Jenni Darkwatch

I was a bit surprised to find out that normal+spec seems to be active even if Advanced Lighting is unchecked. On slower GPUs which are likely to have AL unchecked, this does cause noticeable performance issues. Bug it? Or WAI?

Run the client from the command line and copy/paste the error you get.

Yours is the way to go, Pussycat. We have a similar system on ours (roughly 10k "real" users, less than 500 posts a day - not very big). In addition we also limit the number of NEW posts someone can do after joining to one post in one hour. Forgot what the exact setting is, but only after x days _and_ y posts does that restriction get lifted. Last but not least we gave trusted users the ability to flag stuff as spam. If 5 trusted users do that, it gets de-listed and the user gets put on moderation (and reported). If it turns out to be legit, the user is history. If it's not... there's 5 trusted users with very good explaining to do. We get maybe one spam post a day, and it's typically gone within minutes.

If you are not familiar with Linux you'll be better off with any 32bit distribution. The viewer was built against Debian, so that's the safest bet if you want to get it to run. Beyond that, try to join a local Linux Users Group or try whichever Linux specific forum you like. Linux isn't user friendly nor is it trivial to use for newcomers.

Words are cheap. After years, actions are what matter. IMO, there's been a few changes in the last years that I liked, and not too many I didn't like. That it doesn;t always go smoothly is a fact of software development. Best laid plans sometimes end up in disaster.

Personally, I'd go for the TWI. It's mesh, it moves a lot more natural. Disclaimer: I own the TWI and the Water Horse mesh wolf, but not the WereHouse wolf.

Added Ullom to BUG-5663

Excellent point, that is a tradeoff to consider especially in SL. Luckily it's tied to the Advanced Lighting Model checkbox, older GPUs with presumably less memory hopefully will never load the texture.

Thanks for the excellent (as always) clarification Drongle I can shed some light on the math behind normalmaps vs. "real" geometry. It's been a while though, things likely progressed since the late '90s For geometry, you'll always need per-pixel Z-order calculations (ignoring transparent surfaces for a moment). Depending on optimizations, this at least needs to figure out which triangles are close enough to be either in front or behind the surface in question. That calculation at least used to be o^n, i.e. pretty bad. In addition, since the Z-order changes with camera angle changes, you get into some very fun performance territory. If you notice FPS drops when turning, that's why. Normalmaps on the other hand are merely a simple vector calculation performed on each _visible_ pixel. For each pixel you'd use the normalmaps' offset to the triangle normal, then calculate the angle between viewer and nearby light sources and their distance/falloff and you're done (ignoring any additional shader operations). IIRC normalmaps are merely a shader operation on a GPU. If you're curious, displacement maps are more or less treated like actual, existing geometry as far as I know, i.e. the same drawbacks as "real" geometry apply.

LI is a frustratingly complex beast. I'm not the best to explain it, but here we go: If you're talking a bike, you should be able to get insanely detailed for the highest LOD, but you'll have to compromise with the lower LODs. Plenty of creators are stuck in the "sculpty" mode: Do one high LOD, cannibalize the low LODs. The result? Looks good close up, looks like crap at a distance. You can honestly keep the LI at 1 for _most_ small objects, even if they have a lot of detail. Just make sure you have nice low tri models for the lower LODs. At the lowest, you might just want a sort of "impostor", i.e. flat panes with a very VERY rough approximation of the actual model. Another important thing is of course physics. You're practically always better off creating a custom physics shape. For a bike, I'd say it's mor or less something like a hexagon for the wheels and a box for the body. Last but not least: Use materials to display fine details. Oh and welcome to the world of game-ready modeling... it's by necessity low poly, unless render-ready models.

True Not a prob for me, but a good point.

Agreed for the most part, though one correction: Hair will look like crap with masked alpha. Reason: There's no way to simulate fine hair except with partial transparency. On the other hand, trees and plants can quite often be switched.

Have you tried materials? Specular map specifically? With leather I'd use a fairly wide, tinted specular. Maybe a normalmap to add a hint of texture. Silk is trickier because of the way it reflects light. Narrower specular, a tick of glow possibly might do it.

For me it remembers the placement of the CHUI window... I have it on bottom left too (using the LL Viewer). If you use another viewer, you may be better off asking in their support forums or in-world group if they have one.

Amen to that. Footnote: I'm kinda expecting that the super-secret "Experience Permissions" thing might end up being a variation of a certified builders program - just speculating though, I'm not in the in-crowd and really don't know.

There's a few available for Linux, I tend to stick with VLC myself for capturing. There's also recordmydesktop and Kazam. For editing there's also a plethora of tools for Linux. Kino, OpenShot, KDEnlive, a few others which I forgot the names of. I don't need video editing all that often, but if I do I tend to use KDEnlive because it's pretty simplistic.

Yes the engine has been updated continuously. The issue I have with the engine is that it's bound by old bugs that became "features" and can't be fixed without breaking content. Then there's the issue that from a programmatic point of view you can update to a point, but eventually you'd have to do an entire rewrite - with the associated slew of new bugs. Personally, I'd make many advanced features available - for people who fulfil certain criteria. The "Experience Permissions" system I'd imagine may end up as such a filter. One thing I'd expect is being held responsible for ones creations, among other things. On the topic of shaders: If LL would just provide some simple common configurable shaders, that would be plenty fine with me. Water would be a prime candidate, obviously. Granted, that does not take the entire User Generated Content issue out of the equation, but it should help. As you know very well as a respected creator, a very large percentage of worn mesh currently on the grid is utterly disastrous in quality - because there's no penalty for running around as a walking lag monster. People with old obsolete hardware should be fine if it's possible to turn off all the bells and whistles.

You can sail around much of the Corsica continent, and entirely around the island to the east of Corsica. Thanks to a kind resident you can currently also sail down to Blake Sea using the east channel but that's pretty much subject to change whenever the renter on Rollo leaves. The company that has all those red hearts up pretty much puts up banlines as a policy. Unfortunately there's also plenty of regular residents who block off protected water channels. I do what I can to regularly go around every few months and IM/NC people who blocked off the channels, sending an AR when necessary. On my own sim I provide buoys to clearly mark channels.

Qie is right, there hasn't been such a sound at least since when I joined in 2009. Some sims, like mine, have a little invisible "helper" that does indeed create splash particles and sounds (and some other things).

To be honest, I've wondered if Oculus would go anywhere at all. I've used VR for nearly two decades now (approximately since the Forte VFX1 if anyone remembers that - I still have mine) and while it's cool, it's unusable for the majority of the population: * You can't see the keyboard. Most people can't touch-type. * A fairly significant percentage of people gets very nauseated by VR (even more than the 10% or so that get nauseated by 3D movies) * VR practically requires a different UI. Nearly no software that I know of supports that. * Most VR hardware, including Oculus Rift, requires driver support of some kind. FB buying Oculus just means Oculus is going down the drain. Nothing new, they haven't been going anywhere to begin with, aside from burning money left and right. VR hasn't been "the next great thing", ever. Nor will it ever be. Augmented Reality maybe, but even there I highly doubt it. Look at Google Glass. That too is going absolutely nowhere.

'course, the issues with analyze are known. I just figured in the case presented it might be a fast, easy, unproblematic solution.

The answer to that would be "no, you can't really see any benefit from that". SL has been hamstrung in many ways, the graphics engine is pretty oooooooold. Look at materials: That stuff has been basic for computer game graphics since around the time SL launched. Yet we barely got support for it. And we still have no support for shaders, no support for displacement/heighmaps, no support for a lot of things computer games have taken for granted for years. And with the new-ish LI system LL would now have the tools to allow creators some fairly amazing things - true mirrors for example - at a cost.

Wouldn't hitting "Analyze" in this case then fix the problem too, Drongle? Effectively switching from triangle to hulls based physics?

Draw distance shouldn't have much of an effect I think. Did by any chance the RenderLODFactor get set really low?

I'd almost think server problem if it crashes on main but not aditi... would require a Linden to check I guess. I've not run into that issue yet myself, but as I said - different OS.