Nalates Urriah

This video popped up in my phone... Should be fun chasing down all these places.

...better living through chemistry... ?

Now... when you say "nice build" do you mean... 🙄

@Isa Crystal When you want technical help there is a lot of information we need to narrow down the possible problem. While LittleMe says there are "various things" I'll tell you there is almost an infinite number of possible things that can go wrong. The viewer can crash on launch, after launch but before you have a chance to log in, during login, immediately after login... and so on. We need details to help. We also need the viewer and computer specs. It is easy to collect those if you can launch the viewer. Before proceeding to log in, click HELP->About... and copy that info and paste it into your post.

They could shave...

Video play quality in most cases is a setting. Video embeded in the forum pages start playing at 480p for me, which is noticeably fuzzy. But the videos are often way nice HD. However, there are no options on the SL home page. I suspect the home page's video sucks because it was more important to get a good page load speed. But why it is dark... may be someone's idea of artistic...

Boring...

Weird things do happen with the viewers. Often time heals the problem and we are left wondering WTH. When you need tech help include information about your computer and viewer. The easy way to do that is to click the viewer's HELP->About... and copy and paste. There is a glitch that happens where the viewer will attempt to have your avatar wear literally everything in inventory. Logging on and off and clearing the cache doesn't help. Clearing cache helps with very few things these days. However, this odd happenstance is usually solved by wearing the Ruth/Roth test avatar. Click Developer in top menu (or press Ctrl-Alt-Q if it is not showing)->Avatar->Character Tests->Test [Male/Female]. This will break the "wear this cue". If you run into your problem again try this as a quick way out.

For heads and bodies to fit together the mesh in the neck has to be standardized. To avoid mismatched neck seams one cannot design away from that standard. Both bodies and heads can use materials. SL materials include normal maps, which let us pretend a smooth surface has shape. A skin maker can bridge across the head and body seam. With a normal map for the body and head, one can create a 3D look for the neck that is well-defined and works with lighting.

@SnakePliskins With Firestorm you should not have to go into Debug Settings to change the camera. Here is a video that shows another way: I think even this is overly complicated. But it is easy to remember. You can use Shift-Mouse Wheel to move the focal point up and down. Or use Ctrl-Mouse Wheel to move the camera up and down. The setting you wheel to for these becomes your default camera position. The ESC key will return you to your default camera position. Shift-ESC will reset the camera to the Firestorm default camera settings. Ctrl-8 to zoom out, Ctrl-0 to zoom in, and Ctrl-9 to reset to default zoom. And you can use the mouse wheel to zoom in and out.

I tried a bunch of AO's. The old ZHAO II does not use the new functions available to replace default system animations and uses polling instead to override the system animations. This means it generates more traffic than the newer AOs. Comparing the script load of the newer AOs to the ZHAO II shows the newer ones are WAY script heavy. I decided to go with polling and a lighter script load. I think the Firestorm AO uses the newer functions to replace default animations and avoid polling. But the code is running in the viewer rather than in a script running on the region server. I use the FS built-in AO. For all other viewers, I use the ZHAO II.

We have the Open Source group that Oz used to head up: Open Development. I think they are still meeting. This group was primarily interested in viewers.

Ardy gave a simple way to look. You can also look up the specs for your laptop model online.

This error has many causes, enough so that trying to chase down the actual cause is less important than just getting past it. To get past it there are several steps to try. First, try logging into another region. Pooley or Furball are good ones. But any from the Destination Guide will work. Next, restart the router/gateway and then your computer. Test your Internet connection. If that goes well then try logging into SL. Check the SL Status Page. See if SL is up. The websites can be up when the grid/world is down. If SL has a problem it shows up pretty fast on the forum. Check the general internet status. Look for Internet Traffic Reports to see if there is an outage between you and SL. You need to know where the SL servers are that serve you to do this. This means that when you are connected you need to grab an address so you'll know when things go sideways. Open the viewer's HELP->About... and look for your region server's address. It will look like this: Add .secondlife.io to the simhost-... address and geolocate the combined address. While you are trying all these steps it is likely the problem will resolve itself... or someone will fix it. So a simpler fix is to do something else for an hour or so and then try again.

I fly and sail. I generally set the Draw Distance at 512m. Zoom out the mini-map (radar) to show 2 or 3 regions ahead. Your Draw Distance forces or restricts region rendering. In the right image, you can see I have two regions ahead interacting with me.

Some consider SL a game... From Rhonda Huntress in answer to whether or not SL is a game: I have found that underneath it is a game. It is an inventory management game where you sort and categorize items with increasing complexity while creators strive to develop new items that defy conventional categories. Soft caps are there to force you to weed out duplicate and superfluous items or risk crashing, being turned into a cloud or worse yet, loosing large portions of your inventory. Everyone has to play the game to some extent and the rest of the world is there to entice you to add more and more items to your inventory. The point is... start organizing your inventory now. Will save you headaches later.

Most users don't experience that problem. Which means this is a problem specific to you. If this were a common problem lots of people would be complaining. On a weekend I often go club hopping in SL. I'll go through my folders of LMs and often visit a dozen or more places. Often in quick succession. Other times I am exploring and may TP from links in the Destination Guide as well as LMs visiting a half-dozen places. I use Firestorm 6.6.8, the Linden Release Candidates, and Black Dragon in Windows 10-22H2. None of them gives me a problem. I've forgotten when I had my last viewer crash in any of the three. If I were crashing I would be reading the viewer and Windows event logs to see what was going wrong. I would also consider switching to Henri's Cool VL Viewer.

Your viewer can keep up with any Internet speed. My connection can deliver 250mbps and my 7-year-old i5 keeps up. The Internet is NOT a firehose blasting data at the viewer. The viewer requests the data it needs and has to wait for it to download. So the faster your connection the better. Most viewer problems related to your connection are bandwidth limits (volume of data) and latency (lag). Deliberately trying to slow or limit your connection is likely to add to your problems. In the old days, the viewer had a Max Bandwidth for UDP data transfer setting that was important. That is not the case since the Lab changed the data transfer to the HTTP protocol. And back then it was about the SL backend servers NOT keeping up with the viewer, not the viewer keeping up with the server's data stream. So the old recommendations to tweak the Max Bandwidth setting are pointless. Use either the FS recommendation of 1500 or the Linden recommendation of 3500. The Firestorm Team still has the equation up on their wiki for calculating the OPTIMUM Max B setting based on your connection speed. But they recommend a max setting 1500. Today most people's connection speeds calc to something much higher. So most of us skip the calc and try 1500 and 3500 and see if we notice a difference. I don't.

Your computer may have no dedicated graphics card. If it does it isn't using it. The Intel(R) Iris(R) Xe Graphics is an in-CPU graphics processor. Since you have only 1GB dedicated for graphics memory I suspect your viewer settings are forcing the system to page memory to storage. Whether a hard drive (really slow) or an SSD (better but slow) they cannot compete with RAM/System Memory. I suspect that is where you get the video blinks. You can read about how to possibly adjust the amount of memory the system dedicates: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=assign+memory+to+Intel(R)+Iris(R)+Xe+Graphics&ia=web You can also tweak the viewer to use less graphics memory. There are articles here in the Forum Answers section that explain how. There are settings in the viewer to limit memory use. BUT... those limits can force the viewer into swapping out textures and you see what we call Texture Thrashing, a texture partially loads and you see it as blurry, then in a minute or two it clears and renders clearly. Then a couple of minutes later it goes blurry and the cycle repeats endlessly. Your computer more than meets the Lab's minimum system requirements. So you should be able to run without problems. But using the Intel CPU for graphics processing is not recommended. Examine your computer's specs and see if there is a built-in dedicated graphics chip. Often a laptop will avoid using the graphics chip to save power. You can set the laptop to use the chip when running an SL viewer. Google and the Answers section here will tell you how. If there is no dedicated chip in your laptop, you will have to tweak the viewer's graphics settings to use less VRAM... video memory. There are numerous tutorials on how to reduce lag and improve viewer performance...

Bad idea. R E A L L Y BAD idea. Clearing the viewer cache does NOT make you look new in SL. Any scripter can ask the age of your Avatar. (See: llRequestAgentData() ) The viewer caches are used to improve performance and reduce the load on the backend servers. By clearing your viewer's cache you negate all those performance benefits. You make SL suck for all of us because we all need those backend server clock-ticks you are wasting. You have a REALLY bad list of suggestions.

Bugsplat is not about getting you help. The engineers track the reports and decide on which is the most pressing problem. AFAIK they only respond directly to a report if they want more information. Plus FS Team is not that big. Do not expect a reply... ever. There are lots of suggestions here. For specific help, you would need to tell us which you have tried. The last Windows 10 update to 22H2 triggered something in my system putting it in molasses mode. After 4 days of trying to find the specific problem I gave up and reset Windows. I am now reinstalling all apps. The reset with data and apps saved did not work. So, while this computer has worked amazingly well since I built it with almost no problems, after this last update it was a major problem. Your computer's OS, the viewers, the SL backend, and the Internet are constantly changing. The idea that it worked well yesterday only tells us something changed or broke in the last 24 hours.

Changing the viewer or doing a clean-install will not cause inventory loss. You can add a new viewer, say Catznip, and it will have the same inventory as your previous viewers. Inventory is kept on the SL servers. The viewer downloads ONLY an access list to your inventory. Any inventory lost is actually lost on the Linden side of things and is very rare. HOWEVER, viewer caches do get corrupted. Firestorm has enough of a problem with that such that they wrote a wiki page about how to recover APPARENTLY LOST inventory. You can ask for the link in FS Support Group in-world. Settings... FS has the option to let you back up your viewer settings. A good idea. Especially if you do lots of tweaks to the viewer. But when troubleshooting wait to restore settings until you know if the clean install fixed the problem, as the problem is often in the settings. One thing to check is the folder C:\Windows\System32\SRU. The Diagnostic Policy Service has been and often still is a problem in Win10 & 11. A check to see if that may be the problem is to look in C:\Windows\System32\SRU. There should be less than a dozen files in the folder and the .DAT file should be 2-digit MB at largest, not GB. If that is a problem, it would likely be the source of the mini-freezes.

If you have your floating Window Opacity set to 1.00 the panels should be opaque. If not, set it to 50% and see if it changes. On FS 6.6.8 mine changed in real time. If there is no visible change, there is a problem with the installation. Do a clean install. The Active and Inactive may have changed in one of the updates. I don't remember if Inactive was always 50%. So this may be where the problem occurred.

I suggest you remove the viewer and do a clean install of FS. Lots of us use the latest FS (6.6.8) with no problem. I would take a hard look at your Windows system and make sure it is OK. Make sure all your updates are in and the video driver is current. Run SFC (System File Check). Then run CHKDSK 😄 /R, ( C followed by a colon NOT a happy face) which takes hours. If your computer is years old then the chkdsk can find disk surface problems and repair them. I recommend a system backup or at least making a system restore point before running the /R option. This is not something to bother with on a new computer or SSD.

And obviously, my browser went nuts...