Nalates Urriah

The questions you use to challenge statements are valid. I suspect in most cases the statements are opinion or repetition of something people have heard and accepted as true without any objective validation. They are just repeating what they heard. But, the 'standards' ideas you voice are just wrong. There are accepted goals in 3D modeling for real time games. These might be called 'best practices', but whatever they are called they easily fit the definition of 'standards'. One can find them in any 3D modeling course. A whole series of do this not that... As to who has the responsibility for content... that is us. Not the Lab. The Lab could go all Blue-Mars-fascist and tightly control everything uploaded to SL. How did that work out? Instead they provide us artistic freedom to create whatever we want at whatever skill level we have. So, as a beginner one can be uploading and enjoying SL. They don't have to spend time tediously learning the fine details of 3D model optimization. That certainly has its downsides. BUT... SL is still here and several similar efforts that have tried to limit content to ONLY optimized content have closed. One learns from history, or they don't. I see your thinking about having the 'Lab fix it' as the current day equivalent of promoting the nanny state. People in favor of the nanny state think someone has to make 'other' people DO IT RIGHT so they are not inconvenienced. They forget large bureaucracies turn into fascist states and force everyone to conform. Creative freedom... well, freedom period... vanishes. You misuse the term hacked... but, we get your meaning. Designers have found ways to game the ACI system to get low ACI numbers. They didn't hack/change the system to accomplish their goals. They are taking advantage of what they have to work with. The Lab is planning to correct ACI and remove incentive to use some of the loop holes currently found in the system. They continuously work to improve SL. But, they also strongly consider artistic freedom and avoid infringing on it. The coming changes are expected provide incentive, not limits or restrictions, to use better LoD models and lower poly counts. BoM is hoped to remove the incentive to use onion skinned models. As technology changes, SL changes and the design criteria used by the Lab changes with it. They could not have anticipated today's tech in any way that would allow them to 'have handled this years ago'.

In my part of the world we use rice. I never have coffee beans. All mine is ground.

Yeah... searching for somethings is way too difficult. Era clothing is one of them. Few designers have added any era, year info to their promotional stuff. Making it hard for any search engine and I think SL's search is a weaker one. But, there are a few designers that do. You can try Jo Yardley's 1920's Berlin regions. Shops there are focused on 1920's stuff. But, they aren't that precise. So, I think you'll find stuff that will work. Also, try http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Shepham Estates/98/240/22

We'll have an ambulance standing by for when you OD on the eye candy...

I remember drowning my SpaceNavigator with a glass of spilled water... Expensive oops.

Every so often the forum+browser just goes nuts. The other day I was trying to get an image out of a post. Seems no matter what I did it kept coming back... Today its OK.

This brings up a couple of interesting points about personal responsibility, the free market, and the torrent of RL talk about making 'OTHERS' solely responsible and total avoidance of personal responsibility. Accidentally purchased? I see no place in the purchase process where an accident like a RL light burning out happens. These accidents I see as almost exclusively human error. The person at the center of and cause of such an accident is 'us'. Yes, there are scams and frauds, but we have some recourse in those cases just as in RL. So, this becomes an effort in how do we protect you from your dumb mistakes? Make better idiot proofing and someone makes a better idiot. That is the basic nature of humans. How does one get around that? Scams are prevalent in SL and RL... probably at about the same rates. But, there is no hard, objective evidence on rates either way, AFAIK. The biggest problem is again human nature. Eliminate one scammer, another steps up to to replace them. So, no matter how good the laws one has to learn to spot a scam as they will always be around. Trying to remove the responsibility from ourselves for falling for a scam generally aggravates the problem. In such a scenario we no longer have to learn anything and rely on others to care for us. That is an ideal environment for scammers.

Think about it this way... If you take a picture of someone on the street (RL), do you EVER contact the manufactures of their clothes for permission to have them in your image? Clothes and material patterns are copyrighted and often patented.

Also, look at the basics of dealing with avatar appearance, http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Video_Tutorial/Editing_your_appearance https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/controlling-your-avatars-appearance-r216/

You aren't getting it. Other games are not on the SL servers. That is the connection you need to test. The connection you have out to your ISP can be considered the general connection. Any TRACERT run to any server will have the same first few hops, between you and your ISP. Then from the ISP to wherever changes and passes through different hardware and backbone service providers to reach the content provider's servers. If you are in Chicago and connect to a site in Florida you are NOT using the same connection path as when you connect to a server in California. Ethan in his blunt and incomplete way could have possibly been right. Other MMO's provide no indication of how well your connection to the SL servers should work. SL has changed some from the days when it used a ridiculous number of connections and often overload old or cheap gateway/modem/routers. So, it is still a common troubleshooting step to restart a gateway/modem/router. So, while 'connection' is not the likely cause of your problem this time, it almost always is. Thus why so many insist you look at the connection realistically and not suppositionally to eliminate it. Whirly has given you the best set of remaining things to consider.

No... it can be your connection. If everyone else looks OK and you don't, then suspect a problem in the upload/sending channels. Do, others see you OK? The avatar not rendering is is called bake fail. The common types of bake fail are covered here: http://blog.nalates.net/2013/08/23/second-lifes-new-bake-fail/ The bake fail specific to inventory issues is here: https://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/fs_bake_fail ======================= I have no idea why the forum keeps inserting this image from another of my 'unrelated' posts...

GIMP is close to PS in ability. So, you can watch PS tutorials and learn what you need to know. Some SL'ers don't know that much of the realism' comes from the SL Viewers' settings. William Weaver has done some tutorials on how to set up for photos using the viewer. See: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZIX02rPcHYIvrDFxu10J2Q Strawberry Singh has done some tutorials. She has some good stuff on posing the avatar. If you are interested in how the TOTALLY REALISTIC looks are done in amazing images see Natsumi Xenga's work. These are less tutorials and more speed painting videos. But, I've learned from them. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ-uhYr4WopyhYZhA1Iv7SA I think you'll find the Firestorm and the Black Dragon viewers are important to getting the images you want. I prefer FS, mostly because of easy access to the environment settings. But, Black Dragon as the Avatar Poser. It lets you move the avatar, right down to individual fingers.

Summer time on Dreamer's Island. The swimsuit is from Angela's Boutique. Still looking for sexy mesh suits. Seems the suits I have are mostly applier suites, which is OK. But, applier suits and outfits are a bit more complicated.

No. It isn't. A good Internet connection does not mean you have a good connection to the SL servers. Test that specific connection. http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

The graphics card thing is not the problem. If the graphics card is insufficient the viewer simply will not launch or error out just after launch. You certainly won't be able to login. So, video is unlikely to be your problem. In laptops the video chip, not a card, is soldered into the motherboard. So, there is no changing the video chip. Only that particular model of chip will fit. As has been pointed out, you most likely have a connection issue. The article on my blog is about how to figure out where that problem is. http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ It is a 2011 article, but nothing has changed since it was written. You'll find it linked to by hundreds of posts in this forum. You don't have to use it. But, it is the quick way to sort out connection problems.

Getting the image tech right is apparently more important than what is in the image. Grabbing my most faved image on Flickr... I am consistently impressed by the tag selection. The AI has figured out what the images are.

It is. I forgotten exactly how to do a text link and hide the URL string. BUt, you can past the URL string as many do. However, you won't see an active link when you look. It is for everyone else. Have a friend check that the link actually works.

In another thread we went through all the other hardware, software, and possible connection errors. So, I am really surprised that switching to VPN changes how the image is rendering. Whether it is std. Internet or VPN the content of the network packets is the same. The packets are encrypted and travel across the VPN network which is mostly the same network path and hardware, at least at both ends. You should be getting the exact same information whether using plain or VPN. The difference exists only in the traveling packets. If the packets are altered in either, the CRC (?) or whatever, error checking would catch the corruption and send up flags. I have forgotten if you took the computer somewhere and tried it on a different network. If not, I would do that before going through the hassle of changing ISP's.

I knew ACI/ARC was off/broken. I hadn't realised HOW far off it is. I won't actually know how things compare until ARCTan is out. Then the community will re-start the discussion with a new set of numbers. My bet is instead of changing a 30k ACI to 300k we'll see everything else go down... you know... more PC.

Oh Coffee, there is so much wrong with that. Going the "not my responsibility, it is their problem" route is just wrong. The idea that dev's don't respond to customer pressure is demonstrably wrong. The short history of ARC/ACI has shown significant impact on the market place. As proof consider that discussion is ACI/ARC is broken and pushing dev's in bad directions as evidenced by their use of loopholes. One can't argue dev's take advantage of the ACI/ARC loop holes and that it has no effect on dev's. Adding more hard limits is taking away creative freedom. While it is popular and propaganda conditions people think having some authority make it better by passing a law is good, history shows how bad an idea it actually is.

We'll have to disagree. ACI/ARC is a indicator of render/lag cost. So... Mesh versus tortured prims is no contest. Mesh hair these days in general has an ACI or 1,000 to 20,000. Only a few of the prim and/or sculpty hair items I've seen get that low. Some beautiful prim hair I haven't been able to trash yet has an ACI of 170,000... I have yet to see a mesh hair get that high an ACI. That is 170 times worse than my best mesh hair. Ashke has run into the problem many of us do with old prim hair having way high ACI. A primary cause is textures. But, prims when twisted/tortured can exhibit explosive polygon growth, which can be a major reason for increased ACI. You can see that by adding materials to a twisted prim so that it switches over to the 'mesh' land impact accounting. Toruses are the worst and for that reason are seldom used in new builds as mesh is way LI cheaper and ACI lower. If the problem with Ashke's hair is textures, Penny's article may help.

I suggest filing a trouble ticket. Point them to this thread.

This is a common problem that comes from the changing nature of SL. When the hair was made optimum design criteria was not what it is now. Today's standards try to discourage many of the things that were done years ago. The result is you see a high ACI on old stuff. Not all old stuff... Those things that didn't use generally good game-modeling optimization have high ACI. To get an idea of what can be done, check Penny Patton's article: http://pennycow.blogspot.com/2017/03/draw-weight-revisited.html

People in Germany were having problems logging in. Look through the grid status reports. The Tracert shows you have a network problem. You computer and viewer are fine.

The Cache... The viewer's cache is made of several parts. There is the object cache, texture cache, sound cache, inventory cache... Some viewers allow you to delete parts of the cache. When one says 'delete the cache' we think they mean the aggregate set of caches. What happens is at the next login the inventory cache immediately downloads. This is more of a list than a cache. What you see in the Inventory Panel is the list in a formatted form. This is a text list. So, it is not a huge file and it downloads a folder at a time. So, you next login can be a little slower. The sound, object and texture caches download on an 'as needed' basis. When an object enters your field of view all the needed parts are downloaded, cached, and rendered. Emptying these big caches can slow scene render significantly. The max cache size is 10GB. IF you had your cache set that large, you'll have slow renders until all the 10GB you need is reloaded. It isn't as bad as it may sound. The cache doesn't work all that well. If you watch the Viewer Stats and the Texture Console you can often see a 100% hit rate and textures downloading. Not supposed to work that way. 100% hit rate on the cache says you have everything you need. So, what is there to download? So, clearing the cache isn't going to break your viewer. It will recover. But, it will degrade performance of your viewer and the SL servers. Clearing the cache is a last resort troubleshooting step. If you have a weak connection to SL, which isn't the same as a connection to the Internet, you'll have more problems after the cache clear.