Toothless Draegonne

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.

High core speed and something around a decent 10-series Nvidia or 5700XT-ish AMD. SL does like its CPU cycles, though some things like particle effects will still lean heavily on GPU resources. You don't need to go stupid with RTX cards though. Remember that it's a platform that depends mostly on user-generated content. You're going to experience low frame rates if you try to render everything from here to Jupiter at ultra graphics detail, no matter what rig you have. And yes, 16GB is sufficient, but 32GB is definitely a nice-to-have. More is a bit overkill unless you're doing content creation or running a whole lot of demanding stuff at once.

You need to rent space for an in-world vendor anyway, whether it's a gacha machine or a 7-screen Caspervend thing. Or just throw it on the MP.

Or just list the same voucher in a normal vendor. You make it sound like someone has to recreate everything from scratch, which is... not the case.

Not speaking for everyone, but for me, no copy, no mod, no sale. Think I bought maybe one gacha thing back before they'd infected almost every store in SL, and that was ye olde Spooky Raptor. Span it once, modded the result. Any other spins were to give the vouchers away to people. If you make it stupidly expensive, I'm not going to randomly gift stuff to people for funsies. I'll pick some other cheapo thing to give out a dozen of. And if you don't know what GPU scalpers are, you've not been following the news for the last year and a half. Go forth and use a search engine, because it's a big enough subject in its own right.

If the item creator really wants to raise the price for some reason, that's on them. And once you've run out of your stockpile, where you gonna get more from? Yeah, voucher touts can go away. I'll happily pay the person who made the item, if I think the item is worth the money. I do have to ask though: What's your opinion of GPU scalpers? 😄

Yes I've seen trading card games that literally prey on children. Happy to see that gone from here. What started as a few gumball machines turned into a massive problem, and now it's not. Shame it had to end this way but, well, it wasn't going to end any other way, was it?

Yes. You absolutely will be getting the same quality from the exact same items. And what's more, the people selling their items will be doing so without supporting an army of voucher touts that do literally nothing but take money out of the hands of the people that made the items. Next question?

LL doesn't have any servers period, at least not public-facing ones. Amazon, however, has a LOT of servers!

Depends on what the creator wants to do or how vindictive they want to be. Honestly I don't know why they don't just offer the vouchers for direct purchase. All gachas do is promote a middle-market of voucher touts anyway.

It doesn't matter what you see it as. It matters what it is. As for creators leaving, why? They get to make all the money from an item, rather than voucher touts grabbing it all. It's more money for them, not less.

As opposed to the USD $229/month for the price of a region or $350/month for a "skill gaming" region.

IIRC sploders like that are already on dodgy ground outside of skill gaming regions.

All this means to me is that people making the items make all the money, instead of it going through a train of voucher-tout middlemen first. Good. 😄