WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

Wi-Fi has a few things that can mess you up, and the latest standards do have a higher speed. I would say that Wi-Fi does need more margin between the nominal speed and the bandwidth used by SL. It's not just the effect from another Wi-Fi system nearby (which is why changing from the default channel can make a big difference). There are other things using the same frequencies, and effectively adding to background noise, which reduces bandwidth. The reduced speed advice is maybe a safe starting point: cut your bandwidth, check your wi-fi set-up, and then see if you can increase the speed. There can be a lot of trial and error in it.

There are official starter Furry AVs with that sort of skin: fur-only and no clothes. Some people are going to get worked-up over it, regardless, but there is a clear precedent set by Linden Lab for that sort of skin being OK. Anyway, nobody fusses about not getting clothes included with a human skin. PG Skin is an OK label, but it might be worth a word or two of description, pointing to cartoon examples (Bugs Bunny and Yogi Bear come to mind), and reffing to the Linden Lab examples

Something seemed to go wrong with Mesh between the v2.6 Beta code and the v2.7 Release. Frame rates plummetted. I'm not sure that the cause was, strictly, bugs in the Open GL system. The calls the LL code used were pretty ancient, and the driver code seemed to change in ways that slowed those calls down. But it wasn't just SL that was affected. And that doesn't explain some of the other evidence. It's arguable that Linden Lab wasn't paying attention to the Open GL side of things. There's been a lot of work done to fix the problems, but maybe a bit of forethought would have avoided the problems. The coincidence meant that people blamed Mesh, the new feature. But both Kirsten's and Cool VL Viewer were available with Mesh code based on v2.6, and showed much higher frame-rates. And I have no idea why they didn't get hit by the Open GL problems. I think the Lindens shot themselves in the foot with Mesh. Part of that is some poor communication--the Linden Disease--over why the Mesh Viewer messed up the customer experience, and what was being done to fix it. If you want to find out what is happening you have to read a lot of Geek-speak in a scattering of JIRA entries, and I don't think that is good enough. The Viewer developers even seem to have a problem annoucing the new versions of the Viewer. I admit that I don't like the Linden Viewer, for various reasons, but they persist in hiding their light under a bushel. Mesh did coincide with major problems, affecting you even without any Mesh in a region. They're getting it fixed. And they're not doing a good job of telling us. Is it any wonder people are still refusing Mesh Viewers?

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep. HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?

It sounds a good idea to have some control over groups from the web-profile area. I don't see anything there at the moment. (Do new residents get told about Display Names when they sign up?) my.secondlife.com Isn't there a text-only viewer listed, might get around your bandwidth problem... Yep, there's several in the Third Party Viewer List (Even finding the Wiki from the Dashboard is, shall we say, insanely difficult.)

I have had good experiences with Live Chat, most recently during the last sim-crossing debacle. But I'd agree, it would be a help to have a better idea of what issues they can give immediate assistance on. LL do not do very well on explaining stuff to the paying customers.

Just stopping payment is a bad move. Linden Lab can ban you from SL, and (in theory at least) it can affect your RL credit rating.

I think there are a few common factors in both these styles. 1: The avatar mesh itself, and the "morphs" controlled by the Appearance sliders are really quite old tech. Yes, they're low-resolution, but there is a decade of experience out there, both for other games and for CGI. (Male AVs can have an odd ridge along the line of the bottom rib. And what should be a smooth line can go all over the place if you have the wrong shape.) 2: Some of the Appearance sliders really shouldn't be taken to extremes. For some, 0 and 100 are both extremes. Others are biased one way of the other. And the Avatar Physics--bouncing boobs--needs room to move in. 3: Women, pretty obviously, are going to be a different shape when wearing clothes than when not wearing clothes. And the Avatar Physics will be different too. (Comic-book artists, as a class, are notorious for not having a good understanding of female anatomy.) 4: There might be a streak of unintentional caricature. I know that my own memory of people can be misleading. I have one slight advantage as a furry AV: I don't have to worry about keeping my head and face unchanged when I change a Shape, and the whole thing is expected to be a bit unreal. And that does make it posasible to have a shape which suits the clothes I'm wearing without threatening my sense of having an identity.

My experience is that you can use the apparently speculative Lindex to get a bit better deal than you would get from an instant transaction, but it isn't really a significant difference. What's 5L$ in 250 L$? If my tier was due on the Monday, I can see a slight advantage in having a deal open over the weekend, but if something went wrong--maybe somebody puts a backhoe through my internet connection--the troubles build up fast. I don;'t know what the big estates do, taking in rental in L$ and paying thousands of USD every month. I am not at all sure the "market" is a real market, and I wouldn't be surprised if, in the past, it depended on the cash-rich in-world gambling. Any market needs people willing to buy and sell, including some speculation. There's no sign of speculation: the Lindens have set an exchange rate with the US$, just as currencies were traded 50 years ago.

So if you're comewhere you can create an object, you can use Pathfinding? There are no complications involving data about the content of a Land Parcel?

It's not really hidden, but a direct payment in USD is going to incur a transaction charge from the payment provider, and that complicates things. The charging structure is likely one reason why LL set a minimum payment for crediting your account with USD. Once those USD are in the LL system, it's all pretty inexpensive to handle. I have seen a few things on the Marketplace that are expensive enough that a USD payment might be worthwhile, leaving my L$ total intact. Maybe it can be better explained that you pay an extra charge. And does the merchant get USD or L$?

The dating looks odd, but it may indicate that they've been running this code for a prolonged test on the beta grid to try and find memory leaks and the like, or just to catch embarrassing bugs. If there's something weird, and it don't look good, who ya gonna call?

I know Kuula had a restart, about an hour ago now. Running code marked as "Second Life RC LeTigre 12.02.02.248819". That looks odd It may be something to do with fixing the bug in the Region Crossing code, which made such a mess the weekend ofter it was rolled out 12-01-25, because there is a mention of some changes in the Region Crossing code. Removed unnecessary information being transferred across region boundaries during region cross, causing possible instability. The timing is plausible. Am I going to risk crossing a boundary this weekend? For some reason, I am suddenly finding it hard to trust the Lindens.

I've been having problems with receiving tems from in-world vendors too. I can't rule out the Viewer I use, but the Marketplace problem makes it hard to tell. Using "share" in the viewer is working, so I'm inclined to wonder if there's a scripting problem. Maybe it didn't get noticed on the RCs last week, Maybe it's older. But something is broken.

The RC rollout last week was a pretty big test, though it would have been a lot of work if a problem had emerged. And it would have annoyed a lot of customers. As for the hardware maintenance, I figure we're lucky to get this much ifo about what's going on. I see what you're getting at with the apparent timing. There is usually an announcement that the software roll-out has started: nothing yet. My guess is that this ongoing hardware maintenance has effectively been tested against the new sim code already. with enough of the RC sims running on the new hardware. But since they never seem to say anything--Oskar is an exception--we're left to speculation. And, yes, some of us with experience of running a business, or maintaining a computer network, sometimes think whisky tango foxtrot.

I'm not sure where the setting might be in the Viewer you use, but I have found that my PC works a bit better with fewer concurrent HTTP GET requests allowed. That doesnt seem to slow down loading--there is maybe something happening server-side--but it does seem to improve things such as frame rate. There are other viewers which seem less sluggish, but what works best on your system might be less successful on mine.

Some of it doesn't go away. There are some blatant UI design flaws which got into Viewer 2--they were there in the Beta--which never seem to have been fixed. I have downloaded the official viewer from time to time, and been presented with the same dumb, stupid, fundamental UI choices. My eyes aren't your eyes, but I find myself wondering sometimes if the Lindens are not some sort of alien reptile, walking around San Francisco wearing rubber masks.

know switching back to UDP sort out lag problems, but times are changing. To be honest, I don't recall much ever being said about the pros and cons. I do wonder if residents outside North America, with inevitably longer ping times, can see that as limiting the speed of HTTP texture gets. There's a limit on simultaneous texture loads. But one HTTP request involves 6 packets, and three round trips, minimum. Which for me is between 750ms and 900ms, on top of the time needed to actually transmit the packets. It looks horribly complicated. It ends up depending on packet sizes, and how many packets the server will send without acknowledgement before it pauses to wait. Small textures will have a higher overhead from the setup, but might not be affected by that pausing. And when you TP into a new region, there might be a lot of textures to download. Let's say there are 48. I think there are 8 simultanous streams possible. And the packet size I assume trivial at whatever beandwidth is set. I can see a fivefold increase in the total time needed to download textures. HTTP Get is more reliable. It avoids a sim-server bottleneck. But I am not convinced it is inherently faster.

It used to be that you got everything from the sim server you were connected to, using UDP, and there was a per-user limit set by the server. The tech has changed, and now the sim server sends you a URL, with textures, in particular, downloaded from a server cluster using HTTP. A large HTTP server cluster is a well-understood technology and can put out a lot of data. So I reckon some of the advice is obsolete. But not everything uses HTTP

All three RCs on the same new code? That's a courageous decision.

Current Heagon version is 2.5.1.79 which is available from DAZ 3D for free, Also DAZ Studio for free as well, and I'm seeing references to Collada export. So Hexagon --> DAZ Studio --> Collada --> SL That has the advantage of being a supported path using DAZ software all the way to Collada. Some info here: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/dazstudio/reference/fm_exportdazcollada It looks as though there are two variants of Collada available as export options from DAZ Studio Make sure you pick the correct one. Caution: DAZ Studio routinely uses very complicated meshes. I can imagine some of the Hexagon modelling tools producing meshes which are way to complicated for SL. So be careful.

The essential feature for making a Mesh model is a 3D modelling program which can export in COLLADA format. I use Wings3D because I'm used to it. I have used it for Sculpts. Mesh as a substitute for a Sculpt is fairly easy. There are a few more steps to go through, but you have far more control of textures and such. The inxredibly difficult spect of Mesh is the Rigged Mesh, which allowed a one-piece clothing item to be made which bends like the AV wearing it. I have made these things for the Poser program,, and it isn't easy. I am being forced to the conclusion that I shall have to learn Blender to make anything that has a chance of working with SL.

Nalates, I shall try to keep this simple. Last weekend was a mess. Oskar has said that a support fix was in place. My experience, weekend and weekdays, suggests that the support system is inadequate for a service running 24/7, with customers throughout the world. The nine hour response time I experienced, on a weekday, suggests they couldn't cope with the problem. That hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that I had a prompt response early in the weekend. I infer that the support fix worked, but the system became overloaded. These guys can program computers, but I wouldn't want them to be managing something important, such as the computer systems at my local hospital.

One for the furries... "My boyfriend is a horse"

I think that here we have to accept that we have different viewpoints. I'm not in the same timezone, and for much of my day support is of greatly reduced availability. The hours of full support over the weekend seem to be even shorter. With my experience of the last weekend, I have to say that Support, when it was working, was good. But Second Life is a 24/7 service, and Support is not. From my viewpoint, your relying on Support over a weekend was clearly not a sensible choice.