have a presence in the EU, to not transfer money to the company. That would make it so in order to do business with the company an EU citizen would either have to physically move their money out of the EU or use some shady money laundering service. And before anyone says that couldn't happen I'd like to point out that that is exactly what the US did to prevent US citizens from using online gambling websites.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Didn't you see the video? That looks like cell shading, whether it's how it's done for movies or not..... I won't get involved in a discussion about a word, all I can say it looks great Loki...especially the first one in the vid. I've been hesitant to reply since you say you don't want to argue about it and I don't want to either. However I think this quote from the wikipedia page sums it up. "Popularly, this "ink" outline applied to animation and games is what’s called cel shading, while originally the term referred to the shading technique, regardless of whether outline is being applied or not." It's called cel shading, not object outlining. It's a technique for lighting objects in a in a non physically accurate manor for artistic reasons.

Cell shading is a specific non-photorealistic lighting algorithm that has absolutely nothing to do with the mesh itself. The only way to implement it is to modify the shaders the viewer uses to calculate lighting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cel-shaded_animation

H8 wrote: OP... if you only knew your question with gather all SL fanboys around and "tech gurus". Did it? lol Problem is not OpenGL. Problem is bad, very bad coding and optimization. And that new lighting feature just literally eats FPS. From 90 to 15 even less. I bet now some fanboy already used the usual "but games like crysis and bf are 'prebaked' and SL is dyamic". My God... 3000m in sky, only my ship and stuffs, everything is downloaded, nothing moves and I have same issue. But no! It's clearly not LL's terrible code. Love opensource but honestly if they have to rewrite everything, close it and use paid technologies I will not mind at all.... for the sake of normal FPS We need to come up with a good name for the anti fanboys that blame anything and everything on LL. The real world isn't so simple, more than one person can be at fault, problems can be caused by multiple things interacting. But no, when it comes to sl we all turn into a bunch of children and look for some one to point our finger at. I think the biggest problem with the sl community is we're all suffering from monochrome world view, everything has to be in black and white, either it's all LL's fault or all some one else's fault. That's BS and we all know it.

Kavorka wrote: As a side note, I applied the alpha channeled texture to the model in blender (using the regular real time viewport renderer) and with lots of overlap, got no glitches. Well, I did get a very slight transparency issue around the leaf, but it was barely noticable. That leads me to believe that the way SL handels its mesh rendering is causing more problems then we want to admit, even if it is inherently an OpenGl problem. Blender is probably doing per triangle depth sorting where as sl is doing per object or per material depth sorting (just a guess). Doesn't matter tho because neither way is perfect, the only perfect solution is per fragment depth sorting. And I know nobody ever listens when I say this but saying alpha sorting is an OpenGL problem is like saying running out of gas is a Toyota problem.

You just make this stuff up as you go, don't you?

I think LL agrees with you that 4k is too low. STORM-1679

RoudyRaccoon Hand wrote: LL's needs to start transitioning away from OpenGL markets and more towards DirectX for maximum resource utilization, and eventually a "cloud" grid run by the millions of users. This sentence makes absolutely no sense. Anyway there are a lot of people with the same or similar hardware as you that do get good performance. I've noticed this seems to be a trend lately, people with similar hardware getting wildly different performance for no apparent reason. I haven't heard of any good theories as to why that happens, tho that might have something to do with the people getting bad performance just posting a few rants then leaving without ever giving us info.

Publik wrote: I think it was how I was doing the UVs, got it back down to 24 vert, 12 tris which is better than the 72 it was at What's strange is that in maya it only shows 8 connected verticies. That's because as far as your GPU is concerned a vertex can only have one normal and one coordinate per texture, every sharp edge and every seam in your UV map will create duplicate vertices. So your box that maya shows as having 8 vertices actually has 24, each corner has 3 vertices, one for each of the faces the corner touches. The reason 3d modeling programs merge duplicate vertices is because it's just easier to model like that, and many offline renderers don't have such restrictions.

Ann Otoole wrote: It is working great for me. Although I would really prefer a non modal approach to windowing so the tools are not trapped in the viewer window and I would prefer all coms in a single tabbed window and get rid of the so-called "chiclets" lagging up the screen. If the tool windows were not modal they could be slid to seperate monitors in multi monitor configurations leaving the main viewport for the immersion. Modal window.

Chosen Few wrote: [ Lengthy talks about the worst case object a person could create ] The worst case objects you're coming up with are pretty scary, and I'm shure some one will try to build one. However things aren't quite as bad as they seem from the numbers, modern GPUs have a lot of tricks to cut down on unneeded processing. To start with during primitive assembly all vertices will be snapped to a sub pixel grid and degenerate triangles culled, then if enabled backface culling with remove all triangles with normals pointing away from the camera, then the GPU will do one or more hierarchal Z tests and cull occluded triangles, then after rasterization the GPU will do an early Z test and cull fragments (really quads) that are occlude. So in actuality only 1/3 to 2/5 of the triangles will be rasterized and of those only around 1/3 to 2/3 of the area they cover will have fragment shaders run on them (depending on how the object is made). Of course all this is assuming opaque faces, transparent faces will throw most of those optimizations out the window.

Chronometria wrote: This is all deeply upsetting and i`ve stuck with v2 and now v3 even though others call me an idiot for it. This is just my opinion so take it with a grain of salt, but I think your problem is your friends, not which viewer you use. There's a difference between valuing your friends input and letting them belittle your choices as if you were a child.

Thrayce Lanley wrote: "But if LL wants a virtual world where just a few can enjoy a more technically beautiful world, then they have most definitely been going in the right direction for the past two years." Again, define "just a few". I can't remember where I saw it, but not so long ago LL posted their classification list, which classified end-user hardware according to the degree which it could run SL on a scale from 0 to 3. According to the report that was attached, it was estimated that 65% of SL users were running thier viewers on class-3 hardware; that means that approximately 65% of users have hardware that is just barely capable of running well enough to stand in-place and chat. (a slight exaggeration, but the point is made). This leaves 35% of users with systems capable of running the viewer with the eyecandy to some degree. [,,,] ETA: I don't have a citation for the LL system of classification that I mentioned above, and I think I may have the order mixed-up. Could anyone point me to this? You mean this post here? You're numbers are a little off, it's only 35% of users that have class 0 hardware, and 40% of users can run on high or better.

Arabic has, I believe, some complex rules about the presence of some letters modifying the appearance of other letters, that's why the bidirectional input is needed. I don't know Arabic so I can't explain it, but I can give you a similar but much simpler examples from Japanese. Japanese has what's know as the Yoon characters where the pronunciation of two characters are merged together. For example you have the characters ri 「り」 and yo「よ」when combined they form ryo 「りょ」(note yo is now subscript). The second case are what's known as Sokuon where the consonant is spoken twice as a form of gemination. This is indicated by placing a subscript tsu 「つ」before the character being modified, for example the phrase chotto matte "wait a minute" is written as　「ちょっとまって」. That's what I mean by being able to handle letters but not words. Anyway some one did submit patches to clean up Arabic support in the viewer but LL didn't accept most of them for whatever reason.

Baloo Uriza wrote: I believe all Unicode languages are supported in-world; I have seen people writing in Arabic successfully. It even supports Cherokee (though Windows users don't seem to have a font that has this part of the Unicode set installed: Microsoft doesn't care about red people). The viewer uses Unicode so it can display Arabic letters (not words). However it does not support typing or displaying strings from right to left or bidirectional typing, both of which are needed to support Arabic and a few other languages.

Your wishful thinking depends on two things, first that the average user will notice (and care) about the performance impact of clothing from merchant A, and second that a single piece of clothing from merchant A will cause enough of a performance impact by itself for the average user to notice (or care about). I'm not worried about the merchant that sells a 60k tris clothing, obviously they'll go out of business quickly, I'm worried about the hundreds of merchants that will sell 6k tris clothing (rough numbers, bear with me). The 6k tris clothing has a low enough impact that most people won't notice it when they're alone, but when they go to a room full of people wearing unoptimized but not horrible clothing they will notice the lower frame rates they get. How many people will be able to make the connection and not just blame it on the viewer or sim? Mind you we're talking about average people here, many of whom still see a computer as a magic black box. We don't need to guess tho because texture overuse provides us with a great past example. Texture overuse causes a very real and easy to measure impact on performance yet it has taken the better part of a decade to make any headway in that fight. And once again the problem with texture overuse is not the one object with hundreds of textures but the hundreds of objects each with a dozen textures. It's a classic case of tragedy of the commons, each object / person uses a little more than they should, no one person is obviously in the wrong but in aggregate they are clearly hurting each other. Despite your wishful thinking the market did not correct for texture overuse in any way, and still fails to do so in any significant manor now. The reason for this is simple, capitalism depends on buyers having perfect knowledge. I'm shure that eventually we'll win the optimization war but it's not going to be as easy or quick as you hope.

Chosen Few wrote: Hopefully, if nothing else, market forces will prevail at least to some degree, and those who make lagtastic products just won't sell as much as those who make things that look equally good but are better performing. Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but I'd like to think that if that were to happen, the lag monsters would force themselves to learn to do better, or at the very least, realize maybe realtime modeling isn't for them. Either outcome would benefit the rest of us. I'm sorry to say it but that is wishful thinking that goes against decades of economic research. In the absence of any concrete incentive to optimize the vast majority of people won't even know what that is, let alone actually optimize their builds or buy optimized products. As your preceding paragraph points out we've already been down this road with texture overuse and look how well that's turned out.

It looks like you modified the mesh in object mode. Blender makes a distinction between an instance of an object, which you can move around and some what modify in object mode, and the underlying object data, which you edit in edit mode. The reason for this is so you can have multiple objects with different position, scale, rotation, etc., but still share the same object data. You can apply modifications you make in object mode to the object's data by hitting ctrl-a in object mode and selecting "Rotation & Scale". To avoid this problem in the future you should always edit an object in edit mode.

WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote: May I reiterate. If anyone wants to say "It must be your connection," don't waste your time. Too often, that seems to be simply passing the buck. On the evidence I have, my connection is good. Now I want to check if anyone else is having problems. Be that as it may, there is still thousands of miles of cable and hundreds of millions of dollars worth of electronics between your machine and the sim. The problem could be anywhere along the link, or the grid could just be lagging.

Any decent quality power supply that puts out 500w or more will be fine, you can get one for 50-80 dollars US. You don't really have much of a choice on that, any card fast enough for shadows will need one. Check what kind of power supply your machine has now first tho, on the off chance it didn't come with a cheap POS.

I'm not shure what the exact exchange rate is but (from slowest to fastest) the GTS 450, GTX 550 Ti and GTX 460 1GB should be around that price point. They can all handle shadows fairly well. Note that the current viewer has some problems with those cards but it has been fixed in development builds and should make its way into a release soon enough. For AMD the HD 5750, HD 5770 (note the 6750/6770 are just rebranded 5000 cards) or the HD 6790. All of these cards need a beefier power supply than your 8400GS.

Draycko Aeon wrote: also said she can run "Crysis" on ultra setting and get 60 FPS - using a pc thats 7 years old and has integrated graphics? lol ask your friend who their dealer is 'cause they're obviously getting the good stuff. http://www.anandtech.com/show/4344/nvidias-geforce-gtx-560-top-to-bottom-overclock/4