WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

Are you running 32-bit Windows or 64-bit? Briefly, while there have been work-around on the 32-bit limit since the last century, Windows will not use them, and you're limited to 4GB for total memory addresses. Your video card will use a lump of the 4GB. An individual Windows app is limited to 2GB of RAM. One or two things such as RAM Drives can bypass the Windows limit with their driver, and give you a very fast swap file. There are a few things that software writers can do which will allow a 32-bit program to access 4GB of memory under 64bit Windows. I don't know which viewers allow this. The slplugin.exe system is another way of easily using more RAM. Conclusion: switch to 64-bit Windows and you will have more RAM available on any 4GB system. Then, if your motherboard supports more RAM, add some. I cannot install more than 4GB on my system, and I am seriously thinking about switching to 64-bit because of the competition for memory addresses between RAM and video card. When you figure in what Windows needs, that would make a big difference to what would be available for the Viewer and other user software. Keeping voice turned off is also a good idea.

It will be worth keeping track of Firestorm, because there has to be a new version soon. The new "baked texture" system should be active in about six weeks (but we are talking about the Lindens, so...), and it will break every viewer out there. Will that fix your problem with a Mac? Doesn't seem likely, but it does give a timescale, and I would rather rely on the Firestorm developers than on a bunch of anonymous Lindens.

It would be good if users of Second Life could respond to his article. But we cannot. It's easy to register for the site. but comments on that article are not enabled.

So there is a way in LSL of knowing when a texture has finished loading?

Last week, the Linden Blog caried a list of the new features of the last year, and what is to come. I'm not sure that all the new features are so wonderful, but that's opinion. Anyone seen any stuff that uses Pathfinding yet? A Look Back at Improvements to Second Life in 2012 and Forward to 2013 What sticks out as factually wrong is the reference to Threaded Region Crossing: Also to this end, we introduced threaded region crossing to improve teleporting performance and reduce lag when you move from one region to another, It's still something that is only being tested on the Beta grid. There's a couple of other items that are mentioned as having already been done, when they might only be available in a Project Viewer. That is, they're still being tested. And wasn't one of the "Advanced Creator Tools" hastily withdrawn over a security issue? It's been a year since we saw these things appear in Linden Realms. And there is the steady rumble of complaining merchants over in the Commerce forums. I wonder if the guy who wrote that piece of puffery knows anything about SL. Who told him that threaded region crossing was in use?

Thanks, it seems I'm on the right track. What I was thinking was something like this... Frame One: Villain makes verbal declaration of intent finishing with something like, "See how you like this!" Frame Two: Close-up of "this". Frame Three: Close-Up reaction shot, startled eyes, perhaps. Frame Four: Medium shot, hero's response. Frames two and three could be shown for a relatively short time. It's not going to entirely get around the problem of slow downloads. It would also need specific scripting rather than running a general-purpose image display script. Unless there is a method of signalling to a script when a texture is fully loaded, there could still be problems. I suppose I am trying to break away from a rather simplistic framing style, you can still see it in the newspapers, to the more dynamic use of images that people such as Kirby and Lee introduced in comic-books.

By "scripting" I mean the LSL needed to show the pictures, not the writing of the story. What I see in SL is rather monotonous: a constant beat forced by texture loading. So, are there ways of pre-loading textures? Could multiple images on one texture be used to give a couple of fast changes? How may images be pushed into the cache? I think it is possible to zoom in on an image, but that works better with a rostrum camera than with a digital image. A two layer display might help. Think of cel animation. Linden plans can change everything, but we could get a better sense of motion, in time and in space.

Yep, it sounds like the core of the problem is the way the new rendering system handles multiple lights. It's not Windlight. That's been around for a long time. The old system was limited to eight light sources, and needed two of those for sun and moon. So the nearest six light sources were rendered. I've seen facelights with a dozen light sources, and that's an obvious piece of poor design. The new system supports a very large number of lights, and also adds together the illumination properly. So the scene is suddenly lit by more lights, and the total light can be hugely increased. You need to used the Advanced settings for Preferences -> Graphics rather than the simple detail slider. You can set up to use the modern render engine, while leaving such things as shadows turned off. The slider control doesn't give you the tradeoffs the advanced settings do.

Alexi, I don't know if people will quit SL over it, but for this to be dismissed as "expected behaviour" prompts me to wonder whether it is the sims or the Lindens that are broken. The grid is knee-deep in Christmas parties, and any time a region gets more than about thirty AVs in it, it looks as though people start losing control of their motion. They bounce off in odd directions, start rubber-banding, and sometimes vanish for no apparent reason. It wasn't this bad last year and most of the problems seemed to start when Pathfinding turned up. Coincidence? Expected behaviour?

I experienced a similar problem a few months ago, which I reported on the new JIRA as BUG-28. Physics frame rates were running at about 8fps, which is worrying but understandable in complex situations. Trouble was, I saw bursts of 0.3fps, and I wasn't happy to be told it was "expected behavior". If this really is something new, something you haven't seen before, I hope it doesn't get the treatment my report got. If 0.3fps really is "well within the expected range", we have a deeper problem than just a change in recent code. But I suppose I shouldn't expect a complete re-design and re-write of the servers, even though there could be a lot of crud buried deep in the system, left over from the early days.

At first glance, this seems so very easy to test for, but I see from later comments that it may not be quite that simple. It also occurs to me that the effect may be load-related. I know that group chat and inventory were misbehaving in the early afternoon, SLT. Maybe putting the same code on all three RCs was a trifle optimistic. If there is a bug, it is going to affect more customers. And, just as a practical matter, it still seemed that the rollout took far too long. Seen from my side, and exacerbated by my particular time-zone difference, it comes across almost user-hostile. There's no good time to do these things, but it is always the same time. Any chance of a discount for those of us in Europe?

Most SL viewers have frequent updates, with maybe not much obvious difference between one version and the next. The official SL viewer also doesn't get changes well-publicised. Where do you find the version number of the current download? It isn't obvious. So I was pleasantly surprised by the new version of Firestorm that was just released. One example: the old version, as a lot of otther views did, could give a hugely reduced frame rate when particles were on. It dragged down the number of triangles drawn per second, as well as the particles needing to be drawn. That seems to have stopped happening. So, I reckon, something got fixed in a recent version of the official viewer, and if you haven't downloaded a current Viewer version, and Viewer, maybe you should. Make it a Christmas present to yourself.

As far as Poser and DAZ are concerned, the basic technology of figure movement and of clothing is the same, and there have been deformers to match clothing to non-default figure shapes for five years, at least. It's a mature technology, which is part of why Qarl could get as prototype out so quickly. From my experience with Poser, I also have some idea of the problems of making good clothing, and Second Life adds the LOD problem. Good low LOD meshes don't come from an automated process. Making a good Mesh garment is a lot of work, and making good low-LOD meshes adds to that. I have a feeling that Oz Linden has a poor appreciation of that complexity. He almost-whispers a plea for test clothing, and then complains more loudly when it doesn't appear within a few days. And, if you want to make a good low-LOD model, you need to know what the low-LOD avatar looks like. You can see what can go wrong if you look at the Navmesh for a region. It's a low-LOD mesh for the terrain, and there can be bits of the visible ground mesh poking through the Navmesh. Small bumps in the middle of big Navmesh triangles. Some aspects of the AV mesh and rigging are poor design, and were revealed by the Mesh Deformer project. You can see them with clothing: some components look their best at a particular shape, and as you move away from it, straight lines start to wobble. And, the way a Mesh Deformer works, the vertice movements that throw off the UV mapping will do the same to a mesh being deformed. Changing the morph data doesn't have to change anything else. Textures would look the same. The Lindens could have improved the AV without breaking anything. It does look as if Linden Research, for many years, didn't employ anyone who knew enough about CGI to even ask the right questions. They do have people who can work on the render engine, but they need somebody such as Qarl, and he might not be the right person to work on revising or replacing the default AV.

I will recommend Rag Dollz. There's a strong Victorian/Steampunk feel, and pirates, but the styles extend into classic Hollywood, both male and female. It's not a place for an ultra-modern look, but there are some pretty timeless outfits. Certainly good for a respectable party. I think they have the Audrey Hepburn "little black dress" from "Breakfast at Tiffanys" which is one of those timeless outfits.

Some of the old freebies are of good quality. And some of the really cheap items are a nuisance to plough through, repeated copies of the same item at different prices. The Marketplace needs better searching and filtering ans sorting tools. What if I want cheap hair and do not want a Demo? It would be nice if Marketplace listings could deliver the right pictures. I don't see that mistake at any other sales site on the net. But if they cannot rely on their own data, search is always going to be broken.

A heads up for you. I'm getting logged out on Teleport. Probably more to do with the network than with the server code, I;ve not been able to pick out any pattern from the info I have, except that TPs do not consistently fail with any particular server/region pair.

The meetings at Shamon stopped a long time ago, but the LDPW ia one of the bits of Linden Labs that actually gets things done.

And some brain-dead pillock of a Linden seems to still think it's OK to block the ANWR channel with a single region running the new Havok code (Region Sandra), Likewise the waterway north of the Color regions (Region Hildegarde) You can add Region Maroon to that list of idiocies. Just what is it that you are trying to test? New physics code, or sim-crossing?

If you're still having problems, let us know the OS version you're using. I only ask because I noticed a big improvement in networking when I upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Thanks to all of you for your kind offers,

Sorry, the timing clashes with my daily eyelid pinhole testing routine.

I'm not sure that behavior is new with this week's releases. In my experience it's a rare. but general and long-established sim-crossing faliure.

i don't know what the uptimes really are on the MC sims. thoughI know there were some that needed a restart over the weekend. I suppose that you're getting some data on how long a sim can run reliably without a restart. My own feeling, from recent experience, is that running a sim for more than two weeks without a restart is almost asking for trouble. Thing is, I don't know if the problems are down to things such as memory leaks, and other accumulated crud. There's also been speculation over griefer attacks. I hope you've used this opportunity, because, whatever the cause of what I see, the weekly restart pattern could have hidden some of the problems.

I don't think this is anything new. The server seems to use the auto-return time if the vehicle was originally rezzed on the parcel--that might be some sort of caching effect--but otherwise it is as you describe.

I don't want this to be read as a specific suggestion, but this could be down to a memory leak, which means that sim servers gradually use more and more memory, until there isn't enough RAM, and the OS starts using virtual memory, and performance plummets. That sort of problem would explain why the fault doesn't normally become apparent, because the weekly roll-outs reset the system before it gets too bad. I don't know how the location of the bad code could be discovered, It doesn't have to be all that recent a change.