Nalates Urriah

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...

I agree with Henri. I have in the past lost connection with the SL servers and eventually been logged off. While I could not move or stop moving, depending, I could spin in place. No jerkiness in the camera sweep or viewer mini freezes.

You might be right... but I doubt it. Your 2GB cache, the 2560x1566 px rez screen image, and the Ultra setting are likely problems, or at least contributing to the stutter. The almost 2% packet loss is not good. But it looks like you captured this shortly after logging in, so the percentage will go down the longer you are on... or should... Bump your cache up to the 10GB max. If you have SSD storage make sure your Viewer's cache is on it. You want the viewer to do as FEW clean-up runs as possible on the cache. If you want to see if cache-clean-up is the cause, bump the setting and go in-world, and test. The viewers use an indexed cache. So file lookup time is NOT a factor in viewer cache size. So go big. And this is not the setting Henri is talking about above. Definitely try his suggestions too. I suggest you tweak your graphics settings. The default ULTRA settings are a generalized, generally best for most machines sort of thing. You can likely do better. The first article I wrote on tweaking viewers for SL explains many of the terms used. It is Graphics Tweaking for Second Life (2010). A new article based on 2016 recommendations from NVIDIA is NVIDIA Settings 2016. I suspect NVIDIA's recommendations for SL have not changed since then. So I suggest you start with their recommendations. Experiment from there. I have several preset graphics settings for different times in SL. So, for dancing, crowded places, flying, sailing, etc. PS: Also, check the region's performance. Press Ctrl-Shift-1 to open the Viewer Stats. Look for the Simulator section. Check the numbers for Time Dilation and Sim FPS. If the region sucks so will your performance. This morning I tested in Peak Lounge after a few tweaks to my system, which is getting old. After most everyone rezzed and my DD at 512m I had good performance. Sweeping my camera through the place had only minor jerks when doing a 360. When I dropped DD to 128 was smooth enough that moderate speed sweeps had almost no jerks and slow camera sweeps had no noticeable jerks.

It is so much easier to jump to a conclusion than figure things out.

You have double posted or my browser has gone nuts... Please don't do that.

You are going to have to give us a lot more information before we can help you. Open the viewer. Do not log in. Click HELP->ABout... and copy that info and paste it into your post or a reply. Explain what happens when you crash. There are many different types of crashes.

@Elyjia Baxton When observing the Task Manager look at the Performance tab -> CPU. Notice if the CPU is running at its max frequency. In the image in the upper right you can see my CPU is an i5-6600 @ 3. GHz. But at the moment it was only running at 3.25MHz. Also, I overclock and run at a max of 4.17GHz. So the CPU is currently 0.92GHz below its max speed. If you see the numbers showing a 100% use and running at the CPU's max speed, then we know you are CPU bottlenecked, then we start figuring out why. The rest of the panel can give us clues as to what is happening. The other parts of the computer can give us a clue as to what is causing the bottleneck. The Performance Monitor is for a detailed examination. The Resouce Monitor will show if there is something hogging a part of the computer and causing the Viewer to wait. I suggest you open the Resource Monitor and look at the Memory. There is a column listing the Page Fault Rate for each process. This is often the cause of mini-freezes. Run the viewer for a bit and the monitor will show average page faults per second. When other apps cause the fault the viewer usually does a mini freeze. When it is the viewer causing the fault then the viewer has longer freezes. When I first land at Peak Lounge my CPU hits 100% and the camera is jerky. I see heavy network traffic and high CPU use as loads of textures and mesh items are downloaded and decoded. The more stuff I have running in the background the worse it is. In a few minutes, it passes. I do think this is more of a problem than in the past. On average I have 140+ processes running in the background. I could improve performance by looking at those and figuring out which of those I could shut down. For a time the Microsoft Diagnostic services were hogging the C:\ drive and bringing my computer to crawl. I would shut them down and things were good again. Since only a few people are having a problem, this is likely something in the local computer. Otherwise, thousands would be screaming. Often Windows decides it has to do maintenance and the Diagnostic Services start using 100% of the C:\ drives bandwidth causing a flood of mini-freezes. So... watch for that. This usually happens when you power up the computer. If you launch the viewer before the computer completes its self-checks and updates the viewer will have problems. Depending on the computer that can 10+ minutes.

Without information on your viewer and computer, we really can't do anything but guess. Open HELP->About... and copy past that info into your post when asking a tech question.

@Elyjia Baxton Check your Windows installation. Open a Command Line window (CMD) as an admin and run SFC /scannow. If Windows has damaged files this will repair them. The other possibility is high disk use. Open the Task Manager the next time you are freezing up. On the Performance tab, look to see if any of your drives are at 100% use. If so that is likely the problem. In crowded regions, your viewer is throwing a lot of data into the cache, making for lots of disk writes. If some other app is hogging the disk, the viewer has to wait. You can run the Resource Monitor to see what is using the drive. While in the Respouce Monitor, look in the memory section to see the rate of Page Faults (memory swaps to disk - a painfully slow task). If this is high it can be the cause of your freezes. If this is a problem, the solution is to run fewer apps and use less memory or buy more memory for your computer.

Saying they become the Lab's property is not accurate. When you upload images to SL you give them non-exclusive rights to the image. You retain all rights to your images. Many of us sell images in SL. I suspect the most successful are the people opening galleries. Uploading high-quality images to SL is a bit of a tech trick. If you have not researched image uploading to SL for the best quality, do it. Landscapes made into SL images with parallax are fun and a bit novel. Anything that takes advantage of the 3D magic of SL attracts attention and that usually translates into profits.

You need to watch the video tutorials provided by AvaLab. Poses start with a 'T' pose. Your pose is made in reference to that initial pose. The SL system assumes any pose starts there. For fingers, I think there is a toggle that includes or excludes the 'extra' bones used by Bento in the animation. It been awhile since I made a pose or animation.

The Lindens are always ambiguous on completion dates. So... soon™. When they do they will announce it on the SL Blog's Featured News. You can check in the viewer by opening the Complete Avatars panel. There is a button and in the top menu Avatar -> Complete Avatars.

To know why you cannot login we need more information. Time, location SL & RL (general not too specific), viewer brand... The most common is a problem with your target region. So, as Qie suggests, try to log into a different region. You always can choose Home or Last Location. An easy way to pick a new login location is to use the Destination Guide (which is a newly updated guide now). You can also change your preferences to show login location choices before logging in.

Auto Return can trick you. Say it is set to 5 minutes. You spend 3 minutes sailing in the region to reach the dock and moor. If you get off the boat, it will remain for 2 minutes then return. But if you sailed around in the region for more than 5 minutes, the instant you get off the boat it will return. In new Linden regions, like Belliseria, they are including rez zones for boats and cars. For planes and copters, you have to look for runways. There are fewer places for planes. But all are marked and generally visible if you get close. And there is a pattern as to where they put them.

Watch the packet loss. I find I have an initial flurry of lost packets at sign-on. Then I don't see any more packets dropping for the rest of the session. At least on a good day. Addresses starting with ec2 or ec(whatever?) usually are a server within the AWS farm. I have yet to figure out how to identify the SL region server's address. Plus I get very different IP addresses for SECONDLIFE.COM depending on who I use to do the lookup. And if I look up the region server name from HELP->ABOUT... like: simhost-0a538900f1ede4aee.agni and attach secondlife.com as the top domain then I get some wild results. I suspect that since the Lab is placing servers near local users we are going to see varying results depending on where we are.

Arielle Popstar is likely on the right track, network issues. Years ago I wrote about how to test your connection to SL, which is different than your connection to the Internet. Places like https://www.speedtest.net/ can tell you about your "Internet Speed" in general. But you need to step through the troubleshooting steps here: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/ Since you have tried other viewers and those around you are not experiencing the same problem, you have pretty well eliminated the viewer and the SL backend. That leaves the network and your computer. You have the link for checking your network connection to SL If your computer has a problem the easy, painless, quick fix is to open a Command Window (type: cmd - or Google it) as an Admin and run SFC /scannow. If it finds problems it cannot fix then Google how to DISM fix your computer.