Nalates Urriah

The lag and problems related to region crossing/teleport come mostly from avatar complexity and script load. The region you are in has to package up all the information it has about you and send it to the region you are entering, which has to unpack it and get all your scripts running. Your avatar and its attachments and clothes are a collection of UUID 's. Those are 128-bit numbers, about 8 bytes of information. So, avatar complexity is sort of a minor thing for crossings. But, scripts are a significant problem. The server has to pack up the server's program code and data memory used by the script, compress it and send it to the destination server. Scripts can use up megabytes of memory. You can get a script counter for free in the marketplace. Also, (Firestorm) look at About Land for the parcel you are standing on. In the general tab, click Script Info->Avatar and you'll see how much server memory is being used by the avatar. I'm generally near 3MB. Above that and you can expect a hiccup now and then when crossing. Vehicles add to the script load and further complicate region crossings. Inventory is a list of your stuff kept in a viewer cache that is checked/updated at login. The inventory information does not get sent to the region servers. So, there is no impact on region crossings from inventory size, AFAIK. If you change appearance or work with inventory in a region, your information is passing through the region server to the inventory management system. Mostly passing along UUID's and some instructions on what to do with them. So, once logged in, inventory size just doesn't matter. Rolig pointed out what a 'flat' inventory can do to you at login, slow or block it. But, size is pretty much irrelevant provided you don't put thousands of items in a single folder.

Whirly is describing what I call Mouse-Steering. I left-click-hold and press W to walk forward. Up-arrow and right-click-hold also walk me forward. Rolig's image shows the possibilities for mouse-steering. Releasing the left-click will allow the wheel to zoom you in and out, nearer and farther from where you clicked. It sticks so you can left-click and start walking again with the camera at the new zoom distance. Do some experimenting. Once you get used to mouse-steering, those stairs will be no problem.

It is almost impossible to know what a majority of people in SL think on any subject. What we do know is back in the day mesh clothes required one change their shape to fit into the clothes. Those were the days of Standard Sizes... clothes made for an avatar of a standard size. It didn't go over well. Many people were not willing to change their SHAPE to fit into clothes. Fitted Mesh was added and the mesh body & clothing market exploded. We can infer a good number of residents prefer their individual look. There is a bit of a snobbish side to SL users... we tend to be leery of new users. Helpful... sure. But, many of us have had bad or tedious experiences with the new people. So, new people are avoided a bit. I think new users pick up on that and quickly move away from the new avatar look. I think to some degree that influences how much we customize our mesh heads. It is probably fair to say a significant number of SL residents do NOT want an out of the can look. So, many will customize their look away from the default appearance of a head. BUT... if you buy a head because you think it is gorgeous... why change it? The point of SL is to have fun and enjoy it. So, do whatever works for you. There is more freedom in SL than in many countries and certainly more than most college campuses. Enjoy it.

Bakes On Mesh is Coming... There is a Bakes On Mesh project. We will likely see it released in the next month or 6... It will change how mesh bodies, feet, hands, and heads are made. So, all of us with mesh attachment bodies will be upgrading. Also, how mesh body attachments and their Appliers work will be changing. You can save yourself some upgrade headaches and reduce your learning curve. The new mesh attachments will work very much like classic clothes, skins, etc. work now. Be patient.

Also, check your connection to the SL servers.If your viewer and others' viewers are not rendering the same thing, the problem can be because your viewer and the SL side of things are out of sync. Open your Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) and look for Lost Packets. <1% is OK. Less is better and 0% is typical. If it is higher, your connection could be the problem.

No feces... The Lindens tell us they are working on improving it. You can use Google to search it. I do occasionally get frustrated and resort to a Google/MP search. Type site:marketplace.secondlife.com nalates The red text is whatever you want to search for. The green tells Google you want to search a specific site. The space between the green and red is required.

Places Page are being promoted to residents. But, they generally do not show up in Bing, Google, or Yahoo. Without placement in major search engines these pages do not seem helpful for pulling in new people interested in those venues. Are there plans for enhancing Place Pages present in search engines? Or... providing API's to make the Place Page content accessible in private/custom web pages? Then individuals could design better placing pages and improve the search presence of their regions.

Klytyna, is almost certainly right. It is common for viewers to crash on log out and we users don't notice. At our next login we find a problem. If this becomes a recurring problem, look at the secondlife.log file immediately after you log off. If there was a crash at log off you should see some warning or error message in the log. Recently my Firestorm is consistently crashing at log off, IF I use OBS for video capture. My point is, if it happens a lot you can probably track down the cause. But, often these are one-off occurances the result of a perfect storm.

Old known bug. You would have saved yourself time if you had searched answers. The work around, check your Internet connection to the SL servers. Then relog. You may want to restart your computer and gateway/router/modem (whatever you call it) and skip the check. The problem is almost always a matter of your viewer and the SL systems glitching at just the precise moment to cause the Friends List to not update as it should.

You haven't given us the information to tell what may be the problem. IF THE VIEWER RAN, you would get it from HELP->ABOUT... As a work around try installing Cool VL Viewer (here) or Singularity (here). You can use the HELP in those, if they will run and they probably will. That are built with older systems in mind. The ideal alternate viewer is the Linden Viewer. But, if Firestorm won't start that is likely going to be the case for the Linden viewer too. However, you can get the ridiculously out of date Second Life Obsolete Platforms Viewer version 3.7.28.300847. It will suffice for collecting the information via HELP we need. You won't even have to log in. We need to know the computer's video device and drivers. Version numbers are important. If you are running a laptop, we need to know if it has a dedicated video chip or runs only on Intel's HD Graphics built into the CPU and chipset. Often a laptop will decide to start saving power and turn off the video chip. So, a computer that once worked for SL starts giving the message you are getting. NIVIDIA has a control panel that has to be set up to prevent laptops and desktops from doing silly things when SL runs. See http://blog.nalates.net/2016/06/05/nvidia-settings-2016/ At this point we are all guessing. The Firestorm wiki has the best known fixes for the problem. If those aren't helping, we are going to need your system's details. PS: Doh! The link... http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers

Why? Materials is mostly a viewer side load. Materials are enabled by turning on Advanced Lighting in the viewer. The server still sends all the 'texture/map' info to the viewer, basically UUID's. The viewer asks for the texture/maps actual files, if needed, and the data is delivered by the 'local' CDN service. So, there is very little load on a simulator from ALM... My thinking is, if your computer can handle the render, enjoy as it has very little impact on others.

The post just below yours... You can read up on the details here: The Great Bakes-On-Mesh Debate You can watch the videos in this thread here and here. Download the Project Viewer for Bakes On Mesh and read the release notes.

Every week there are User Group meetings where we capture Lindens and torture them until they reveal what they are working on... It is amazingly difficult to effectively waterboard in SL. The schedule is here User Groups. Those meetings are held during SLT office hours. So, for many it is hard to get to them as it is the middle of their night. There are blogs that follow those meetings and report the SL news. Inara Pey and my blog are two that report the step-by-step development of projects. Hamlet's, Daniel's, Cirran's, and others are less technical and tend to report the official announcement of features. The blogs make it easy to stay informed. The Linden reported announcements are in Featured News in this forum. But, those posts tend to be just as or after a feature is released. Not much of a heads up for developers. So, one has to find a blog or other good source of insider news.

After all the confusion and ridiculous rhetoric in this thread Cathy is admonished to 'be careful'...

Cathy has made a good video that covers the tech issues more completely than Strawberry's. For an overview go with Strawberry's. For the tech and what can and cannot be done watch Cathy's.

Strawberry Singh has a good video showing BoM in action as it is now.

Isn't it likely that designers will design their UV layouts with two arms? If they do and paint their diffuse textures with two arms, won't the BoM service simply bake those textures as simple composites that render correctly on the layout? Isn't the BoM just a compositing service that totally ignores UV's? The textures and mesh attachments' UV will have to match, be designed for each other. Older skins, tats, etc. designed for the single-arm classic UV if used on a two-arm layout mesh will leave one arm untextured. Thus the need for an additional texture for the 'second' arm?

Lindal gave you good advice. I'll give you a simple way to check the SLVoice.exe file. Restart your computer. Viewers are known to crash on exit and leave some processes running. A restart clears any such processes. Turn off your antivirus for a few minutes. Important for next step. Install your viewer over the existing install. (If you install the Linden viewer, you will want to reinstall Firestorm so it is the dominant viewer. By default Windows uses the last viewer installed as the 'preferred' or default viewer.) Before your antivirus 'timeout' runs out, login and try voice. The results will show whether you have a problem with SLVoice.exe and your antivirus. On another note... whitelist the viewers' install folders, ie, C:\Programs\Firestorm or Second Life. Also, your cache folder, which you can find by looking in Preferences. The Lab checks all uploads and their outgoing packages for viruses. So, we won't get one in the install folder or the cache. You can safely whitelist those for a bit better performance and to avoid the false positives sometimes encountered with SLVoice.exe and slplugin.exe. Good luck...

Are you using headphones? Have you checked the master volume and voice volume settings inside the viewer? You aren't giving us much to go on. So... you may have more luck in the Firestorm Support group in-world. If you don't have the Linden SL viewer installed, install it and see if it works for voice. This will give an idea of where the problem is. -- This Linden viewer is the troubleshooting step most of use. I keep several viewers installed just because I'm insane... but, it makes troubleshooting much quicker. Also, if you do have to resort to SL Support they will ask if you are using the Linden viewer if not, they will blow you off.

There are various possibilities. If you inventory has a high number of items in a single folder, that can be a problem. A high number would be 2,500+. If this is a possibility contact support via a trouble ticket. Lindal points to the most common problem, an overloaded router/modem. Have you tried logging into a different region? Try Furball or Pooley. If all is failing and what we have listed is unlikely, look in the viewer log.

You will need to know how the mesh body designer laid out the UVMap. It doesn't have to match the classic body's UVMap. So... it depends.

You make a good point. The poke-through I am concerned with is for attached mesh clothes. I suppose those clothes could come with alphas that would hide classic or mesh body parts.

Hmmm... no one mentions principals, the morals of free citizens, or philosophy or psychology. Controlling people and forcing them to conform to our, or some group's (national, social, or religious) ideals is the basis of fascism. The base point in the purpose of this thread seems to be the OP losing their friend, somewhat self centered, based on the personal opinion that the friend is a victim...

That may be true. Bakes on has 6 slots, listed earlier. So, one could use 'bake_hair' for a HUD. People are already considering using the skirt to have different textures on the arms. I have more truble figuring out how that may work than imagining how I might reduce HUD textures.

It has already been tried. The one that tested it is talking in the video about their experiment. So, yeah it works.