Nalates Urriah

The animations are a minor problem. Once triggered the animation ID is sent to everyone. Their viewers request the animation from the asset servers and cache the animation files. The actual region server has little work to do. You can actually see how much work you are creating for the server by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Alt-U (Show Updates to Objects). After that, playing the animation places very little load on the region server. It sends a few bytes of information telling other players you are starting an animation. That is the end of the server's participation. After that it is up to the individual viewers. So, while there is some client side load it isn't an issue on a medium level computer. If you are trying to run on a Pentium CPU, it could be significant. But, the iCore CPU's should handle it easily. More costly and lag producing is the script in the weapon. Knowing how many scripts are in it and how much memory they actually use is the criteria for deciding how laggy they are. See Those Scripts You Wear, Which Are Pesky? for information on how to see what is inside the weapon. I suspect if you check with animations enabled and disabled, you'll find the same number of scripts. Things in SL do NOT delete scripts that will later be needed as there is no easy way to add them back. It is easier to leave them. If you are concerned about the milliseconds from your key press/mouse click, animation start, and the firing of the weapon, that is harder to answer. Some script functions wait for a task to complete before moving on. Starting an animation via script is async, it doesn't wait. Your key press/click is sent to the server to start the script execution response. Your viewer does not wait for a server response and can send additional key presses and clicks. You can use the Fast Timers to see what the viewer is actually doing (Ctrl-Shift-9 or Develop->Consoles->Fast Timers). It gets way techy. The absolute most laggy factor of weapons is their rezing projectiles. Bows the rez and fire arrows cause lag. Not as bad as automatic weapons that rez bullets. Drawing weapons does generally not rez anything. If you press Ctrl-Alt-T, you can see the weapon sheathed and drawn. When drawing the weapon the change is only in the items 'transparency'. For combat the only lag you need to worry about is your viewer's FPS and ping time to the simulator. If you lag the server, you lag everyone. The playing field remains level. There are, I'll call them cheats, that allow a player to slow/lag opponents without suffering the same delay. If you find a player that is incredibly fast... you are dead before you know what happened... repeatedly... and others have the same experience, report them to the game master. Ask that they be watched.

How do you "wrongly" respond to a verification email? You click the link they send... Worst case have the verification email resent.

I think we are being trolled...

It sounds like you think you are talking to Linden staff. You aren't. This is a user-to-user forum. Contact Peter Gray, the marketing rep for Linden Lab. He may help you. I have seen various demographics reported from time to time. So, the Lab has them. Whether they will provide them is another matter.

I can only suggest you make it to the Beta Server UG meeting on Thursdays. Talk to the Lindens working on the simulator and backend software. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:User_Groups

Yes, once upon a time. No, the Lab is not currently supporting it. However there are work-arounds. http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2016/06/how-to-set-up-your-new-mobile-vr-viewer/ http://blog.nalates.net/2016/07/31/second-life-vr-how-to/ Is the viewer fast enough for VR? Depends. There are computers running SL at 100+ FPS rates. So, we can safely say it is marginal... Since VR requires TWO images, left and right eye images, and a minimum frame rate of 90 to avoid certain simulator sickness, we considered a computer incapable of a consistent 180FPS for single images as unsuitable for VR. Tech has advanced. The NVIDIA 1000 series cards change that. They can make the second image from the context of the first image, thus disposing of the 180FPS idea. Future cards will do an even better job. The majority of older computers (2-years+) are incapable of providing the power for enough speed to avoid making people sick. Today most of the SL users fall in that range. So, the Lab has decided to withdraw their VR support. You can choose to hear the between the lines comment 'for now' or not. As more people use VorpX, the Lab may be come more interested. As it is now they are working to rebuild the computers and system support back end of SL. The last couple of years have seen lots of SL modernization on the viewer and viewer support side. Recent comments by Lindens suggest something similar is happening on the server backend systems. Is that being done without any thought toward VR? The Lindens are not saying. But, I suspect VR colors all game developers' thoughts these days. Only time will tell.

When you ask a technical question include information about your computer and viewer. Windows version? Mac version? Check that your system will run SL. See System Requirements. If you are updating your viewer, restart the computer then try again. When a viewer shuts down it often silently crashes. In such a case you may still have parts of the viewer that are still in use and cannot be replaced by a new install. Wiinmm.dll has to do with Windows joystick and multi-media API's. I doubt it is part of the SL install, but I am not certain. A computer restart may be the best step in getting your install to work.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'realistic'. The word seems to imply you have a specific look in mind and you aren't finding it. I find that it isn't so much the Skin that provides the Asian look as it is the Shape, especially the eyes. For skin it is mostly a matter of getting a skin color that works for what you want. About my second year in SL I searched through Asian skins trying to find my first one. With some effort you'll find a huge range of skin makers. A good portion of them make ethnic skins. Still the problem is finding a skin and shape that provide the Asian look you want. I decided on a Skin and made my own shape. Deluxe Body Factory makes several Asian skins, male and female. Georgia! Creative Clutter more... Exotic Asian Beauty Skins more... There are 72 pages of Asian Skins in the marketplace. Most of those have in-world shops. I suspect someone in that group would be willing to make a custom skin.

So... you talked to your hosting company?

Explaining SL creation is way too large a task to take on. YouTube and Vimeo have hundreds of tutorials. 3D modeling is no simple thing but, neither is it rocket science. Modeling for games gets one into optimizing models and their materials. Whether for SL or any other game most is the same. You can learn form new and old tutorials. Sculpting models and building efficient models is basically the same as it has been for years in all games. Texturing and animating the same. Each game has its unique aspects. SL certainly does. Learning those gotchas isn't hard. Finding out about them is difficult. If you are new to modeling, then there is no difference. The SL way is just the way it is done. Coming from Unreal and other backgrounds creates different sets of what's different. So, there is no uniform or general this is what is different for people to build tutorials on. The best I'll do for you is send you here: http://blog.nalates.net/tag/tutorials/

May 5 @ 12:45 SLT... I just got an error that too many people are accessing the site... my.secondlife.com. Profile requests are failing. SL web properties may be seeing DoS attack. Or it may be larger. Flickr went down for a couple of minutes earlier in the day.

Over the last couple of months I have noticed web pages failing to completely load. I can't find a problem in my connection. The web sites are all over the world so, it isn't place specific. Flickr has the problem as do other sites. Some part of the page, CSS file, or scripts does not load. To build faster loading pages Content Delivery Networks are used. Parts of the pages may come from several servers. Anyone of those servers could be overloaded at any instant. Milliseconds later all may be well. But, you browser does not re-request failed requests. So, you end up with a broken page. I can often hit RELOAD and then the page works. You can safely do that in the purchase stream of pages until you pass the BUY commitment. After that you may be making duplicate purchases. Credit card based payments have a time-limit. Any repeat within a minute or two is considered a mistake and the 'second' or subsequent purchase is rejected. In the SL Marketplace that may or may not be true. All you can do is try it. When I contact support for any given web site doing e-commerce for an 'I can't purchase' problem they tell me to clear the browser cache and try again. If you get a broken page, Chrome, Firefox and others may never re-query the web site. The page in the cache is fresh and it gets re-used. So, even a page reload may not solve the problem. It just reloads the broken page. F5 or Shift-F5, depending on the browser, is supposed to force a new query for the page and ignores the cache. It is faster then clearing cache, but doesn't always work. Broken pages are also a possible sign of a bad connection to the problem site. So, if you test your connection, test to the problem IP address. Remember. A good Internet connection does not guarantee a good connection to all points on the Internet.

Deciding what is safe or dangerous is challenging. About the best measure we have is 'age'. How long has a freebie store been around. Less than a month... big red flag use lots of care. Also, things given to us by unknown people. Check the age of the avatar being so friendly. Griefers usually don't last long in SL. They do keep coming back as different avatars. But, that forces to a new age.

There you go... being rational again. Also, is the attitude Character Strength or just basic narcissistic behavior?

You are somewhat doomed to tediously weeding through the various animation related tools available. The reason is they quickly change/update. So, reviews are mostly out of date. nPose just updated. So, most of its tutorials are out of date. People using nPose are mostly unfamiliar with the update. My point being it will be hard to get info other than, "I like..." I like nPose because there are simple and advanced ways to use it. It is pose ball free, which reduces the number of prims in a region. Setting the placement of the avatar with nPose is easy. New tutorials are coming out. I've tried others. I just found nPose better suited me. The tools you mention being interested in are for 'installing' previously made animations in furniture. To make the actual animations one uses tools like Maya, 3D Max, Blender, and similar. I find these are important for making animations that fit the avatar to the furniture I have made. So, I got into making animations.

I suggest you visit the iApp store and search on Second Life. I use Android and the the Play Store has some apps for SL that I haven't seen before. Maybe the same is true on the Apple App's.

It sounds like your hosting service is tightening their security. They have likely blocked some ports your process is using. Restricting scripts is less likely but they may have blocked some PHP calls. You will have to contact your hosting service and ask what they changed and why your scripts have stopped working. There may be new calls that you scripts need to use. For instance, if you use SSL you likely will have to update TSL. Or your CuRL version may be out of date. As this is not an uproar in the SL community it is most likely at your hosting service. They can help you or you move to another host... that is about your only choices.

Making clothes for SL is similar to other 3D worlds. But, SL has its very own collection of gotchas. Using AvaStar or MayaStar eliminates having to learn and avoid them. When I was still trying to use plain Blender I was dealing with several little gotchas. Here is one: http://blog.nalates.net/2013/04/23/second-life-shape-export/

In SL a polygon has one side. The direction of the normal determines which side is visible. Blender will allow you to reverse a poly's normal. So, you can control which side is visible in your model.

If you use Firestorm or,I think, Black Dragon, this is not true. FS will allow you to use more than 512k of VRAM. The LL Viewer limits Texture Memory to 512MB. That isn't all the VRAM used.

Well, that is a downer. All I can think of is driver has pulled in 'default' settings that disagree with the viewer. Loki Eliot added SL as an app to the SN setup and got his working with El Capitan. So, if you haven't, I would try making a SL profile for the SN. In the viewer I would push the values for the Dead Zones way up to see if I could get control. Then sort through which axis is over controlling. See these discussions: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-10362? - Closed. Apparently no fix. http://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-16286. They go through some experiments but they seem to get it working.

To get more time, sit down. Most of the eject scripts cannot eject you if you are sitting. But, I think it is better to leave, fix the problem and return. I'm a premium member so it is a bit easier for me to get into crowded places. I'm less tempted to be stubborn about leaving.

It is likely TWC... but there are other possible problems. The age of the gateway/modem is a prime criteria. These units last about 5 years. So, if you are nearing that age consider buying a new one. Also, the brand of gateway/modem matters. Low cost gateways often have problems with SL. They aren't built to handle the large number of connections SL opens. I've seen SL open 115 connections... I have an on screen floater that watches my ASUS motherboard and network. It tells me how many connections I have open. You can test your connection to see where the problem is. See: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/10/26/troubleshoot-your-sl-connection/

Alwin is right. The region will most likely need to be restarted to fix your home controls.

For $40 get the additional 2GB. For SL you need an NVIDIA card. The newer the better. As things move toward VR NVIDIA and AMD are building more hardware support for VR into their cards. The first round of that tech appeared in the 1000 series cards. I have 1 VR capable game. My 1060 verses my older 560 is beyond belief. It is walking versus flying an F-16. Bree is right. SL is different. It is even different depending on which viewer you are using. Firestorm has been allowing the viewer to use more VRAM. Other viewers are limiting how much VRAM can be used. With a 6GB VRAM card Firestorm allows me to use 2.5GB (if I recall correctly). With my 2GB 560 I am limited to 512... I think. I haven't tried the old machine lately. Whatever card you are planning to buy, look it up on Amazon, New Egg, B&H, and eBay. The price variation may surprise you. Also, people are upgrading and selling their old cards on eBay. You can get some great deals. A GTX1060 w/3GB is US$170 now. With 6GB it is $211... $41 difference, which is WAY cheap VRAM. I have a section of my blog on hardware as it relates to SL here http://blog.nalates.net/category/hardware/ To compare NVIDIA and AMD see http://blog.nalates.net/2016/08/06/video-cards-gtx1060-vs-rx480/