Toothless Draegonne

You absolutely can, and you don't even need land to throw a few lindens a week into some choice adboards that are dotted around all kinds of regions. What I would suggest is to lurk around some places and see if the community is a fit for your services, then go buy an adboard or two. Be wary of regions that are more bots than real people. Bots don't buy stuff! Cheapest land for an in-world store would probably be to get a premium account and then buy into a 1152m^2 (1024m^2 + 10% deeded-to-group bonus) mainland parcel somewhere. Don't bother with any expensive buy-in fees, you're literally a teleport away from anywhere else and you're not getting an inworld store for "the ambience". Set your store up in a skybox, make a landmark to it for sharing out, and job done. The rent for that land will be included in the $99/year premium fee. And yes, nothing stopping you putting your business details in your profile's about: section. (Any other questions like what "deeded to group" means and the exact procedures for doing all of the above, well, you can learn from individuals or ask builder-type help groups 😆 )

A few minute-or-so ocean loop emitters near shorelines. Some seagull sounds here and there that fire at random intervals whenever the sun is above the horizon. A multi-emitter foghorn triggered by the sun being below the horizon. A nice long loop of bell sounds for the buoys that mark the world edge out on the water. The Yaquina lighthouse comes with its own wind sounds, which are pretty good when you're placing the thing up on a tall outcrop of rocks. Asset list: Ocean loop: 751c4786-acdb-f73c-b45b-13ac488bf25b Seagull: 23943933-39f4-0f89-0734-6485beaceff5 Whitby Foghorn (mono): 4e4807d6-0f95-7217-4db2-073a3ff79517 Whitby Foghorn (left): 07e9ab97-dada-53ef-0c80-66e2988a8f4d Whitby Foghorn (right): 92164bae-6c97-e993-239f-4adab911039b Buoy loop: 73c6686e-5355-a090-b6e5-bc53ff5b302f Enjoy.

That's the basic idea, though sometimes regions get stuck as to the state of an agent. You could try adding a double check to listen for whenever an agent says something to trigger a stop. You also don't need a horrendously fast timer. 0.5 seconds should be easily enough. (Of course, the stuck AGENT_TYPING status could also be fixed, but ya know, deal with what you've got, not what you want.)

Ask 20 people how to improve FPS, get 20 answers. Personally I'd never disable Advanced Lighting except as a last resort on utterly potato machines, because so much stuff uses ALM's features that it destroys the look of the scene. Fortunately, you can gain almost, or in some cases just as much FPS by disabling shadows, and setting water to none(opaque). Also the usual applies about things like rendering only friends (but be aware you may walk into people or get unexpectedly bumped), or setting max number of non-imposter avatars to a lower value. Draw distance is also a big factor if you're on the mainland or a large, busy region or linked set of regions.

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Yes they could. And if you don't want support, stipends or be in some special prebuilt Linden Homeowner's Association, why not let anybody throw $7.50/month into 512m of madlands? That's what it costs anyway. And if $109 per month plus tax isn't a subscription, what is?

Owning a homestead without owning a full region is something that could always have been done, as I've said multiple times already. This should have been an option since the start. No $249 tax required. You think the Lab aren't already raking in literally millions per year? You think the Lab wouldn't be raking in even more just by letting people buy homesteads without the Ploos tax? Stop defending the dumb.

Like I said, this could always have been done. No extra $249 tax required. You are paying half the price for a region with a quarter the capacity. It. Could. Always. Have. Been. Done. It isn't a benefit. It's something that should always have been an option. Stop defending the dumb.

And $109 per month plus tax for a potato-grade region is something that could have always been done, without a $250/year extra shoved on top of it. If you think that's an almighty deal, go for it.

I say again, this is something that could have always been done. And no, you don't have to be premium to own a full region. Stop defending the dumb. This is someone in the Lab frantically scratching at ways to make The Mighty Ploos more attractive. It is a cash grab and nothing but a cash grab.

So is $109 per month, so why require $250/year for it? Ploos isn't worth it either. If you really want the extra madlands tier, buy two normal premiums for "only" double the price. If you're uploading that many thousands of textures, why even local textures and beta grid? Again, $109. Per month. Plus tax. For a region that runs like a potato if you're doing anything other than admiring whatever scenery you can shoehorn into 5K. It could always have been done.

Full region is $229+tax, 20k LI, full speed ahead. Homestead is $109+tax, 5K LI, 5ms script cap, who knows what other caps. Your math is wrong. Stop defending the dumb. All this shows is that homesteads could always have been sold on their own.

"Congratulations, you can now give us $109+tax per month to get a region with quarter the prims and compute of a full region, without buying a full region." "But only if you give us $250/year first." What mentalist thought this was a good deal?

Someone was trying that with me a while back. I'm not sure what they figured my reaction if any was going to be. Kinda flattering in a way. I'm important enough to have a stalker? Oh my!

There's been no implication that OBJECT_ACCOUNT_LEVEL would indicate plus-level (granted you'd think that would be an obvious one), nor did I see anything about extra animesh attachments. The benefits are all listed in the sign-up page.

Why would I be looking at the proposed service for anything other than what it does for me?

Not sure I'd want my mainland parcel to be going DING three times per day. Once per day tbh is a bit excessive these days, unless an actual problem is being experienced. Note that you can ask a bluedot to have a look at a region via live support, support ticket or abuse report as appropriate - you don't even have to have any parcels there. You can even do that for private regions if the EMs/landowners aren't around to help. Done it a few times when a region has been in a crashed or otherwise griefed-to-all-hell state.

Toys like little auras that could auto-colour based on the returned RGB values. HUDs that, yes, give you a clue how someone made their butt wobble like that - we've had attachment spies for long enough and nobody cares about those. Other trinkets or cantrips that do *things* based on a hash of shape results. But no. Can't do that now because some people got mad about shapes not being super sekrit any more. Oh well. The answer is to put useful shapes up on the MP for zero lindens. Drive the market price for a bunch of slider settings down so far that the people that insisted this function be nerfed, lose their profit margins another way.

"Extended chat ranges", in events? That's about the most useless place to put that. "30k Li", well whup de doo. "Rollbacks as a service!" - once set up properly, exactly how many events ever need a rollback? "Instancing as a service!" - for $1800/month you get a copy button. "White Glove concierge service" - because normal peasants only spending $229/month ex tax don't deserve a 24/7 support dept. "20% script improvement!" - scripts aren't the problem these days, unless someone dials that number back down to make the rip-off seem like a bargain. I want to see how these regions work with 175 billion-vertex, gigabytes-of-VRAM fashionistas physics-jiggling their way around the shopping stalls. And all for the low, low price of literally more than three linked 30k "normal" full regions. Exactly how much digital stimulant was being railed off an animesh backside when this idea got thought up? Oh well, I'm sure enough people will buy them. $40 name changes, after all.

Don't know if there's anywhere on the grid that is both popular and friendly. Soon as a place becomes popular, it starts getting certain crowds moving in trying to take the place over. That said, sometimes they ain't so successful and the place stays friendly. Firestorm regions are pretty good. They tend to have people around most of the time to boot troublemakers out. Social Island 10 can vary. Generally friendly. Can get a bit clownshoes. Westcoast Valley/thaplug is an interesting one. "Urban" region. Can get loud and brash and people-yelling-at-each-other, but if you ain't involved in the drama, it's unlikely you're going to get dragged into it.

Welcome to Area 51. At some point I'll get around to changing that awful ground texture

I cannot recommend and will not use any viewer that is not on the TPV. There's enough scare stories to stay well away from anything that isn't on that list. amdgpu is built into the kernel and is wholly open source. You're thinking of amdgpu-pro, which has proprietary additions for OpenCL and other workstation-ey uses, and ironically doesn't perform as well as the open saucey kernel module when it comes to realtime 3D rendering. That you're talking about multiple virtual machines, secure boot and all kinds of other geek-isms is exactly my point: Normal users just want something that works. Linux mostly does that, but it doesn't do that for SL. I will say again, I have a 24 core threadripper, 256GB RAM and a 6900xt, with a cooling system that cost more than most entire PCs. I run Linux as my daily driver and I'm very comfortable with dicking about in terminals if I need to do something weird. Most people, however, are very much not. Install, run, use. If it's not that simple, it's no good.

Something Pascal architecture (so the "Pro" version of the 1000 series) and 5-6GB DDR5 or more. Bear in mind these are NOT "toy" GPUs and are suboptimal for gaming, but should be sufficient for SL, and would be great for stuff like Photoshop or other workstation uses. Use a properly refurbed unit and they needn't be bank-breakingly expensive, though if you can get something like a 6GB GTX1060 normal Nvidia card without slapping your bank account around too badly, that would be fine too.

As someone who uses Linux as a daily driver, I would not recommend Linux as an SL machine to someone who just wants to switch on and have fun. The stock viewer does not support it. Firestorm has SLVoice issues. Black Dragon only runs in WINE and not entirely without issue. It's all a bit geeky-fiddly-argh-why-won't-you-just-work, and it seems that the Lab are entirely uninterested in any kind of Linux support right now, which compounds the issue. Apparently Linux users don't put enough money in to be worth it... because the regions I pay for and premium subscriptions are apparently non-existant and why am I not just using Windows amirite? Granted, the amdgpu stuff built into the kernel is lovely, but that's not going to matter if you're using an Nvidia card and end up downloading the Nvidia blob to drive it, and you'll still end up whacking Vivox with a mallet to make voice work. Given this is a machine that is also going to be used for other stuff, that also has to be factored in. If the other programs are basically a web browser, Blender and some light office work, that's probably fine. If you're trying to use the Adobe Creative Suite? Yeah no.

SL is an odd beast, and it can be better to ask whether your computer will run well for a particular region or region type rather than "in SL". 4GB VRAM is a bit thin, but given the current market, might be the best you can do without spending stupid monies. The GPU itself is more than plenty enough, at least until the viewer's rendering pipeline undergoes some major changes. Keep your resolution to 1080p and I guess it'll be OK. Given SL is the only thing used other than "other graphics programs" such as Photoshop, maybe it's worth pricing up some refurbished 6GB Quadro card? Last-gen Quadros can be had for surprisingly cheap, given the big shortages were mostly around gamers trying to get shiny toy GPUs to play with, rather than pro-end stuff that isn't normally used in, or optimised for, games. You may need to research more on that, given that most people are only familiar with the model numbers of the toy GPUs. CPU probably won't be awful. Cheap, cheerful and does its job, but probably also will be a bottleneck for SL specifically. My frame rate can drop to horrible levels with a 6900xt and a 3960x threadripper in busy areas with long draw distances, and that's a machine that can run basically anything out there right now that isn't SL. Concentrate on something that has a good single-core performance, if you're making a Second Life rig. Don't expect anything outside of liquid nitrogen overclocked stupid-machines to run a busy shopping event at high frame rates without some compromises. RAM is OK, not terrible, but get CL16/3200 and 16GB of it if you can afford it. Don't forget to turn XMP on in the BIOS. Ultimately, this all goes back to the first sentence: It all depends where in SL you are. Expect to be dropping draw distance down to 64m or less at busy events or clubs, and tbh, you probably don't need more than a 32 or 64m draw distance in a club anyway. On the madlands, everyone suffers. In a mostly-empty sandbox where you're just pratting about with toys and chatting with friends, you can probably up those details a fair bit. On your own personal Openspace (they do exist!), Homestead or full region where you have complete control, you can keep things tightly curated and have something that can look quite pretty with high to ultra graphical settings, without needing a supercomputer to see it all.