Archangel Mortenwold

This is a really worthy cause, ladies and gents! Please help by donating whatever you can, and by attending this event!

VERY good plug-in for Adobe photoshop! This makes it MUCH easier to do up product ads where I use a green screen. Thanks for posting it!

You can download and install either Singularity or Cool VL Viewer if you prefer ease of use and stability over resource-hogging, crashy viewers with lower frame rates such as Firestorm. To download these, you can go to the following web sites: http://www.singularityviewer.org/ http://sldev.free.fr/ Having tried and given up on Firestorm long ago, and having been put off by the pathological dishonesty and elitist attitudes of its developers, I can safely say that once Phoenix no longer works I will be using these viewers full time. The programmers put a lot of effort into integrating the V1 user interface to the V2 and V3 code bases, and as long as those viewers are maintained, those of us who think viewers should use fewer computer resources, have higher frame rates, and actually work on people's computers, have a way to gain access to Second Life. Good luck!

Niiiice!

Phoenix should be open source, so a dedicated programmer should be able to lift that code and make it work. The guy who did Cool VL was able to backport mesh into a V1 viewer in a few months. Singularity developers have now backported mesh into their viewer. So it's not a matter of whether or not it can be done — it can be. It's just that having made a bad decision to go with a crappily-designed outsourced viewer for SL, the Phoenix team simply has no interest in further maintaining Phoenix. To that end they've been fibbing about the difficulty of backporting features, or if not that, don't have the programming skill and therefore think it's more difficult than it really is. Either way, the low priority given to Phoenix's V1 viewer means that users who enjoy using SL with far fewer glitches and crashes will either have to switch to Singularity or Cool VL or wait until somebody with more talent for backporting V2-V3 features into the Phoenix viewer picks up the project. Come to think of it, if I or someone I knew had the ability, I'd seriously consider doing just that...

If we're going to weigh the pros and cons of mesh over sculpties, let's look at it from three different perspectives: prim cost, upload cost, and the incompatibility of mesh imports with the viewers most SL users are able to use on their computers. 1.) Prim Cost A single sculpted prim is just that: a single prim. Yes, the loading time for sculpties is atrocious and a region or parcel with many sculpted prims can seriously lag out a computer, often to the point of crashing. But in regions and parcels with limited prim allotment, the need to keep prim count down to within tolerable levels often outweighs whatever perceived benefits there might be to mesh imports, which have a higher prim count than normal sculpted prims. If an avatar full of mesh imports cannot be sustained within a region, what then? How quickly will parcels and regions max out their prim counts? The answer depends on how creative builders are, just as with sculpties. 2.) Upload Cost As Moo pointed out, there is a higher upload cost for mesh imports than there is for a single sculpt map texture. For people importing a handful of mesh builds, especially ones with low(er) prim costs, this may be fine. But most people probably will not be able to afford the mesh imports required to heavily or completely revamp their lands. If you have surplus disposable income to spend on mesh, that is great. If not, you probably will find mesh prohibitively expensive. 3.) Viewer Incompatibility This is probably the biggest issue with regard to mesh. With a majority of SL users finding Viewer 2 and its clones unuseable, they must find ways to stick with their Viewer 1-based viewers or leave SL altogether. This is not a very pleasing set of options to choose from, to say the least. Linden Lab has long sought to impose its inferior, outsourced viewer on the rest of the grid. Most Viewer 1-based viewers, which have consistently outcompeted Viewer 2 since the latter was created, cannot display mesh. This means that those of us who either cannot use Viewer 2 or simply prefer not to will not be able to see all the pretty mesh imports people are uploading unless they switch to a viewer that either doesn't work on their systems or which they can't stand on account of the poor design and exceedingly difficult user interface. To be sure, some third party viewer developers, such as Singularity, are working to incorporate features such as mesh into their projects. (As they succeed, count on more people to dump Viewer 2 and its clones.) In the meantime, however, most of the grid cannot see mesh, making it pretty much irrelevant. If Linden Lab wants to retain customers, it needs to revamp its viewer so that it has the Viewer 1 layout and interface. This is not an impossible task, as others are successfully incorporating Viewer 2 code and features into their projects. It also needs to lower the costs associated with mesh in order for the investment put into it to see any significant kind of practical return on that investment. Just my two cents, for what they're worth.

This week I received and hooked up a new computer. My previous one ran Windows Vista Home Basic on a 32-bit system. The new computer uses Windows 7 Ultimate on a 64-bit system. When I tried to log on to Second Life yesterday, I kept losing my Internet connection. I don't know if this is an issue of compatibility, or if it's something else. Also, since I saw nowhere to post this question that was relevant to the situation, I decided to post here. Is this something related to viewer issues, or incompatibility with Windows 7?