Jenni Darkwatch

You might get better help at their forums. LL doesn't support third party viewers.

Two reasons, IMO: 1. Creators believe mod makes their items easy to copy and no mod prevents copying (wrong) 2. Creators believe no mod means less support calls - possibly true Me, I won't buy no mod unless there's a very good reason for it, or there's no alternative similar product and it's too time consuming for me to just make the damn thing myself.

Wundern wuerd's mich nicht, ehrlich gesagt.

Good question... hence the suggestion to tie a fee to it to deter people from using it for harassment. Shape matching isn't rocket science in this case, and the same principle could be used for textures, sounds, animations and objects, thus making it less specific to mesh. The big brother aspect is a concern tho... not sure how to effectively limit that, considering DMCA is apparently occasionally/often(?) used for harassment, just like marketplace flagging is abused at least occasionally.

Actually I think we're more or less all saying the same: LL should do what they reasonably can to protect content, and beyond that, give creators reasonable tools to battle content theft. In the category of the latter, there might be an additional (techie) solution: From a programmatic perspective it _should_ be possible to rate meshes for similiarity based on its geometry. Computationally, that's a bit expensive, but it might be a tool LL can offer for a small nominal fee: "Show me all meshes that are similar to mine, within x% variance". Realistically, even if two people make the same reasonably complex object, they are unlikely to be perfect matches, possibly not even close matches. That kind of analysis is too unreliable to use as automatic banhammer for various reasons, but it _might_ be useful for creators to track theft themselves. Mind, it's _not_ a trivial tool to program at all, but I believe it is certainly doable. My vote would be to create tools for creators to help track theft rather than attempt to programmatically prevent theft. IMO, the current protections are good enough to deter casual theft.

UUID protection? Won't do any good, since no one needs the UUID for ripping. As has been pointed out over and over: _anything_ sent to display on the viewer, play on the viewer etc.pp. can be ripped without the UUID. Easily. Textures, animations, prims, meshes, sounds - they get in one form or another processed and displayed/stored by the viewer. You could invent the worlds best encryption scheme, and it wouldn't protect anything. DVD has encryption. It has been broken before it even made it to market. BluRay has encryption. It has been broken over and over. Always because of the same reason: Anything displayed on a screen or played through a speaker is trivial to intercept. There's all kinds of "clever" schemes to foil movie screeners. They still exist, thriving as ever. The bill is being paid by the honest customers. I understand why people prefer the "lalalalaaaaa... I can't hear you" approach to that simple little unchangeable fact. Ignoring that doesn't make it any less true. Heck, it's even possible to just browse the local viewer cache. What it takes is to come up with a reason for people to _stay_ honest. Or put REALLY simply: http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/why-people-pirate-movies-steps-to-watching-video.jpg Annoy users enough and they'll prefer the copy over the original. In case anyone infers some silly motives: I buy every movie I like, I own almost a thousand books - many hardcover - and I buy CDs of every band I like. And I rip all of that to my (private, non-shared) media server instantly so I can access it easily.

Well... others have already pointed out that it's pretty much impossible to prevent theft. You _could_ go ahead and limit mesh to people above a certain SL age, with PIOF or age verification. Yeah I can already hear the screams. However, that won't prevent the rampant theft that's already commonplace: Importing textures, geometry, sounds willy-nilly from any source people feel like, along with equally blatant unauthorized use of trademarks. Frankly, all I can see is the good old "it's a battle that cannot be won by technological means". You can make it harder, but that'll inevitable upset hobbyists (i.e. 99% of SLs creators). You can engage into an endless, money wasting war on IP theft... all you'll end up with is the same as the US "war on drugs" or "war on terrorism" - waste of money, little to no measurable benefits, a lot of harassment to honest people and the bad guys will merely laugh.

Sculpts are uploaded as textures of a special kind. The RGB values represent X/Y/Z points in space, with neighboring points "connected" to form a surface. These textures can be created in many different ways, typically with 3D programs. Once you have the texture, you upload it as such. Then you rez a prim, change it's type to "sculpt" and you can apply a "sculpt map" - the texture you uploaded. Voila, sculptie Here's a starting point on sculpts: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Sculpt Mesh might replace sculpts entirely, depending on some not yet final decisions of LL, or they may coexist - we'll see.

I think you're not talking about mesh but about sculpts - mesh isn't on the main grid yet, so it's not for sale. Sculpts are a poor-mans-mesh and work differently, you might want to look at sculpt tutorials if you're interested in that. Otherwise, just wait for mesh - whenever it's going to go live.

A bit vague.. are you trying to find a pl.ace to sing? Or...?

Stimmt, die sollten dann nicht ratbar sein. Vor einiger Zeit (mit dem vorherigen Forum) gab's 'nen Exploit der es ermoeglichte, jedermanns Daten zu sehen sofern der/diejenige einen "frisierten" Post anschauten. Soweit ich weiss war das aber ein sehr spezifischer Exploit, d.h. cross-site, und entsprechend musste der avi eingeloggt sein. Bei alts ja eher unwahrscheinlich. Benutzt hat den Exploit under anderem der heissgeliebte "Wasted" Vollpfosten. Ansonsten faellt mir dazu auch nix konkretes mehr ein. Praktisch koennte es alles moeglich sein: Ex-Linden hat die Daten mitgehen lassen und verkauft... LL selber verkauft die Daten... irgendein unbekannter (oder bekannter) Exploit... bisher habe ich aber auf meinem SL-email-account keinen Spam bekommen. Ich muesste mal den Spamfilter ueberpruefen ob da irgendwas ankam, denn alles was nicht von LL-domains kommt geht da eh in die Tonne.

Does Caras Galadhon have a rez area these days? Last I checked they were beautiful - but no way to rez a saddle or non-wearable horse.

Wenn du deinen Mailserver selber hostest, schau dir mal die Logs an - SMTP, POP3 und IMAP. Es gibt da so "huebsche" proggis die einfach querbeet mal Namen ausprobieren, und das durchaus auch recht fix. Standardnamen sind dann relativ fix gescannt, und das selbst ohne deine Domain zu kennen.

~shrug~ choice is good. If you don't like Viewer 2, simply don't use it. Plenty of v1 viewers out there - until mesh hits the grid, anyway. Then it'll get interesting

Driver crash can mean a lot of things - SL doesn't use SLI, so dual GPU is a waste of time for SL. The vid linked by jjccc is the best proof of that. Even though it's using outdated, ancient shadow code it's still got atrocious FPS. First thing to check is temperature. SL has a nice tendency to fry GPUs

I do not believe Kirstens has it - I tend to use a scrubber script for that anyway, since it also means I can kill any godforsaken bling.

Nethya Emor wrote: The problem is related to FPS, though the connectivity has its problems too. The ping seem I see is usually 130~220. I usually have either Skype or MSN in background, and web browser. Also run SL in a window mode. I tested performance with two settings. SL2 Viewer: In skybox house: 40-55fps. Antistropic Filtering, 16AA. Packet Loss 0-8% (Max Bandwidth 1500) In sim surrounded by more in all directions with low population. 10-20fps. Same settings Pheonix: In skybox House: 40-50 fps. Enabled Shadows: 2fps (AA downed to 8, 4. Nearly the same). Removed AA+Antistropic: 20-25fps but looks more laggy. In sim. 12-18 fps. Kirsten: With Global Illumination, no AA: 5-10fps in Skybox House. Oke that gives a much better impression on what's happening. Shadow code on Phoenix is ancient, so the FPS drop with AA/Anisotropic does make sense. With Kirstens, your culprit is Global Illumination. For shadows it's not needed, and on all but the most high-end rigs it _will_ kill performance instantly. I won't touch Phoenix, so I can't give you reference numbers there... but with Kirstens, my numbers are as follows (in my all-sculpt ~110prim 32x32m skybox with 15 lights - four of them projectors): 100fps: No shadows enabled 50fps : Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) 27fps : Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) and Global Illumination Settings were on max, draw distance manually to 96m, 16xAA+Anisotropic, enabled multiple threads. KirstensViewer S21(8)Test. The PC I tested that on has a Core2Duo E8400@3GHz, GTX460/1GB (the 768MB version of the GTX460 is crippled, hence 1GB). Global Illumination _will_ kill FPS quickly if the scene is reasonably complex. An example on ground level, same settings, with 7900prims - about half of them sculpts) in the scene: 28fps: No shadows 17fps: Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) 10fps: Shadows (Sun, Moon+Projectors) and Global Illumination So, depending on the complexity of your skybox it's quite plausible to have such low numbers, especially with Global Illumination enabled. Global Illumination is, as far as I recall, CPU dependent, not GPU.

One crucial piece of info: What is your render radius?

Persephone Emerald wrote: While we're talking about making Inventory easier & more fun to use, how about adding another Phoenix feature. Let people narrow the scope of Inventory searches by the type of item they're looking for - eg objects, clothing layers, landmarks, or notecards. Also give them a "Worn" tab on the top, so the don't have to type "worn" into the inventory search bar window to see what they're wearing. Erm... both of these features are there in v2. To my knoledge, have been since public beta, maybe a little after that. What you wear is (to me, logical) in the Appearance panel. The filter is in the "gear" icon in the inventory.

Hi Corinne. Good to see someone expressing well-written concerns. I've only cherry-picked some points, though I agree with some and can't reproduce others. >> * .wl files that are so useful in Phoenix to share windlight settings - are just xml notecards in viewer 2. I've got no idea how Phoenix does the .wl files, but v2 had .wl settings for a long time... my guess is that the assets aren't compatible. I've even got a box full of them. >> * I keep hoping for a "light" interface - not simpler, just with lighter colors. Black is hip but it's also visually ponderous Try Hitomis' skins for v2. They're light and quite pleasant, IMO. >> * RLV support, or something like it - there are HUDs out there that let me manage my wardrobe that require RLV. It's not all about whips and chains. That's been debated to death. LLs standard viewers will never have RLV. >> * Alias text is dark gray on a black backround. Seriously? I don't want to be too mean, but this is not good design, a very amateur mistake. This is one of the biggest drawbacks of Viewer 2: amateur UI design mistakes. Agreed. Whoever came up with that low-contrast bloated UI deserves to get fired. >> * Also look at the sky and settings shortcuts on the bottom right of the Phoenix interface. They got it right. I use Kirstens, that one has the sky settings in the top bar. Still too bloated but better. Me, I wish the whole bottom bar would be gone for good. Dynamic-size "tray" on the right, maybe chat entry bar on the left (though I fail to see why)... the rest is wasted space, the buttons could as well be up in the "address bar". My biggest gripe with V2 is that whoever designs its UI doesn't seem to have the first clue about usability or UI design in general, let alone SL usage variations between building, socializing, whatever else.

I'd say drop it and refer people to the TPV directory instead. Why bother supporting ancient software past End-Of-Life?

I never thought the Internet was free at all. Users pay for access, that pays for backbones and "free" servers. Then there's advertising, profiling etc.pp. - big business with big bucks being made. Even information on the net is not by any definition "free". Regardless of where people live, posting the wrong content will get them in trouble. The US is lobbying against Chinas "Great Firewall", yet posting content the US dislikes (or bans by law - same thing in the end) will get people in jail just the same. The same holds true in Europe and in any other country. Freedom is an illusion. "You're free to think and do as we please." And that's the same for the Internet.

Void Singer wrote: to be fair, my proposal would require changes to the viewer and server code that are probably non-trivial I'd imagine there's already a mechanism to exclude offline users, there almost has to be. Might be possible to expand on that pre-existing code. Without knowing the server code tho... dunno.

Nope, I don't care. Once mesh hits (if ever) the same outcry will come. Frankly? Your problem. Not mine.

IRC can handle millions of groups - just about any chat medium can. Groups with as few as a hundred people in it on the other hand can be problematic. Not sure what the biggest groups are in SL - considering peak concurrency is hardly above 50k users, I doubt any group has at any given time 1000 of its members online. I might be wrong. Voids solution might be the most sensible. There's plenty of groups where I couldn't care less about the inane blubber on group chat, where I only need the notices. Yet there's no setting to disable group chat only for this group (TPV hacks aside). Especially since he hit the nail on the head... the obscene amount of info involved when someone joins or leaves a group chat session is one of the bigger causes of lag. OTOH, sending a list of users to every user doesn't seem like it could cause problems, but it definitely can and does cause problems. Try looking at any group membership list and you can see it for yourself. Another way to alleviate the issue therefore might be to simply not keep that list updated or even send it at all unless a client/user specifically requests it. Caveat emptor: I know nothing about how SL group chat works internally, hence all I wrote was hot air. Or maybe not even that.