Fender Strangelove

Destiny, I just went through this same problem with LL Support and although it took a little work, it got fixed. You may want to try this, it worked for me: 1. Download and install the latest version of the LL viewer 2. Use this viewer to log into SL 3. There is a People option on one of the tabs on the left side of the display 4. Pick one of the built-in avatars and allow it to load 5. If it loads completely (it did for me), you should now be able to reload your own avatar and see it properly I will mention that I tried this first on the Aditi (beta) grid--if you do, be sure to let your inventory load completely before you do anything else. At this point, your proper avatar should work in the viewer of your choice. If it does not, try the above steps after logging into Agni (the "main" grid). I hope this helps! --Fender

Yes, I tried loading the test avatar--she won't show up until I run Phoenix again >.<

For the past week or so, my avatar will not render in any viewer except Phoenix, and then only if I rebake after logging on. Not in a Linden Lab viewer (any version), Firestorm, Singularity, Cool VL, Rainbow, Imprudence, Frontier or anything else I have tried--only Phoenix. Now that is weird behavior. So far as I know I didn't make any changes although I admit the possibility, but still... why only Phoenix? I have waited for over an hour without result. I've tried fresh installations, clearing every cache there is, changing every setting there is, changing the graphic driver, and nothing makes any difference. Soooooo.... anyone have any ideas? No matter how outlandish, it can't be more outlandish than this behavior!

This particular issue with nVidia graphics cards has been going on for a long time and is not limited to Second Life. Although a lot of people have tried to fix the problem, I have not found any one fix that works for everyone. The problem seems to be caused by the graphics driver timing-out--you may want to try turning-off CUDA in the nVidia driver settings Control Panel (some people have had success with this and it is very easy to try--if it doesn't help, you are not out much time or effort). The problem seems worst with the newest nVidia cards, from what I can find, but can occur on almost any nVidia card. I know this isn't a definitive answer but take some comfort in knowing that you are far from alone.

The type of script you are describing is not really very difficult to make (I can say that because I am not a scripting guru and I have used both llSetLinkAlpha and llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast to accomplish this task, usually with a touch event as the trigger. However, to write a working script requires knowing a few things such as the actual link numbers of the prims you want to control, and the parameters of the touch event (owner only? probably), as well as any other conditions that you may wish to apply.

Chosen, Thank you very much for your reply. As a matter of fact, my "first" avatar mesh is sitting at about 6300 triangles but I would have liked to use more in some critical areas. I tugged and pulled and reduced reduced reduced until any further reduction ruined the appearance. The existence of the original avatar mesh bothered me and I am glad that you confirmed my thoughts. Taking your advice I am going to look at moving some of the triangles from non-critical areas to detail areas that are getting smushed--that was truly helpful! I can see that I should plan to do several uploads, experimenting with the mesh, to find the compromise that works best for me. Thank you again for taking the time to give me such a thorough, helpful response.

Hello all, Would one (or many!) of the Mesh Gurus be able to give me some idea of a practical number of triangles to aim for when making my mesh avatar? I realize that I am asking a very general question but I would really like some idea of the number of triangles which makes a reasonable compromise between detail/smoothness and performance. One thousand? Ten thousand? Fifty thousand? Any and all information greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. --Fender Strangelove

Kotari, that certainly sounds like a reasonable explanation. Going back to the original post on this subject: "Also how come Activision Blizzard can remake the entire world of Azeroth in a year, and you guys started working on stability 2 years ago and items from the marketplace still don't deliver all the time; people walk around without knowing their skin hasn't loaded; inventories fail to load. This is all backend stuff." Your answer supports this comment--my connection to the SL servers is spending almost all of it's time doing ACK/NACKs, so Guinevere is in fact correct.

Lulu, I would be the last fennec on earth to suggest that you keep silent when there is something going on of which you disapprove. I did not mean to suggest that you should not express your disapproval, or approval for that matter. The only thing I really meant to address was your comment about there being a "friendlier" way for LL to do what they are doing. The rest of my post to you was more a restatement that LL is going to do whatever they feel they must do, regardless of what the residents of SL think of such actions. They have never been swayed very much by community feeling in the past, and I don't see any particular reason they would start now... though that is only my personal opinion and I hope I am wrong.

Kotari, Thank you for taking the time to reply, but I am afraid that you didn't address my questions. What you said makes perfect sense to me if I were asking why textures/objects take longer in SL to load than in WoW, but that was not the question. The question is why the number of textures/objects would affect the way that they load--in other words, the problems with textures failing to rez completely, objects, especially sculpts, not rendering properly, avatars failing to load, etc. If all textures and all objects are rezzed by the same software (in a given viewer), the number of different textures and objects shouldn't make any difference except for the amount of time required to get the information (as you said).

Deej, There is no reason to say that Linden Lab is taking an attitude of "your kind no longer welcome here." Of course you are welcome--we all are--but realistically, it has to be on LL's terms. LL is the backbone from which all else in Second Life derives, and no matter what we think of their policies and practices, without LL there is no SL. That is why I can truthfully say that a decision on LL's part to embrace the Facebook-style Web makes me sad but not angry. The situation is driven by economics and if LL goes under because of a refusal to accept that their original model for Second Life is not viable, then there won't be any Second Life for anyone in any form. If this means that they have to risk the loss of some of their current user-base, I for one cannot find it in my heart seriously to blame LL. Their resources are finite and must be applied in a way that makes sense for their future. I absolutely have no idea if this new approach will produce the results Linden Lab wants and needs but one thing seems to be clear: Linden Lab feels that it cannot continue with the original plan and remain a serious competitor in the virtual world arena. And if that is what they think, then they have no choice but to change their operations to reflect it.

*laughs* A lot of the other grids out there are indeed OpenSim/Hypergrid based, but not all. The most successful viewers will be the ones that actually feature all the functionality that they need. Depriving Viewer 1.x of the ability to search is just one step towards making Viewer 2 the de facto mandatory viewer, if not by blocking Viewer 1.x, then by making it unuseable. Although the Phoenix team has shown itself to be remarkably resilient .

From what I have seen, the problem has been that Viewer 2 (as first released) didn't meet the needs of the platform--it was too wonky to work the way LL wants to use it. It's taken a long time but apparently the viewer has become, or is very close to becoming, the tool that LL actually wanted in the first place. Some of the first comments (and complaints) about Viewer 2 related to "the Facebook-like sidebar." Almost everything in the Real World takes longer and costs more than initially thought. Why should Viewer 2 be any different?

No no, not at all, Cody. I just didn't want you to think that I disagreed with your assement of the situation. I am trying to be realistic about what is going on and prepare myself for the worst case, because as of right now I am pretty sure that SL is turning into something I do not want to use. I hope I am wrong but I have a private scoreboard of predictions I have made in the past and, sadly for me, I have been right more often than I would have liked to be. It seems that your thinking and mine are meshed (no puns intended) pretty well, really, as far as what will eventually happen. Your ideas for handling this situation are very good but I am not sure that Linden Lab has either the resources or the interest in taking that approach, sound as it may be. Here's hoping

I think you may be confusing It's Made Voting Unnecessary with another world (concurrency now over 140,000). There are places which fit your description but they aren't one of them, from what I have seen. Of course they've said things about acquiring new users, over and over. And the whole "misery" didn't start with Viewer 2, it started long before that, slowly working it's way to what we have now. Viewer 2 was made the way it is so that LL could integrate it with things like Facebook--the other UI features that people love or hate are incidental to the viewer's purpose. I'm not arguing your comments or anything although I am a bit unclear if you really meant to reply to me. The whole issue with LL not listening to its users is a longstanding one in the SL community but if LL had listened to us, they wouldn't have been able to move their direction in the way in which they want to go. And if that is what LL feels they need to do, well, it's their company and perogative to do so, just as it is ours to leave if we don't like it.

Lulu, I personally don't see a friendly way of doing what LL wants to do, because people like you and me came to SL for what we perceived as the way LL did business and ran the grid. Changes to that perception are painful, no matter what the reasons behind the changes may be. For now LL is depending on everyone currently active in SL to take a "wait and see" approach, thus giving them time to drum up a new user base with the new features they are implementing and will implement in the future. I don't like the way things are headed either because it's not what I wanted when I joined but I am forced to the conclusion that this is the way things are going to be, regardless of my preferences. I stopped eating at Ruby Tuesday's because they changed the recipe for their once-delicious burgers. I can part with SL without becoming rancorous about it because things change and not always the way I would like. If LL keeps up with the kinds of changes that they have announced, I will simply move on--no yelling, no screaming, just a friendly wave and a "thank you" for the pleasant times I did have on SL.

By "preaching to the choir" I meant that I, personally, agree with you already--you don't need to convince me I just have the impression, from the metrics that I have seen, that LL and SL are both stagnating in terms of growth, perhaps not at a complete standstill but certainly not where LL wants to be. And given the apparent success of other approaches to virtual worlds, LL wants to emulate some of the practices that seem to be driving that success. If the entire existing customer base were to disappear and was replaced by one an order of magnitude larger, LL would be a very happy corporate entity. Whether or not this can happen is beyond my ken.

Oh, don't feel that I am arguing against your point of view, because I am not. I am just saying what I feel Linden Lab is trying to do. Somebody at LL thinks that being affiliated with Facebook and Twitter and who-knows-what-else is going to generate FAR more traffic than the movie Avatar did--the money people were disappointed about that, if you recall. Sometimes volume does more than make up the difference between spending levels. Unless everyone currently active on Second Life is spending a LOT more money than I think is the case, the volume vs. spending-level comparison isn't even a contest, not when LL is in the situation of having 5% of their users generate 95% of their income (the big landowners)--that's not meant to be a "real" number, of course, just an example of what I mean. And those big landowners aren't going to ditch their investment in SL so quickly, especially if LL is correct in their reasoning and they do attract a vast new crowd of people who decide to stay. Right now there simply aren't enough people spending enough money in or on SL to make Linden Lab happy--perhaps the margin is slimmer than we realize, considering the huge layoff and the lack of customer services that we would like to see. It could be a case of "we cannot afford to do better right now, we just don't have the money." But that's just a thought, not a statement of fact.

I agree with what you say, but then, you're kind of preaching to the choir. The whole point of what LL is doing is to ensure a much larger, more viable pool of customers and potential customers than they have now. Why would LL care about their existing customer base if they expect to attract five or ten or fifty times more people with their new paradigm? Frankly, if I were the one doing it, I wouldn't care either, not from a business point of view. As I said to Crys, these changes and shifts aren't things that LL decided on a whim, no matter what anyone says. Second Life as a whole has been moving this way for a long time now... poor old M Linden got replaced because he didn't move it along fast enough to suit the money people (remember how disappointed the money people were with the debut of Viewer 2? Without that fiasco, we'd have seen these changes being made months ago, maybe even earlier than that, but the interface was not solid enough to allow for it.) As far as I'm concerned it's all an intellectual exercise. I may 100% wrong but if I'm not: Remember, you heard it from me first!

Well, the whole subject is one that we can only make assumptions about, for now. However, as I mentioned in my first post (and the thing that got me to thinking in the first place) was seeing how many users were on Its Made Voting Unnecessary this afternoon compared with Second Life. If a business model works, then it works and there is no point in Linden Lab burying their heads in the sand and hoping that their original business model would come out on top in the long run. From what has been going on and announced so far, it would seem that someone, or a group of someones, connected with Linden Lab has decided to take the plunge, essentially admitting that perhaps the original model needs to be changed to keep up with the rest of the virtual worlds out there. I should assume that the decision was reached after considerable study -- not even LL would make such profound changes without having reasons that would satisfy a Board of Directors and investors. Actually, I fully expect to see a much more restrictive attitude about Adult stuff on SL in the not-so-distant future, and following that, an effort to open SL to younger residents (I consider the merger of the Teen Grid with the Adult Grid a test-run of that process). These are models that other virtual worlds are already using--Second Life simply is not technically ready for them at this moment, but there is no reason it couldn't be made ready, as has been pointed out numerous times by people who know far more about the inner workings of the software than I do. Of course the current residents would be outraged but the "original" Second Life is incompatible with a broader, all-ages range of users--but the potential pool of customers is vast. By the way, are you aware that some other virtual worlds have been using what we've been calling "mesh" almost from day one?

Crys, I think I am not making my point clear at all, and I apologize for my lack of verbal skill. What I have been trying to say is that all the people on SL who "join SL to get away from RL," who don't want Facebook, etc., all the faithful users... are not who are driving the changes in Second Life. Linden Lab is making a deliberate effort to recruit new users who do want Facebook, etc., whether or not that effort costs them existing customers. Part of the existing customer base will probably not go along with most of these changes, and LL is taking the stance, "Well, that is too bad, and we will miss you, but we are going to make these changes anyway because for every one of you that leaves, five (or ten or twenty or whatever their projections may be) will join because we did make these changes, and that revenue stream is just too juicy to pass up." From that standpoint I think LL's approach is understandable. We may not like it and it may not work, but apparently it is a chance they are willing to take. Such an approach will almost certainly change the face of Second Life beyond what you and I recognize today.

Crys, I am not saying that I agree with the changes LL is making, only that I understand why they are being made. The one thing I don't have anyway of finding-out is the actual income of competing services like Its Making Voting Unnecessary. However, I would be willing to bet good money that Linden Lab does have access to the kind of information that would say to them, "If you don't get on the Facebook bandwagon, you're going to be buried by other services that are." Facebook is HUGE and there are a gazillion people who love it along with a gazillion others who at least use it. I truly do not mean this to sound snarky but 200,000L$ is peanuts in real dollar terms. I've been on SL for over 5 years and I have spent far far more than that, and that amount is peanuts, too. The only people who directly contribute serious cash-flow are the landowners with dozens and hundreds of sims. Ten thousand dollars may be a lot of money to you and me, but it's legumes to Linden Lab and their operating costs.

Cody, that is what I meant by "understand." All the ranting and all the valid concerns don't mean anything when it comes to Linden Lab improving their bottom line--and I will say it again, I do not fault LL for that. If doing things this way causes LL to lose 25,000 active customers, and gains them 125,000... well, if it were your company, would you complain too much? LL was perfectly aware when they made these decisions that a fair number of their customers would not like them. It's a risk/reward thing: Do this and lose some but the potential gains are far greater. Whether or not things will work out this way for LL is an unknown right now but it definitely seems that they felt they had to do something to maintain a viable competitive position in the marketplace.

Y'all are working too hard to understand this stuff when the answer is available on the web with a few clicks: There's a certain other site (that Is Making Voting Unnecessary) whose concurrency number as I post is above 138,000. Can you guess to which other external sites these people are connecting? Could those sites be *gasp* places like Facebook? Well, what do you know... that's sure enough one of them, I looked it up! Having seen this information firsthand, I now fully understand what Linden Lab is doing, and why. I don't fault them for it or anything like that--making money is their first priority, it has to be. I think it's just nice to know the reasons for things sometimes. Edit: Yeeps, I didn't mean to reply to you directly, Scott, I apologize for that.

TriloByte, I have heard that sort of statement about games like WoW for years... and I still don't quite understand the reasoning. I'm probably misunderstanding what you mean but let me just ask: 1. In what way does the number of different textures/objects have anything to do with the way in which they are rendered? Aren't all textures rendered by the same engine(s)? Aren't all objects rendered by the same engine(s)? The server feeds information into the viewer, why does it matter how many different textures/objects there may be? 2. In connection with #1, aren't all avatars the same basic object as well? Being rendered by the same engine(s)? Doesn't the server just send the "modifications" to the avatar object? Why should the behavior of the overall system change from one day to the next? Now obviously the amount of time required to render a given scene/texture/object can vary quite a bit, but that in itself isn't the question. I always thought that my "custom content" was stored in a database and otherwise treated as any other object/texture would be. Other than the time factor (perfectly understandable), how do the comments about WoW vs. SL have anything to do with loading/rezzing failures in SL? I am not being critical, I am asking so that I can understand.