WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

I am sure that Rodvik has addressed communication, but he omitted the Zip Code and dropped it in the mailbox without a stamp. Current Status Message Status Message: Unscheduled Maintenance [RESOLVED 11:55PM PDT, 02 August 2013] Scheduled Maintenance announced to start at 5:30 AM PDT, Monday 04 August 2013 Didn't they budget for a replacement calendar last January?

My interpretation is that they are properly careful about who can make those announcements, but if I were a brewer I would worry at the propect of hosting a Linden Labs staff party.

The Preferences option for graphics card memory is for the amount used to cache textures, so that 512M limit is something of an illusion. Getting the right balance for a card with a more limited amount of RAM can be a bit tricky. In some ways my own system is a comparable with the OP's. I use an nVidia GTX650 with 1GB of RAM. The motherboard memory is now my bottleneck.

I have, a couple of times, got out of a prolonged initial load of the AV by TPing to one of the regions running the new SSA/SSB code. The old baking system requires all the texture data to be sent to your computer, which is a lot of work if the connection is misbehaving. The new system only sends you the final result. There's all sorts of other things that could be going wrong, but I think it is worth a try. I also have a couple of simple versions of my Avatar. That can be useful in a lot of places.

I have seen these camera glitches. Never noticed any pattern to them, but they seem to be more frequent this week

Thanks. It looks like Linden Labs have some bad GPS coordinates for the anatomy they use for sitting down.

I was going to put some USD in my Linden Labs account to pay some expected bills, after having trouble on previous occasions with the automated credit card system. Apparently my credit card provider considers Linden Labs to be suspect. Is there any way of getting USD into my account direct from outside? All I can find is a statement that L$ should be exchanged for USD. The old "Increase Credit" page says this is not used any more for Limit Buys. With exchange rate effects (you always get fees and an exchange rate which makes a profit for the card company) I'm already losing out. And now Linden Labs seems to want me to pay more fees for the privilege of paying them, because of the way the LindeX works. Have I missed something that lets me get the USD I have into my account? It was Mid-May when I last deposited USD in my account. What has changed since then?

Something to watch for. I can't decide if this is a new server problem, not yet, but I've had a couple of sim-crossing failures in the last hour characterised with being un-sat from the vehicle I was using. No obvious sign of the restart process being involved,none of the effor/failure messages I would expect. At least once, both sims involved were Main Channel. Speeds were low, a sailing boat. I hope it's a false alarm

There was definitely a problem on Friday afternoon SLT. Outfit changes were bad on a Magnum sim, better elsewhere, but never what I would call good. Loads on my local internet may have been a factor, and the larger part of the problem may have been attachments rather than SSA. No admitted problems with the inventory servers, but the pattern I saw was suggestive. I'm not sure it was an SSA problem, but it wasn't this bad last week. I don't know enough to more than guess, but SSA server provision may be on the low side of optimum.

Agreed, the SSA is doing a good job. But there was a bug last week affecting Le Tigre sims. They shift to Magnum, and there might be a new bug. Oh dear. But it will get sorted. I wouldn't be surprised to see Blue Steel next week, but the bug status is still at amber. My understanding is that the constraint on how fast they can roll out is the capacity of the specialised servers: extra hardware to install rather than a software rollout. It's more than having a bug-free week in an RC that sets the timing. It's software people who have been doing most of the talking to us customers. This whole operation, based on new hardware, is unusual. (And one or two people doing the talking I know don't have a history involving hardware deployment.) And I know one place on a Magnum sim which is busy on a Friday, a lot of AVs and stuff happening. I shall be there as usual, dancing with my ever-loving vixen. It'll be the first time I have been somewhere busy with SSA running.

I've seen the same problem with pants, and it's not a new symptom. But it might not be the same root cause this time as it was last time.

There's a huge amount of work in making a 64-bit Viewer, and I cannot really see there being a TPV team that has the resources to do it. It's going to depend on Linden Labs. Normal 32-bit programs can use 2GB of RAM under Windows, but there's a compile option which allows about 3GB to be used under 64-bit Windows. There are bits of code which break when you do this. I don't know which Viewers have this option, other than Firestorm. There are other ways in which 64-bit Windows pays off, even with 32-bit software.

Yes, they've been supplying really old graphics drivers since the turn of the century. From their point of view, they know it works, and that can be important. Direct X let them keep some control of that problem. But a lot of software uses OpenGL, and Microsoft never seems to update that. I have this problem when I installed Windows XP: the driver on the CD was badly out of date for OpenGL support. Short Version: Microsoft supplies you with drivers good enough to let you get online and download the currenmt drivers for your hardware.

The inventory cache is a particular set of files, and some viewers let you delete only them, which can save a lot of hassle. From the Firestorm Wiki: How to manually clear cache If you're using the pther viewers, the Cache Location will be different: "SecondLife" instead of "Firestorm" in the folder path is one possibility. Open Preferences → Network & Cache. Go to the first path “Cache Location” and click the “Open” button behind the path. This will open a file explorer window displaying your current cache location. Logout (close the viewer) and then delete everything inside the folder with the filename extension .inv.gz You can then log in at a quiet location with a minimised draw distance and let your inventory reload. Some people say you should regularly clear cache, but that is rather pointless. Cache clearing should only done when something is wrong: lost inventory, corrupted textures, obvious stuff like that rather than things just being horribly slow. I have a huge texture cache, and it isn't worth deleting that for an inventory problem.

I do have one or two AVs that had a very low Avatar Rendering Cost under the old system. It was hard to get a green rating back then. I'm not sure that the current system is any better a guide.

Sim crossing certainly seems worse at the meoment. although I'm seeing signs of a poor interenet connection, these problems my not be down to anything LL can do anything about. I cannot honestly point a finger at the new baking system.

The new code hasn't rolled out yet. So far, just the Main Channel getting the copde that has been in the RCs for a couple of weeks. I was having problems yesterday, and it looked like my ISP was badly overloaded, nothing at all to do with Linden Labs.

We do seem to be making SSA complicated. But I've seen some pretty dumb questions asked elsewhere on the Forums. I hope nothing goes wrong on Wednesday. Past reports from user group meetings suggested that it wouldn't necessarily be activated on a whole RC in one swell foop. I hope everyone involved on the Linden side is speaking from the same script. I suspect Firestorm Support is going to be interesting tomorrow, for Chinese Curse values of "interesting".

It's been a couple of years since I ran anything like that system, but I have a hazy memory of Windows XP throwing up hesitations when bandwidth consumption was high. I only noticed the difference when I switched to Windows 7 on the same hardware. I think you're going to struggle until you replace the system. A better video card would help, but that all looks old enough that you could be stuck with old hardware because of how the parts connect together. I do my own hardware changes, such as replacing video cards. If you have to pay somebody to do the job, it's a fair question whether to spend the money for a small gain.

I'm not having problems, but I know how useless it is to say that. My Firestorm version is 4.4.2, and if you haven't upgraded to that, all sorts of bad things might happen next week. If you're still trying to use version 4.4.1 it's being blocked, because they made a silly mistake with some debug code. It could be a problem with your OS version or the graphics driver version, and since you don't tell us, we can't tell. I know that nVidia also released a driver updaye un the last couple of weeks, but if you're not using nVidia graphics hardware that will be irrelevant. It's why you need to tell use these details. Go through the Firestorm Clean Install procedure, and note the option to save chat logs and contact sets (If anyone is not using Firestorm, there will be different folders involved, but the general setup will be the same). Worst case, I suppose, you will have to install a different viewer to get on, and then use the Firestorm support group. One of the smart things that Firestorm does is to use different folders to the defaults used by most viewers, so installing the SL viewer won't mess up Firestorm. The detail you need to tell us is in Help -> About, which you can get at without having to log in to SL It shows paragraphs listing the OS you use, the basic hardware in your computer, the info on the Viewer and the graphics drivers. These things matter, and it will frustrate everyone if you;re using a Mac, and all the answers are coming from Windows users.

Unfortunately, the "in progress" announcement is roughly two hours after the pre-announced start time, so still about an hour after the first actual restart. It still looks careless.

This week, the dates on Status have been wrong. I can sort of see why the roll-out process starts before an announcement is made, something to do with the permissions needed to post a notice, so that the pre-announcement gives a start time (5am for Main Channel) and the actual in-progress comes out around 7am. It looks careless. It's reliable in the sense that the pattern is predictable. But there's no reason why, when you start up the Viewer, the log-in screen cannot show the latest status message. But if there's a couple of hours delay on the restarts-in-progress announcement, doing that isn't going to work well. There are ways of getting the information in front of people, but it should be better information that we get now. (It seems a little strange that Linden Labs doesn't appear to trust the guy in charge of executing the roll-out to post a prepared message to Status) [Checks: Firestorm reports the three most recent Status posts, currently all tagged as Resolved]

The Lindens chose not to implement materials on the actual avatar surfaces, and I'm not sure why. Perhaps they're wary of the rendering cost. Another possibility would be an Avatar 2.0 project: that would need new content, and making materials available for that might make sense. What might be useful is a set of normal maps that would work with library textures. I'm not sure they would be a good idea for ground textures, and I doubt they would be needed for some, but there is the "redwood" texture. There are others in the Buildings folder. The "Shingles" texture is a bit more than just grooves. There are the textures used for Linden Homes. But I am not sure that there is a huge advantage for the irregular, almost-noise, patterns there might be in gravel drive-ways and in some wall finishes. An existing baked-shadow texture could have a lower rendering cost.

Isn't there some way of changing the Windlight settings on another resident's viewer? They have to give permission, but if you're using Windlight to change the look of the water it doesn't matter if it is implemented by the viewer. I know the trick gets used for setting the lighting for a place: the first time I saw that sort of thing used was a version of Lovecraft;s Innsmouth, but it didn't work for every Viewer. Ah, here it is. It's an LL feature, though there's a Parcel-level version available for Firestorm users. Region Windlight Region Windlight can only be changed by region owners or estate managers. It is set by going to the top menu bar and selecting Region Details. On the window that opens, select Environment. Regions can be set to use the default SL day cycle, a custom day cycle, or fixed time of day.

If I might give a brief and slightly approximate summary: gamma is the relationship between input and output, and need not be a straight-line graph. Input might be the numeric brightness value foir a pixel in a graphics file, ourput might be the brightness of the screen pixel. It is worth trying to get your monitor as well set-up as possible. One set of test images, with instructions, can be found here: LCD Test Images. The setting will depend on your local lighting. You may also have adjustments in your graphics driver software. Get these as good as you can before you start fidding with individual programs. Very little of a good image should be either completely black or pure white. The extremes don't render well. In the days of film photography, good film, correctly exposed, could record 7-bit data, but the print you made from that image might only be able to show a 6-bit brightness range. You adjusted printing exposure and chose the paper contrast grade (effectively the gamma) to get the result you wanted. Adjusting the gamma in the viewer doesn't fix everything.