Jenni Darkwatch

Ah oke. Then the next question would be: Is your friend (where you tried it and where it worked) with the same ISP?

Somehow I doubt they can access your router... but unlikely as it may be, they might have. What brand/model of wireless router do you use? Netgear, Linksys, D-Link...? Or is it actually one your ISP provided?

Oh oke... scratch that idea then... tried mucking with the VBO setting? Just a shot in the dark.

If I could give you 1000 "fav+" or karma or whatever for that post, I would. IMO, SL was successful because the tools were in the client, enabling everyone to create things easily. With mesh, one has to either use expensive tools or the ungodly awful pile of doo called Blender.

That seems like a router issue to me then... if your router supports any kind of "security" features like web page filters and such, try disabling them. Some come with such a feature that's kinda hooked to a companion install on Windows-based PCs.

Actually... based on the highlight transparent being active... I'd also suggest deleting the settings file(s). I do not know where they're on a Mac though, sorry

Would it be possible to expand this article to at least link to a KB article explaining physics shapes? Also, download weight can vary for different object sizes. That might be a good point to add. The debug option "ShowAdvancedBuilderOptions" does not seem to exist, at least not on the LL release viewer (Second Life 3.2.4 (246439)). When a script moves an object (and possibly otherwise manipulates an object) it's impossible to get the advanced floater to display the actual weights, it perpetually loads. I'm not sure if that's a bug or not, but stopping the scripts in the object fixes it. Easy to test with the LL premium boat gift. If it's intentional it might be worth mentioning that caveat. When inspecting individual parts of a linkset it is not possible to determine the individual LI of the components. I've got a vague suspicion why that's the case. Might also be worth mentioning :)

Qie Niangao wrote: One thing devoutly to be wished is a way of displaying text on prims that is both reasonably prim-count-efficient and not subject to the security risks of Shared (or Parcel) Media. Mesh seemed to hold such promise for this, and indeed one of my very first Meshes was a super-simple eight-material model, with all sides facing the same way, for use with a modified XYZZYtext script that I planned to write. That would give up to 16 characters per Mesh, and as much as 32 characters per "prim equivalent" land impact. This might make a big improvement in content efficiency on the grid, where so many prims are now used for just this application. Except -- yep, it has to be scripted, so that means the land impact is doubled for components with such simple geometry. Just for giggles I did that... because it's indeed a good example. I replicated a regular-prim event board as faithfully as possible. The original board had 9 rows of 40 characters (4 prims per row), plus a text clock and a "picture" frame of sorts. 4(prims per row) x9(rows) = 36 prims, plus clock, picture frame and background prim = 39 prims. I used a flat 8-face mesh I got off the marketplace with a LI of 0.5. With otherwise identical build and 8 additional characters per row I got a total (scripted) LI of 30. So even with scripting it has a lower LI than the regular prim board. Not to mention it was one heck of a lot easier to program. :smileyhappy: Breaking the linkset and re-linking it on demand would of course have still cut that almost in half. Probably tolerable to do for rarely-changing boards, but otherwise it'd be nasty to a sim. And that's where it gets iffy. I'd say if it was a rapidly changing board, maybe even with text effects and whatnot, the penalty would be justified in my opinion. On the other hand, for largely static boards it's ludicrous. I wouldn't even attempt to write any logic to detect such differences in script use. With that in mind I wonder if it might have been an intentional nudge to separate out scripted and unscripted parts of any build. It would certainly make sense. Oh and I wholeheartedly second your suggestion of some text surface render function. llSetTextureText(string Text, integer Face) maybe?

Perrie Juran wrote: Thank you for posting this. It's almost scary to think you will need a slide rule to figure out best building practices. What still befuddles me is this. My basic understanding of the purpose of introducing MESH was two fold. Higher quality builds/objects. And that building something out of MESH would have less impact than building it out of PRIMS. Maybe if done correctly that could be true. But so far most of what I have seen is the opposite. You're right, that is indeed the purpose of mesh. Maybe it helps to emphasize a few important points. Mesh is far and beyond more efficient and less ressource hungry than either prim or sculpts - if built properly. This early in deployment, many mesh objects are not very efficient. As creators learn to use the tools to create mesh, efficiency will improve. The misunderstanding that mesh is less efficient arises largely from the two independent accounting systems. The old accounting system tolerates atrocious building practices, with ostensibly less impact on our land ressources. In reality, if you examine just about any build out there, halfway properly constructed mesh would beat the pants off prim/sculpt based builds. Client side render performance isn't necessarily related to mesh. As you noted yourself v3 performs worse even if no mesh is present. I don't know what the cause for this is, but I'd bet it has little to do with mesh per se. After all, every 3D game out there uses mesh. SL was about the last holdout on implementing direct mesh support. That the current implementation of mesh is sub-optimal is pretty obvious. On the other hand, it's impossible to roll out a flawless feature. It'll have to evolve over time. The main concern with such new features is the introduction of "sticky bugs". SL has a few of those. What that means is that bugs get adopted as "features" and therefore become unfixable lest they break existing content.

Statistics floater is CTRL+SHIFT+1 on Linux... I believe the same on Windows, but I do not know where it is on Mac. I seriously doubt the old accounting scheme will disappear in the forseeable future. There is too much content that would severely break if they did that. Practically all sculpted trees would suddenly count as 20+ LI. I did a check on a 30m tree, 2 sculpts. 43.6 Download, 3.7 Physics, 1.0 Server... imagine what would happen to a sim full of trees. The Lindens would have to seek shelter in a bunker, I think.

Because there's a ton of misinformation and even more woe-to-me, here's a bit of a guide - in laymans terms. For everyone who's interested in the details please do feel free to look over at the mesh forum. Disclaimer: This information represents my own opinion on how things work, and is largely the result of experimentation and reading various posts from people way more talented than myself. Especially Drongle McMahon, Gaia Clary and Chosen Few. WHY IT IS IMPORTANT TO KNOW ABOUT LI There's a good question: Why would anyone besides creators even care? Because with mesh and with the new accounting system that comes with it, the following scenario is quite possible. I built a simple house, it's 11 prims as you can see in the build floater: A few things to note: The house was built using regular box prims and a cylinder. It's not exactly well-built either. After all there's no door and no windows :) More important to note and not immediately obvious is that the build floater doesn't list "Prims" but "Land Impact". For old objects that distinction is irrelevant. But creators are now increasingly using mesh items and/or items which contaim partial mesh content. Mesh accounting, i.e. Land Impact, is vastly different from the good old prim based accounting. Here is the same house, but using Land Impact (mesh-type) accounting: It's the exact same building, but it only has a land impact of 6. In old terms, it means that even though I used 11 prims to build this house, the simulator only subtracts 6 from my parcel allowance. For consumers this can quickly become difficult to understand, because they might buy this house and the ad might say "11 prims, 6 Land Impact" or more common on the marketplace "11 prims, 6 Prim Equivalent". PRIM ACCOUNTING - PAST AND PRESENT We all know the good old region prim count. It's used everywhere. If your region has a maximum capability of 1000 prims, then 1000 prims is what you can rez. Regardless of whether the prim is a regular prim or a sculpted prim, and regardless of their size. With mesh, there's now a new accounting system: Land Impact (LI). It calculates three values for any prim: Download Weight, Physics Weight and Server Weight. It also calculates a fourth value, Display Weight, but that one is not used for Land Impact (LI) calculations. Unfortunately, old viewers can not properly display Land Impact, and that's a problem. Because if a customer would buy that house from the first paragraph, old viewers would show both houses as using 11 prims, even though the second one only subtracts 6 from your parcel allowance. Old viewers cannot distinguish the two houses. HOW LAND IMPACT WORKS It gets a bit technical here by necessity, but bear with me please. LI is calculated for each and every prim in an object, regardless of whether it's a simple prim, a sculpt or mesh. By default, only mesh is forced to use the new LI system. This is where one misconception stems from: That mesh is less efficient. In the newer viewers, Land Impact for objects can be examined in the build floater. Here's what it looks like for the good old 0.5m cube: Sorry for the low contrast. The advanced floater appears when clicking on the "More info" link in the build floater. LL changed the terminology across the board. No longer does land have a prim allowance, it has a LI allowance. The distinction is significant. In the advanced floater there is a section called "WEIGHTS OF SELECTED", listing four values: Download, Physics, Server and Display. These terms are not explained very well in any LL reference that I could find, so here's what they mean based on Linden comments and resident research: Download: It literally is a measure of how much any prim impacts the network side. More complex objects have higher download weights. The download weight corresponds to the size of most (but not all) prim types. The bigger a prim, the higher the download weight. Box prims stay the same at all sizes. Torii don't. As Drongle has kindly pointed out, the download weight is kind of in-between server and viewer, as it relates to bandwidth use. Physics: A server side measurement. This relates to the complexity of the physical appearance of a prim, which is not the same as the visual appearance. More on that below in the physics types section. Server: This seems to be largely script weight, again server side. Unscripted prims seem to have a server weight of 0.5 regardless of shape or type. Display: This is the only value that is not relevant for LI. It's meant as a measure of render engine impact and as such is clientside. Because this value is highly subjective it's not used for LI impact calculations. The LI value of any object is always the highest of the three values Download, Physics or Server, and it always gets rounded up. You will notice that the simple box has a highest value of 0.5. That gets rounded up to an LI of 1. What happens if we link two boxes together? As we all know, it counts as two prims as seen in the build floater. But the highest weight of the two boxes is 1.0. That is because by default, non-mesh prims use the old accounting system of just adding the number of prims to a prim count total. That's where it gets interesting. It is possible to opt-in to the new LI accounting system, like I have done here: Et voila, the land impact dropped to one. In other words, these two boxes only count as one single prim against a regions old-style prim allowance. And that's why LL has removed reference to prim count in most places including land/parcel info floaters. It's now all called LI. How to opt in to the new system? Change the physics shape of ANY object or prim in a linkset to anything other than prim. If even one prim in a linkset is opted in to the new accounting, the whole linkset automatically gets opted in. Also, if a linkset contains even just one mesh, the whole linkset opts-in to the new LI accounting. WHY WE HAVE TWO ACCOUNTING SYSTEMS There always has been a problem in SL. A prim isn't a prim. For servers, a torus is a horrible thing. It's physical shape is complicated, and it's relatively complex to describe the shape of a torus. Boxes are simple. Most simple objects would benefit from the new LI accounting system. But some would not. Let's opt-in a pair of tori to the new accounting system: I admit up-front I cheated. I only opted the root prim into the new accounting by changing its physics shape to Convex Hull. More on these physics shapes later. As you see, this can be a real "Oh damn!" moment. These two prims have a LI of 37! Or in old terms, they count the same as an object made out of 37 prims. That's why we currently have two accounting systems. The old "a prim is a prim" system and the new LI system. If LL had forced the new system in, a lot of people would have had a lot of their things returned to inventory. When experimenting with the new accounting system it's a good idea to either be in a sandbox or on a parcel with plenty available LI/prims. In a sense, the new LI accounting exposed just how inefficient prim-style building can be in some cases. Keep in mind, old viewers will not see LI. They only see prims. PHYSICS SHAPES EXPLAINED Physics shapes are what make SL useable for avatars. Without them we could not walk into houses, over bridges and so on. Physics are not free, they have to be calculated. The servers handle that. Many objects in SL really would not need to have any physical shape, or could at least use a very simple shape. Next to script memory use, physics are one area where we as residents have direct influence on sim performance now. We currently have three distinct physics shapes: Prim, Convex Hull and None. Meshes can have their own physics shapes, I'll ignore them for simplicity and just use a torus for explanation. Physics shape type: PRIM I've upscaled the torus enough so I can stand inside. On the right I enabled showing the physics shape of the torus (in Develop->Render Metadata->Physics Shapes). You see that the physical shape matches the visual appearance of the torus quite nicely. The example torus above is using the default physics shape type for old-style prims, aptly named Prim. Lets switch to Convex Hull and see what that does. To illustrate, I turned the torus so the opening is on top. Physics shape type: CONVEX HULL You see that my avatar stands on the hollow part, it does not fall in. Again enabling display of the physics shape shows why. When switching to Convex Hull, the physical shape ignores the hole and closes it. Convex Hull can be thought of as a gift-wrap shape. It just follows the outline and ignores any holes. Here's a side-by-side of the two physics shapes: You can clearly see the difference when looking at the triangles. Also, Convex Hull does not conform nearly as precise to the actual prim shape. It's a lot easier on the physics simulation though. Physics shape type: NONE The last new shape doesn't require an image, as there would be nothing to see. Physics shape type "None" removes any physics shape from a prim. It effectively turns the prim phantom. This can be used in linksets to have individual prims phantom, removing the need to either script objects for that or have a separate linkset for all phantom prims. Linksets can have a mix of all physics shape types. I'd expect that the better creators use that new ability to optimize builds for low server impact. But I'm not holding my breath for every creator doing it. Most don't give a damn anyway, it's easier to blame LL for lag. I'd like to warn again: Be careful when experimenting with this - it's quite possible to blow LI through the roof especially with complex builds. Go experiment in a sandbox if you're low on free prims. WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR SL The new accounting system gives us yet again a new tool in our arsenal to make SL a pleasant place and cut down on lag. I'm sure many here are familiar with the statistics floater (in Advanced->Performance Tools->Statistics Bar). It gives, among other things, a snapshot of the sims health: Specifically the time display is of interest, as it tells us where the sim is using its processing time. The three weights that make up LI are more or less directly tied to three of the time values in this display: Download Weight affects (vaguely) Net Time. Physics Weight directly affects Physics Time. Server Weight (at this point in time) mostly affects Script Time. This is overly simplified of course, but it illustrates just why we, as residents, should care. Not every performance problem can be attributed to poorly created content of course, that would be unfair to creators who put a lot of time and effort in to making quality products. A lot of content is badly built regardless, partly because we didn't have the tools to effectively measure the impact of our creations on SL. Now we, creators and residents, have better tools at hand. As residents it allows us to make more educated choices when buying things in SL. PROBLEMS WITH THE NEW SYSTEM The new LI accounting system has a number of flaws, as near as I can tell. An object thats set Phantom still gets the full physics penalty, even though at that point it should not affect the physics engine at all. Since the new system is opt-in unless you use mesh, it does somewhat encourage "cheating" by setting all objects that benefit from it to the new LI system and leaving all objects that do not benefit out of the LI system. Personally I don't see that as much of a problem, but it definitely is a problem. The new system also places A LOT of weight on scripting. Scripts kill any objects LI quite fast. No idea what the reasoning behind that is. Last but not least: The new system is not explained very well anywhere. There's no central information hub on it. The documentation that does exist is often outdated, incomplete or both. Especially for creators the new system is problematic. People with older viewers cannot see it. People with newer viewers may not know about it. The marketplace doesn't support any information on it. Anyway... if you read this far, my apologies for the lengthy pamphlet. I hope it'll help understand what's going on. Also sorry about the format, I've had a detour to the ER that kinda screwed my thought process. --- Edit: 2011-12-21 02:32 Fixed typo and added menu path to statistics menu

Hence the handicapped part. SL is great for people who _cannot_ go out because of whatever handicap. It's not so great for people who are not handicapped and simply don't go out. True, it's possible to explore things in SL that one cannot in RL. I'm sure I cannot be a horse in RL... that does however not mean SL is in any way shape or form a substitute for reality, except, as stated, for handicapped people who simply cannot experience reality anymore.

And because you can provide custom LODs it beats sculpted stuff hands-down.

StoneDwarf, your explanation about Download Weight is incorrect. You're thinking Display Weight, I believe. All weights are server-side weights, with the exception of Display Weight. But Display Weight is not part of LI.

I'm glad I waited with the reply There's quite a lot of misinformation out there, and it's about time LL wrote up a definitive tutorial on the whole issue. It's a bit ridiculous that users have to figure all this out on their own with lots of trial and error. If it weren't for people like Drongle, Gaia and others we'd all just prod around in the dark. So... What is "Prim Equivalence" and what is "Land Impact" They're one and the same. Originally when mesh came out, LL faced the problem that meshes have highly variable complexities, and they introduced the ability to have custom physical shapes. Up until that point SL only used raw prim count as the deciding factor. So they came up with a calculation to determine how many prims a mesh should take from ones parcel allowance. That's when the term "Prim Equivalent" (PE) was coined. Sometime down the road LL decided that the more appropriate term should be "Land Impact" (LI). PE is always the same as LI, an object never has a PE of X and a LI of Y. An object can, however have a prim count that differs from its LI. I'll give a separate post on the basics there, but on the general forum so it hopefully reaches a wider audience. Prim accounting, past and present We all know the good old region prim count. It's used everywhere. If your region has a maximum capability of 1000 prims, then 1000 prims is what you can rez. Regardless of whether the prim is a regular prim or a sculpted prim, and regardless of their size. With mesh, there's now a new accounting system: Land Impact (LI). It calculates three values for any prim: Download Weight, Physics Weight and Server Weight. It also calculates a fourth value, Display Weight, but that one is not used for Land Impact (LI) calculations. The new accounting can be seen in any newer viewers' build floater. You'll see that there is no mention of PE anywhere. This is where a lot of the confusion arises. Old viewers simply do not show any of these values. All they show is prim count. Even if people use a newer viewer, they're very likely unaware of the new Land Impact accounting system. We've used prim accounting for so long, it's hard to get used to new things. Because the term PE was there first, it's used in a lot of places including many marketplace listings. Truth in advertising? This is where it gets interesting, and where Pamelas question makes a lot of sense. For people who kept track it's relatively simple: Any object has a prim count (NOT the same as PE) and a land impact (which is the same as PE). Seriously, how many consumers know, or want to know, the intricacies of object accounting? I do, but I doubt I'm in the majority. For me, everything I buy in SL I want to know three things nowadays: Prim count, land impact (when applicable) and script count. No creator that I know lists script counts, and I've been bitten by that too many times. Furthermore, on the marketplace you'll often see "100% mesh" with a line below saying "Prim count: 10". Well. Is that the actual prim count (i.e. number of meshes) or is it rather the land impact? And since land impact does change when re-sizing objects, at what size is that value correct? For Pamelas products I'd guess it's sufficient to list prim count and land impact (and maybe for **bleep** people like me, script count where applicable). Adding a notecard for people with older viewers might indeed also be a good idea.

Everyone who thinks SL is a good substitute for reality is severely handicapped - or severely demented. Try hugging a friend in SL. Try eating out in SL. Try just about _any_ human interaction in SL and then in RL. Try feeling the wind and weather in RL. Go sail in RL, then in SL. Go hug your grandchildren/friend/family in RL. RL beats SL hands-down in every single department. Or, more accurately, RL beats _any_ cyber interaction. Even if you claim it's good for social networking, that's simply not the whole truth. There are better ways to network than SL. Even the godawful FakeBorg page is better for that. For business needs there's better tools as well. GotoMeeting, various videoconferencing solutions, prototyping solutions (aside from wanting to TOUCH a prototype), collaborative work tools etc.pp. SL is a toy and somewhat of a social playground. Akin to going to the movies, not akin to the clothes we wear every day.

I'd think it has to be permanent. Here's my reasoning why: 1) There's already too much mesh content to drastically change the algorithm 2) Right now, the big problem are worn meshes. They're most often horribly built (there are exceptions, but I can count them on one hand). Performance hits from that (and worn sculpts) are ridiculous. If they want to decrease lag and increase performance, they'd need to go after avatars and some other crud.

Well... savings depend a lot on the actual sim. In this case, most of the vendors there are not scripted, i.e. just boxes set for sale. The savings come from the fact that physics in any shape are a problem for the physics engine. The more solid things there are, the more any physics engine has to calculate. When there's avis around anyway. Running into walls etc.pp. The important thing is that convex hull is cheaper (for the physics engine) than prim physics. Setting the prim phys shape to "none" takes it entirely out of the equation. Just ask yourself how many prims have a physics shape when they don't need any? In the case of the mall I think I disabled physics on about half of all prims, effectively turning them phantom. I'll grant that I went nuts on it. Roof, windows, door frames... everything you would not normally collide with I turned into physics shape "none". Decorative sculpts same thing, though there i just opted for turning them phantom and not opting them into the LI accounting. And you're absolutely right about prim property scripts... they utterly suck. I tend to toss them too. Texture animations usually, particle scripts, sometimes prim phantom scripts (the old way of making one prim of a linkset phantom). Equally a pet peeve are scripted windows... with a script in every freaking window prim. Or lights. Actually... don't even get me started on scripts

SL, or rather the idea behind it, sure has potential. But SL has too many problems to be useful for just about anything. My RL partner makes her income in SL. Or rather, would make the income in SL if there wasn't a much better medium for communication: Skype and screencasts. SL merely facilitates payments. For businesses, SL is useless. As a conferencing platform it uses too many ressources and delivers utterly **bleep**ty performance. Teaching might be fun in SL, but RL and/or webcast teaching is easier, works better and is more flexible than SL. Whoops, lost voice again? Darn. Let's re-schedule class. Or use a reliable conference system. Socializing? Well, maybe when someone invents a brain implant. Can't hug people in SL, can't go to dinner with someone, can't touch hands, can't enjoy their body language, can't share a book... the list is endless. SL isn't the next great thing. It's got too many devastating design flaws that are very near unfixable. Besides, any interaction over computer is limiting, fake and at best useful for very specific purposes. Maybe if someone with enough brain and vision comes along, something like SL might take off in the mass PC market. SL is a niche product and will remain a niche product. Only gaming PCs can run it (barely) adequately. Even high end gaming rigs run SL like a pile of **bleep**, regardless of viewer. What SL is, is a good way to waste some time. Akin to MMOs, web forums and social networking pages.

Not really much change for ordinary prims. The physics shape can now be set individually per prim, to either "prim" (which is the default), "convex hull" (which closes all holes and makes it a solid object) and "none" (essentially turning the prim phantom). Objects can have a mix of all types. Beware though, changing the physics type to anything other than prim "opts in" the whole linkset to mesh accounting, i.e. "Land Impact". It can lessen the prim count, and it can easily skyrocked the prim count. As an example, rez a box and set it to physics shape "convex hull". You'll find that it still counts as one prim but if you link two such boxes together, it'll STILL be one prim because individually they're 0.5 land impact, which gets rounded up to one. Now do the same with a torus... preferably in a sandbox or someplace with a bunch of available prims. More or less incomplete: Scripted objects will retain their land impactt or get a higher land impact Sculpts and torii will get drastically higher land impact (especially left at prim physics shape) Changing objects' physics shape impacts sim performance, specifically the physics engine The ability to turn individual prims in a linkset "phantom" by setting their physics shape to "none" makes funky scripting un-neccessary in most cases In a complex linkset it does make a lot of sense to individually fine tune the physics shape. It can often cut the prim count (land impact) in half, even if there's sculpts or torii in there Fine tuning all objects can make a drastic difference in sim performance. A mall I'm involved in went from zero spare time (plus lag) to 2ms spare time (and no lag) after mucking with the physics shape of a few thousand prims, one by one. I now only get called Prim Nazi... figures.

Different issue. Using a mesh viewer does not mean there's even any mesh objects rendered.

I found the same in the meantime... Enabling wireframe shows the missing mesh (or sculpt). Interestingly, my RL partner sees the issue more often than I do. We're on different viewers and different OS - I'm on LLs 3.2.4 on Linux. We have absolutely identical hardware.

Raven Snowfall wrote: "ldd do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin|grep found" Gives me: libalut.so => not foundlibcollada14dom.so => not foundlibllcommon.so => not foundlibfmod-3.75.so => not foundlibglod.so => not foundlibtcmalloc.so.0 => not found "glxinfo | grep server" Gives me: X Error of failed request: BadRequest (invalid request code or no such operation)Major opcode of failed request: 138 (ATIFGLEXTENSION)Minor opcode of failed request: 66 ()Serial number of failed request: 13Current serial number in output stream: 13 All of the "missing" libs do exist in the /lib/ folder, I double checked. This tells the story. The driver wasn't installed properly. The crash in your follow-up post is because the SGI driver is MESA (software 3D rendering). Try reinstalling your ATI driver. Pain in the hiney, I know.

More detailed builds, as soon as the needed bits and pieces show up on the MP (and are affordable).

Textures sell for next to nothing. 3D work, i.e. mesh and sculpts, sell better. Not enough for a RL income I'd think, and not enough to be worth it as a professional endeavor. Just go to the SL marketplace and check prices. Divide the price by 250 and you have the approximate US$ amount.