Shockwave Yareach

I personally run V3. No, it's not perfect yet. But how long did the 1.x chain take before it got stable? Never mind perfect, as it never got there either. Firestorm and V3 are still a little touchy. But that will be fixed in time. If you don't care about mesh then Pheonix is very popular.

I've always just doubleclicked on the top bar of the window. Voom, Fullscreen mode.

Geez LL. I want to give you guys credit for all your hard work. But that's really difficult when you can't even announce a contest right. Only 2 days to make an avatar for a contest? This needed to be announced at least two weeks ago. For a communications company, you have serious problems communicating, either telling things to us or hearing things from us. *EDIT* I'm now being informed that the sponsors themselves gave LL only 2 days of notice. Thus it's not LL's fault, and I withdraw my criticism of the lab for this. However, may I suggest that whoever is in charge of LL promotion, require that any notice LL makes about contests be at least 10 days before the deadline? It does neither LL nor the contest sponsor any good to publicize said event with an impossibly short time to join in on the fun.

What you describe makes me wonder if the drivers for the GPU are installed at all. I've had a friend complain that they could play no games or anything after putting in the card, and he was still in VGA mode with none of the 3D card drivers installed. Perhaps you could download the latest drivers for your video card from the manufacturer? I've had a bizarre glitch before where the VFS announcement stayed on teh screen as the program crashed. But that was caused by having a particular USB device hooked up which killed Dinput8.dll early in initialization.

I find such claims very hard to believe. More than likely it's a bug in the FPS calculation rather than real world performance. If such a tweak were possible, they could sell a TPV incorporating it and make lots of cash even at 10$ a pop. And even if that worked, your LCD only updates at 60 hz, and the sim state only updates at 45 hz. In a word, pointless. Tweaking the computer to get 400FPS in a game and then watching it on a 60hz LCD monitor has always struck me as odd. Have him tell the tweak here and see if others can duplicate and improve on teh results. If there's a way to get the performance up without hammering the network, better viewers can come of it. But I'm dubious that this is anything but a glitch in the FPS calculations.

go with the Nvidia card. Stay away from the ATI as SL doesn't run as well upon it as it does on Nvidia. I've had both kinds of cards and the Nvidia cards work much better than the ATI ones. The issue appears to be iffy drivers and OpenGL support. ATI wants to drop OpenGL entirely so their drivers are thus poor and only halfway support it. This has been a well-known refraign since 2005 or so -- SL runs far better on Nvidia hardware than ATI.

I could be evil and ask for the card number and the number on the back since you were so kind enough to give me a real name. But I'm a good guy, so I'll pass on the opportunity. I'm hoping you'll not give the card number on the forums, as we are not LL helpdesk but just ordinary users. What kind of card is it? I seem to recall LL only permitting certain European Credit cards (not debit). Look here. http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/Billing/ta-p/700037 Also a note on that site says: If you are outside the US, your card may not be set up for international/overseas transactions (this is very common with Visa Electron). Contact your bank and get the overseas bit turned on your card, give it a day, and then try again.

If you are wearing something they gave you, that may be what is controlling you. Simply detach it from what you are wearing. Otherwise, you have to give permission to do the animations someone wants you to perform.

I thought that died and was buried. It was an experiment that didn't pan out. All it did was put a bank of computers that had direct connection to LL's servers and streamed the video/mouse/keyboard data. All the graphics would be generated on site and streamed to your computer, making your machine nothing but a graphic terminal. While this is wonderful in theory, in reality, everybody has bandwidth caps nowdays. And it would be easy to bust that cap only playing on SL for a single day on some ISPs. Plus the lab has to buy and maintain a dedicated computer for every person logged into SL -- so if concurrency is 50,000 people, that's 50,000 PCs LL has to buy to do the rendering and streaming. A very expensive proposition, that was. So the idea was shelved. I've heard no hints that their are plans to try it again.

Just because I have an Alt and tell you so, is not permission for you to tell the universe that I'm also "Surgical Resident" and I sleep with "Nurse McKinzie" in the skybox at 122, 140, 600 on the sim Scirocco on alternate Thursdays between 6 and 8pst. If I want the world to know, I'll tell the world myself. But I told you, privately, and I expect you to keep things told in confidence, confidential. No doubt you'd be upset if I told the world details you confided to me, now wouldn't you? Good seats are still available by the skybox at 122, 140, 600 on the sim Scirocco btw. Order your tickets now.

Every horse in SL is a fake horse. How have you been "had"? If the store is selling Copybots of the Amaretto horses, then yes, the lab needs to hear about it and fast. See, you can copy anything but scripts, so a copy of the Amaretto will not function. How to approach this? Well start with http://amarettobreedables.com/ and advise the creator where you bought yours and all the little details like what name is seen in the Created By block of Edit. The real creator must file the DMCA with LL, not you. But they cannot if nobody tells them when they get robbed (like you were.)

You need either an ATI or NVIDIA graphics chipset to be able to play SL with the regular viewer. The Intel stuff isn't supported. That said though, try Phoenix. Just do a search in Google for Pheonix Viewer (since giving you the URL is against the rules here.) That and LL's own Snowglobe have been seen to work SOMEWHAT with Second Life and an Intel graphics system. I say somewhat because the quality of the rendering will be poorer and you'll have far fewer FPS. But if it's poor or nothing, poor at least is something. Just don't be upset when you don't see the wild, vibrant world you expected.

Simple: you MUST have a premium account to OWN any land, be it the freebie house or the new digs you just bought on mainland. As the others have told you, the land you bought has a fixed tier price that you pay directly to Linden Lab. Your 2K parcel will require you to pay only 15$ a month to LL. If someone is trying to tell you that you also have to pay some group membership every month, you can quit that group -- the only requirement for land ownership is the premium account. People can require a group membership and monthly fee for that group when you rent land, but nobody can require that of you when you've bought the land; the only people you have to pay is Linden Labs. If you are going to keep the land awhile, one way to lower the cost is to pay your premium account for a whole year ahead of time. You then pay only 7$ a month for premium after all the math is done.

@natales: That LL has my credit card can hardly be construed as a declaration of Trust. They have it because I buy L with it and pay for my rental with it. They have that particular credit card because I can take it from their greedy hands with nothing but a phone call to my bank. A better declaration of trust would be their posession of my business CC, something they will never even get a glimpse of now. A true declaration of trust would be my continued premium account and ownership of that one island and four Open Spaces around it - attached to my group's existant island chain - that I was weeks from purchasing to demonstrate a rapid assembly simulation technique to the parent outfit. Rather than create the workflow with actual hardware in a hanger over 6 months, do it in a virtual hanger in only one. That would be <b>serious</b> money for a serious application rather than this play money they get from me now. I walked away from said purchase and dropped the premium when the lab's bait and switch with Open Space came about. So yes, I voted with my wallet. Lots of people are still voting with their wallets, as the dropping numbers displayed in Gridsurvey (dot) com illustrate. I'm an engineer and a businessman in RL. I know how hard it is to get a customer's trust back once you've lost it, even accidently. LL's actions have not been accidental and regaining enough trust that people will turn over several K$ a year for "nothing" is a daunting task. If we don't "Own" the virtual property, then don't price it like we do.

@Pegysus - I appreciate your telling what it's like from a newcomer's point of view. We who have been in for years can forget what it was like when we were new, and sometimes we need reminded. On the negativity though, one thing that will shock you is the fact that from 2006 to 2008, I was one of the lab's biggest cheerleaders. I pooh poohed all the old timers who complained about the glacial pace of improvements and the glitchiness of the overall system, saying that a system as complex as this is bound to have development problems. But the harsh fact is that SL's problems are not technological; they are managerial. It is managerial incompetence trying to turn a virtual playground into a powerpoint presenter and telling everyone to pack up their fun and "git!" that has done most of the harm in SL. It is managerial incompetence that directed the company to implement Bait And Switch tactics that we now refer to as the "Open Space Fiasco" and "Zindra debacle". And when even those of us that supported the lab could not count on them delivering the product that they were paid to deliver, it was the last straw and the lab saw even it's biggest supporters turn against them. The ship LL is today sinking, with user numbers and concurrency sinking every month. The lab repeatedly shoots itself in the foot when there's no logic to it, then blames the users who are spending lots and lots of cash and standing by the lab through thick and thin. So while yes, there is some negativity here, you should have been around 1.5 years ago -- now THAT was a snake pit. Today is nowhere near as bad because so many people found other ways to spend their millions of dollars a month with companies that don't treat their customers hostily like LL does. Those of us remaining and complaining are the die-hards who remember what SL used to be and what they'd like to see SL return to once again -- a playground where you can be anything and do anything. But we cannot do that when struggling with the 23 volumes of TOS and Linden policies regarding land costs and the Marketplace that make owning land a sucker's bet. The negativity is because we fell in love with Second Life of old. And the only reason we don't have it still today is because of idiots who couldn't leave a good thing alone and ruined it. We want it back, or at the very least we don't want the current pale shadow of what we used to have to go bankrupt. So please, forgive us for the negativity. We aren't complaining because we love the blue shade our faces turn to. We do so because we hope and pray that once in awhile, something we complain about will actually get fixed. And under the current CEO, a couple of things actually have been fixed. But there is so much damage the previous chimpEO did that remains to be fixed. And if the critical tasks aren't addressed soon, you may not be able to stay in world long enough to become a "complainer" like me, as the world will vanish right out from under your prim boots.

@Adam - well, I suppose we could shoehorn mesh editor in with the Sound creation area. Oh wait, there has NEVER been a sound creation area in the viewer. Silly me. We can stick it in the tab for the Texture editing area instead, then. Wait a minute, there has never been a texture editor either. Nor has there been a pose editor, or a BVH creator or an animation creator or a Heightfield File editor... Why so many of you blast SL for not having Photoshop built in but continue to take photos with your digital cameras that likewise doesn't have photoshop built in, completely amazes me. You cannot make a movie without a video editor and you cannot create a 3D world without learning some 3D tools either. That you can create some things with the basic tools the viewer gives you is great, I agree. But other tools from companies who have forgotten more about 3D than LL will ever learn also exist, and some of them are even free. There are lots and lots of tools already out for these well-documented standards. Your refusal to make a texture because there is no texture editor in the viewer is like saying you refuse to drive your car because Ford didn't produce the gas in the tank, either. Who cares where the gas comes from? If you don't wish to use PaintShopPro or Gimp or Audacity or Aniposer, that's your business -- nobody is saying you have to or you can't play in SL. You can keep building with your wooden blocks all you like. The rest of us who run more than one program on our computers at a time will be generating meshes that will totally revolutionize how SL looks, from realistic trees to ornate wall paneling to elaborate flying toasters. And besides, adding in all those editors would make everyone crying about the size of the download explode in indignation -- How about a nice 250Meg download every couple of nights? That is, if LL could actually build a working mesh or sound editor in the first place. Seeing how poorly they've done anything else the past 3 years, I wouldn't bet money on them delivering anything usuable.

@Dev Khaos: I had a similar problem until recently. I discovered that what was crashing was NOT VFS, but Dinput8.dll, part of directX9c. It crashed whenever directX started to initialize because I had a particular device plugged into USB. In my case, that was a PICKIT3 programming wand. Try unplugging USB devices and see if the lockup problem goes away. When I go to SL, I have to unplug the PICKIT3 first. This is a problem with some poor USB HID programming rather than LL's fault. But yes, it's frustrating to have your 3D GPU not work because of something you have plugged into USB. Strange problem and stranger solution, but I swear it's true. And I am sure I'm not the only one to encounter it.

@Pookiepie -- MANY of us screamed loudly that if the merger had to be done, that a G-rated continent had to be created and everyone else left alone. But instead we got this junk solution which makes nobody happy, jeopardizes everyone and solves nothing -- all a teen has to do to buy a pe*is is go to Idu and cam into any of the shops in Mature land which surround the new arrivals area there. All a teen has to do to see some really hot steaming sex scenes is cam into the sex-pose store to the SE and watch from the PG area of Idu. I even created a very simple solution to the disaster, suggesting that any M or A sim simply pass no data at all to people with the General bit set (teens). The teens would see a world that looks much like Island areas, but not see anything which they should not. This too was roundly ignored by LL. Between the Zindra ghettoization and the teen merger, I think LL has shot itself in the foot two times too many to keep living as they are today. A fundamental change that really fixes the issues in Mainland needs to be implemented that won't destroy the fun people have today. Aside from lowering the prices of tier, LL should also simplify the TOS in the following manner: * all PG areas are no-sex areas, including your homes. Violence and wargames are permitted only in sims/parcels where it is pointedly permitted and expected. Sex furniture and naughty poseballs are also not permitted in PG, the most restrictive of areas. * All M areas are nudity okay and sex okay, so long as it is not visible from public roads. Public roads are considered PG areas within M and what you do in your parcel is your business as long as passersby don't have to watch. Camming from the road or entering your parcel are not covered -- someone deliberately looking into homes or past decorative blocks are choosing to watch and so have no-one to blame but themselves. * All A areas can have anything and everything open and exposed, even on the public roads. Simple, easy to understand, and fair. Well, fair except to everyone who bought a home in PG believing the lie that what they did in their own homes was their business...

Except for a very few people, no. To do what you desire, you need the source of material (say cable box), Video capture device, a computer running Darwin, AND a relay server running Darwin on a colo computer with 100Mbps to the backbone. Very few people have the skill or the gear or the cash to do that. And even then you have no control over your cable box, unless you also send commands to a realworld device which changes the channels upon command via the internet (an HTTP call with ?chan=xxx at the end). If you are looking for something like a slingbox for SL, they don't exist and the MOV-only requirement for streaming video limits what you can do.

@Ciaran: The heart of the Open Space mess was not that people bought the product. The heart of the failure was that a) they did not test the new 4-sims-per-core design adequately and it turned out that current design maxes out at 3 sims per core. b) LL told people repeatedly that they could own homes in those, then changed their minds after the fact. c) Rather than admit their design and management failure with the new product, they blamed customers for violating unwritten rules and doing things they were pointedly told they were permitted to do, aka having homes. d) They then jacked the prices so that three homesteads running on one core cost more than a full island sim also running on one core. Had LL admitted it erred in thinking they could shoehorn 4 sims into one core and would need to raise the price so that there would be 3 per core, there would have been grumbling, but generally people would have accepted and paid the extra. But being told that it was OUR fault, that the price would go up much more than a full sim for the same hardware used, and that we'd have limits of how many people could be on the land, and that we could either bend over and accept the bait-and-switch or quit... that was too much for most people. Mistakes happen, most people understand. But mistakes followed by baseless accusations and greedy (probably illegal) bait and switch swaps of what people bought was the straw that broke the prim-camel's back and began the decline of SL. When nobody trusts your company to deliver the product paid for, your company will have great trouble convincing anyone to buy from you.

@Mayson: The forced march to the Adult Ghetto took place simultaneously as the integration of Xstreetsl.com into Second Life. Xstreet was formerly a private enterprise called Second Life Exchange where a server talked with "Magic Boxes" via the llEmail command, and a person could search for anything placed in these boxes, buy them, and get them in under a minute. LL had to purchase ALL the webbased systems not because their own systems sucked so badly, but because that was necessary to implement the new adult restrictions and the new Identification requirements. If they forced the sex-part stores to Zindra, but the webbased stores still let little Johnny Rottenkid buy a P3nis without even being logged in, the whole facist control measure wouldn't have worked. So to tie up a loose end in M's Ghetto march of the freaks and oddballs to their ghetto, LL had to buy the webbased store system whole hog. And just killing it would have seen the rise of another within a month, so they had to give the customer what they wanted (for a change)

@Ralph: Well, I agree with you about Atlas -- giving a handful of land barons preferencial pricing, although legal, is pretty lame. If they gave the same pricing to the rest of the grid, they'd have people adding sims left and right, and the money would flow in like water. I don't know why this is so hard for the LL to figure out. But as for the people just wanting a place to socialize and buying a sim on a whim, sorry, but I don't agree. Buying a sim is a serious step and people need to think of it as such. Anybody not willing to turn their sim into their dream or their idea of utopia will likewise not care about it when they get bored and want to ditch it so they can go back to playing Rift or whatever. We need people to build inventive, neat, fun stuff and hang around. Rezzing cookie cutter homes and leaving after 2 months? That's what happens in Mainland already, and it is not a pretty sight. In fact, it's one thing that drove my entire group to getting an island chain, even if we have only 1/2 the islands now that we used to have.

@Marielle: Both have a place. Both are necessary. Sometimes I don't have time to take hours wandering stores -- I need that sculpty prim and I need it immediately. Getting in marketplace gives it to me. Sometimes I'm relaxing and exploring -- I need stores to wander and trip on something I didn't know existed. It's not one or the other. If you have only one but not the other, SL is diminished. And SL eliminating their webstore would just see another nonLinden webstore rise in its place. After all, the lindens simply bought out the SLexchange that was becoming wildly popular and forced it into the world, becoming Xstreetsl and then finally, Marketplace. If SL were to can the marketplace tomorrow, within a week there would be yet another sales website in existance by another resident. Why? Because unlike SL search, a website for finding $item specifically set for sale works and works very well. But it isn't as much fun as window shopping, I agree. So make it so you have to have land in SL to have space in the webstore, and everyone is happy; everybody wins.

@Ralph: While I won't contest lowering the prices will improve land sales, I fail to understand the rest of your argument. You can already sell entire sims and everything upon it to whoever wants to pay for it. We've been buying and selling (and advertising) land sales -- mainland and estate -- for years. As an aside, there is provably zero demand for a ready made, turnkey island sim. People buying such expect it to look like they want and to illuminate their dreams, not someone else's. During project Enterprise (late 2009 to mid 2010) SL had pay-and-go island sims available which came with housing, meeting areas, exploration areas, ready to go with the press of a button. To my knowledge, not a single one of those turnkey estates were ever sold or rezzed. People buy islands to create their own vision, be it made by the owner or by hired builders who bring the owner's vision to life for them.

@Darkie: That page no longer goes anywhere. @Leth762: The common problems are cache related. The most uncommon problem, well, I'll get into that in a minute. Take a look at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/How_do_I_fully_uninstall_and_reinstall_Second_Life%3F and try deleting all the caches and folders in the computer having anything at all to do with SL, and Reinstall it. (Assuming you are running the SL viewer -- other third party viewers may be in different folders.) This fixes 95% of the problems. However, there IS a small percentage of people who have USB devices which cause DINPUT8.DLL to crash while the VSF indicator is still on the screen. If the wipe did not stop the problem, you may have a USB device plugged in which crashes the direct input portion of DirectX. For example, the PICKIT3 programming device is known to me as a device that when plugged in, utterly prevents any SL viewer from loading or working. There are certain to be others. Unplug your USB devices one at a time until you can launch the viewer again, and you'll have found the fault. (Note: this is a problem with DirectX and poorly written USB devices, not Linden lab fault.)