Ferd Frederix

You should be able to get a pretty good laptop for £500 to £600. That is about $750 USD. Any of the Nvidia 900 series GPU's will work very well, and higher numbers are better. The chart for Passmarks posted above is wonderful: I would look closely at it for each model. Cards with an 'M" as a sufix are Mobile versions, and generally are slower that ones without the M. Don't buy anything with less than 8 GB of memory. More is always better. SSD disk drives are nice as they are much more reliable than spinning disk and very fast. It won't change your experience in-world, but it will boot and load faster. What is essential is lots of RAM and a good 1 GB Video RAM GPU. SL will attempt to load the entire sim into memory. If it will not fit, it will swap to disk and just crawl. More than 1 GB of Video RAM is overkill, as SL will not use it. Here are some suggestions that should all run advanced graphics and shadows at bearable frame rates in most sims. - The Dell looks pretty nice to me. I like Dells. http://www.triobest.com/best-gaming-laptops-under-800/ tl;dr There are lots of places that show up if you search Google for "laptops under $750"

Your Radeon HD 8670D GPU is very old and slow - only 815 passmarks. The current state of the art is Nvidia 1070/1080, which is about 6 2x as fast as a GeForce Titan X. src: http://www.roadtovr.com/nvidia-gtx-1080-benchmark-review-performance-head-to-head-against-the-980ti/ It's very new. It will not necessarily improve things over a Nvidia 970, as frame rate in laggy situatiobns is mostly controlled by the CPU's ability to move textures into and out of the limited 1 GB GPU memory that it supports. Once you get too many textures in range, the CPU gets very involved, and FPS suffers. But it will scream in every other game, as if you have a pair of Titan X's at over $1000. Your AMD CPU has a score of only 3693, roughly equivalent to an Intel I-3. It is a Socket FM2, and can be replaced with another CPU chip. I suggest a AMD Athlon X4 860K Quad Core Processor, at 3.7 Ghz, for $74.99 from NewEgg. It scores about a 5,585. I would also upgrade my heatsink - for maybe another $30 to $40. That could save you a lot of moolah - the upgrade would be under $500 and would be a far better machine. You can, of course buty a new machine, but another option is to purchase a new motherboard and RAM. An Intel motherboard holding a I7-4790K at 4 Ghz would benchmark about twice that upgraded AMD Chip. at 11,189 passmarks. The CPu is about $330.00 But you would have $170 left to update the mobo and get RAM. GPU: http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=Radeon+HD+8670D CPU socket FM2: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/socketType.html#id26

I don't know ebough about your machine to be certain of the driver. The latest driver for that card has OpenGL 4.3 support, which is very good. It should not have issues with SL. The latest version for Win7 64 bit machines is 314.22 at http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us Generally, the windows updates are well behind the 'latest'.

This is likely to be video driveer crashes. The newer viewers have code in them to restart the OpenGL Drivers when it crashes insteasd of a hard crash to desktop. I was able to solve this issue by disabling "Use Open GL Vertex Buffer Objects" in the video hardware section. This usually helps with older video cards.

Your textures should also be a power of two, such as 256x128. Mesh upload with texture will not rescale the texture to a power of two like a regular upload will, you get a white border, and you waste the upload fee. You should do this anyway as a good practise to get the best possible texture, but I sometimes forget to check.

Right click on the game icon and hover your pointer over "Run with graphics processor". You could choose from the options as "integrated graphics" and "High performance Card" A quick google search shows that laptop has two graphics cards, one a low-end "integrated card", but iot also has an HD7610M, an OpenGL 4.1 card that should work fine in SL, as Kristofkeuh indicated above. In systems with two GPU cards, the system chooses by default to run applications on the low-power card. That card is not supported in Second Life.

Have you tried right clicking the Second Life shortcut and selecting the high performnce graphics card?

The new command will help, but not always. For example, if sitting, you will get a different position than if standing. You can read the animation state and play a different animation for each possible position that the avatar is likely to be in. It would be consistent. The above command only guarantees one if them will be running, where now, it can be any AO animation. You could also use a larger ease in, and start from the hand at the side or hand on waist position. The last running animation would then be interrupted with the move of the hand to the start position, then move where you want at a consistent rate.

The Ruth is gone, now you are a cloud.

Commercial use will be a problem, as this is GPL V2, so the source must be made available. You can charge a fee, but then so can anyone else, or give your work away.

You can hide surfaces that are in the way by selecting the surface and typing h. Alt h will show them. Sometimes I use H to make a larger hole, camera inside, and look around internally. I often will end up with complex inner surfaces that are hard to paint, such as between teeth, or in folds in clothing. Deleting them would be stupid, as these folds will move and become visible when the mesh flexes. Take teeth as an example. Since they are part of the head, I type 'a' to get all the head selected, click m_head in the vertex group, then click Apply. Then I paint the neck, click Select , so the neck is highlighted, click the m_head group, and then Remove. I am finished with the head in seconds. You do not need any weight paint for any bone. But if you want your avatar to tilt if an animation moves the pelvis, then you should paint the pelvis. I find it best to paint a rough draft in the base pose, then pose the avatar and paint with with mix and blur to get the joints looking their best. The same Select a group to see overspray, and the subtract brush is how you remove overspray.

It may be because there are Linden trees in it. You could try a Linden Sandbox, file a ticket with support, or find someone who will grant you access to a place with enough prims and that has Linden trees access granted. Torley Linden posted in another thread that he had a place where this can be done: "Depending on how big your build is, you're also welcome to visit my TERRAFORMING "LANDBOX" @http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Here/7/7/69 Autoreturn time is set to 10 min. and you may want/need to flatten out the terrain before rezzing — editing terrain is open to anyone, which also allows for Linden trees and plants to be rezzed."

Yes, they can DMCA you ( anyone can), but if they do, you get to respond. I doubt very much it will apply. As a result, you can actually go after them for damages (but it's not worth it) for filing a DMCA under false pretenses. When they sent youa refund, regardless of the reason, that was a gift, no matter what the chat logs say. There was no contract between two agreeable parties, unlike Marketplace transactions, and no legal obligaton to return it.

I would use Qavimator. Nothing is simpler, and it will (eventually) become easy, once you understand the concepts. Load Qavimator and you will see an avatar. Make sure in that the Options that "Protect First Frame" is checked. This is the so-called T-Pose, and it is essential that it not be modified or it will not work in Second Life. For a very simple "rise up" animation you only need this T-Pose and a second frame. We will loop this frame over and over in Second Life. You should change the number in bottom right where it says "Frame 2 of 30", and make the 30 into a 2. Ignoring the first frame, this animation will be a 1 frame animation. I use this 1-frame pose so the avatar hovers there and does not move. And it makes this tutorial simple Click your mouse next to the red line at bottom left so it is in the second frame. Now click the hip joint of the avatar ( see phopto, ity is highlighted in red) and then use the slider for "Y position" and move the avatar up. You can position the rest of the avatar bones as you wish. SL axies are different, this would be Z in SL, but you can ignore that. Fiddle with the sliders, or type numbers in, or grab the circles on the avatar until you get the position and arms where you want. I have shown this in this screen shot. The length is 2, and the slider for Y is at 61. Save the animation and make sure you add ".bvh" on the end of the file name. Upload this to Second Life and make sure that the LOOP button is checked. You can also set a Lead-in time and a Lead-out time so the avatar will move from using lead-in time from whatever animation it is playing to your hover animation, and when the animation ends, it will move back in lead-out time. In order to do more advanced hovering, such as a floating effect where the avatar gently rises up and down, you will want to use a bigger number, such as the default of 30, and insert "key frames". The number (30 FPS) means this will take a full second to run at 30 FPS. if you set it to a larger number, you can do more complex things. You will also need to copy and paste the first animation (#2, not the t-pose) so that it loops correctly, by always making certain that the last animation is the same as the first. Otherwise it will jerk as it loops. You can use key frames to make arms move smoothly between key frames without having to make all the adjustments to all the legs and arms. I would higjly recommend using them to have the avatar slowly rise and fall by using Key Frames. That's a long discussion, too long for here. But I have an excellent tutorial by Zi Ree, the creator of QAvimator - a short and very good tutorial that shows key frames Create a simple animation using key frames by Zi Ree Lastly, I have saved a set of the default Second Life animations at this link that you can load and start with. It will save you a lot of time. They can be opened in QAvimator. Scroll down to " Create Animations With QAVIMATOR" and get the zip file. The various sit poses can be easily moved up in Y axis to make them hover.

AC3d can quickly make 3-D mesh text and export them to SL Collada format. This is the AC3D web site . It costs $89.95 and is worth every penny. Very easy to use compared to many other mesh packages that I have tried. I made these lettesr below by clicking Tools-Create 3D text, picked a font ( the last one is wingdings) , and typed in some text. It takes only seconds. You can make tham flat or extruded. I extruded some letters for you so you can see. Best program I ever bought..... By far.