Nalates Urriah

Exposing an idea for changing the SL software to more residents doesn't accomplish anything. The Linden engineers don't spend much time in the forum, except for special cases. However, filing a JIRA feature or bug report will definitely bring it to their attention. Depends on the change. We should also differentiate between changes and fixes. Fixes are sometimes a matter of hours. And some take years and progress incrementally. Those ACI numbers from the time of recommendation to implementation only took months. That minor change has had a major impact on SL performance. Improving the number is taking years as the variation in computers makes it a slippery number. The JIRA has a graph of bugs and suggestions submitted per week/month and the number handled per week/month. While many think the Lindens are slow to respond, the JIRA tells a different story.

Looking for my Linden check... I have so much fun with Black Dragon's Poser. I probably should attend some of the Content Creators' meetings to see what I will be able to do with puppetry.

...yeah. Get busy and make up with Pearl. 😎

You are taking things too personally. While I may quote you, the response is broader. You are considering far too small a sample of noobies to make conclusions, which is my point in general with those questions.

Shapes are a bit of a problem. We are trying to get them to make a head shape and a body shape, separate shapes. Rather than the current combined head and body shape. It takes practice to get a look one likes. And there are ratios in shape that strike the eye as beauty. Learning those ratios and learning how to implement them takes some skill and time. So many people buy their shapes. It is possible to export Full Perm shapes and then combine them in an editor. If you are good with XML then it is easy. You can then take head settings from one shape and use those to replace the head settings in any other shape... or replace body settings and keep head settings. Save copies of shapes and work with copies so you can recover from mistakes.

How do you know what is "fit" and whether that is working for new people?

There is this idea that all things should be give to one by others. Everything has to be easy, free, and effortless. I know the current conditioning directs people into that thinking. But it isn't realistic. Those that do for their selves quickly find their way around SL and into interesting places. Simply by logging into one's dashboard there is all kinds of help. Exploring the SL websites provides days of reading. Unfortunately there is so much in SL it takes considerable effort to become aware of what is here. Where in the viewer will al that information fit? I think that is what the Destination Guide is. The splash screen on the default viewer and most 3rd party viewers provide a wealth of information. Inside most viewers is an abbreviated Guide. Right... we have 3,000+ controls in the viewer now and people are complaining about them crowding screen space... Look at the images above. What is it they have to search for? We have classes, tutorials, help buttons... the problem is getting people to read what is on the screen. What does one do to get people to pay attention? And when you do those things how do you keep people from feeling spammed and running away? So my suggestion for here is we get real and learn what we have and try to understand why we think it isn't working. May be even determine if things are or aren't working.

Overland Hills (region name) has flowers that fascinate me. Being able to move the camera down into them and take pictures without blending and transparency problems is rare.

The Overland Hills region has these amazingly well made flowers... not sure how they did that. Most fields of grass and flowers in SL are a bit lame. These surprised me. Its a huge field.

Click to enlarge Sunset in Overland Hills region

For those of us that came into SL from Myst Online (~2008) this was a familiar symbol.

After multiple restarts in fairly quick succession the Windows OS decides something many be wrong and runs some self repair steps. I suspect that fixed the problem.

Its caused by computer goblins... Put out rat poison and peanut butter.

@4REIGN To answer a tech question like this we need to know more. Click the viewer's HELP->About... and copy-paste the information there into your post (edit is behind the 3 dots in the post's upper right). Without that information we are blindly guessing.

I think you got the idea that viewer FPS >60 doesn't do much visually. And viewer side >60 has only a few minor benefits. What people have left out so far (or I've missed) is viewer response to the server in SL combat games. One finds out that whoever has a higher FPS has a shootout advantage. Having competed in combat play I found the players with 150 & > FPS were WAY harder to beat when I was playing with ~45 to 60 FPS. If we both hit SHOOT at the same RL time their viewer is much more likely to get the signal on its way to the server before my viewer does. The server, viewer, and animations all deal with timing to make things look right. All the frames are snapshots of what the world looks like in that frame instance. The viewer, server, and animation are seldom in sync. The viewer gets what it can and does the best it can with that for however fast it is running. The viewer is figuring out where an animation is and how much things have moved at a specific point in time by prorating/estimating where an arm is at the instance of the frame the viewer is rendering. The viewer is NOT taking a frame from the animation. The animation is designed based on frames. But the idea of a frame in an animation is not the same as a frame in a video. It is much more of a time marker. An animation places key-frames at various points on the time line. Basically saying 'at this point in time the arm is here'. The viewer figures out where the arm is for the frame it is currently rendering, which is somewhere in the animations time line between key-frames. It prorates position between the nearest key-frames. The viewer also considers the "clock". So an animation seems to play the same speed whether the viewer is running 10 FPS, 60, or 120. The idea is to adjust the time line of the animation to the current render speed to keep things moving in a realistic way and in sync with the rest of the SL world. An animation FPS setting is really a setting for how many key-frames one can put in the animation not the play back speed. The key-frame positions at the 1-second mark should always show those positions at 1 second into the animation regardless of viewer FPS. So at 24FPS I can put 24 key-frames in the video's first second. Whether I put 24 key-frames in or 2 it should take the first second of animation 1 second to play. If you have editing privileges on the wiki, change the bad information. I've updated a number of articles in the wiki. The Lindens review significant changes. No... The Lindens are careful about avoiding breaking legacy stuff. So the 'diffuse' textures will still work. Those with baked in shadows and AO will have double shadows and AO when such a texture is used in a new PBR material . We'll see the baked in shadow/AO and the shadow/AO added by PBR rendering. So... they will look funky. What if those people didn't exist? 😆

Since you have tried 3 different viewers that pretty much eliminates the viewers as as the problem. I suggest you update to FS latest (6.8.8) but I suspect that isn't going to fix the problem. Caith makes a good suggestion. Login in a Script OK region. If your avatar is not the owner of a No-Script region you log into you'll have this kind of problem. If the region change at login does not help then it is time to start looking at the laptop. I would start with making sure the video drivers are up to date. I'm a bit behind in my updates and I notice you (OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 417.88 ) are even farther behind. I suggest you bump the Max Bandwidth to the recommended 1500. And that is also unlikely to fix the problem. You are on Win11 so you should be good. But, run a check. Open a Command Window (type CMD in Taskbar search and run as Admin) and run SFC /scannow. If any of the Windows files are damaged this will repair them or reveal any serious problem, which moves you to into needing more serious repair which we can deal with if needed. Restart after running SFC.

@Ringstrue While you can make gestures part of an outfit you have to explicitly add them. You do that by activating them from inventory and then saving the outfit. If you use the Gesture Panel to add active gestures those so added do not become part of an outfit. This can make for lots of confusion. When you set gestures active via the panel it is more of a viewer setting than a world setting. If you change your gesture setup and your viewer crashes on exit then the changes may not save changes. Unfortunately viewers often crash silently on exit. You won't notice unless you are reviewing your viewer logs. The work around is to login, make changes, and log off to force the save BEFORE the viewer reached a point where it will crash on exit. You can make a folder that contains gestures and add them to the outfit or remove them via a right-click on the folder in inventory. I use this technique for saving weapons setups that have lots of gestures to control the weapon. I got started doing that before there were Outfits in SL. OMG, I'm old...

I think what is being expressed is one can't see the PBR effect in a still image like they can in a video where you can see the reflections and shading changing with camera angle and movement. With movement many of the aspects are VERY obvious. Not so much in a still image. They do show up in the still image. Just not as dramatically.

This is an item we can help with. When you use the Guide and find a place listed no longer exists, report it. An improvement to the Guide's pages would be a button for reporting bad entries in the Guide. I think a good idea would be to have discussion on an idea in a separate thread linked to from here. Many of the ideas suggested have already been tried. Likely before the time of the one suggesting the idea. There are plenty of people around that were here when the ideas were tried. And we have had universities come in and study SL. We actually have objective data on what works to keep people in SL. See: Longevity in Second Life Chun-Yuen Teng and Lada A. Adamic. The TL:DR is interaction with other people within SL is what keeps people in SL. The Greeters/helpers for newbies didn't provide the interaction needed. The Lindens tested that. People that never met a greeter were more likely to stay. Weird. But the stats were conclusive. So think about the study's conclusion and the Lab's findings about Greeters-Helpers. Once that is understood I think it is more obvious what may and won't work. Novices always come up simple and obvious ideas. To move past the beginner level stuff one has to be educated with the information available and list of things tried and knowledge of how they were tried and WHY it was concluded they did or didn't work. An example is Last Names.

We have another thread like this. I can't find it. And these are fun to do. So another one is not a problem. I was recently going through my outfits. So these are all pictures taken in the last couple of days. But the outfits range back to 2014. So it is easy for me to go back to an older avatar and look. Some of the older outfits get updated. The early Slink body outfits get updated to the newer Redux version. Not all the OLD classic outfits can be updated. Some where in 2018 I added a mesh head. I have updated a few outfits and a few I have kept as is, meaning still the classic body. From 2008 to 2014 my avatar did not change much. We didn't have outfits before 2014. So I only have pictures,,, Below is from 2016 we did a thread like this one. Some dates don't match up. That is because I wasn't sure how to date-label updated outfits. I am still not. I did try to get a face and body similar to my RL look. I got hair, skin, and height very close. I sort of got the face... if two eyes, mouth, and nose count...

I opened a JIRA feature request. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-233353 - Viewer as Webcam - The idea being Zoom, or whichever, would see the viewer as a webcam and use the scene we normally see as a feed into Zoom. I can think of several fun ways to use that in a Zoom meeting. @Love Zhaoying if I understand, you are thinking of the avatar appearing as super imposed on your Zoom's webcam feed? That would require some programing on the Zoom side of things. So, I doubt that will happen.

There is an interesting question... If the feature were built in then it would be possible to add a second viewer camera as the 'webcam' and render the world for it. If you have ever run multiple copies of the viewer you'll understand what that does to performance, which is VERY dependent on your computer so ranging from horrible to negligible impact. It would be fun to be able to use the viewer as a webcam. Meaning you could tell Zoom or Jit.si to use the viewer as a camera for a meeting. It would use the viewer's render as the camera image.

If you are asking if it is possible to build a viewer with the ability, yes. However, I doubt anyone will build such a feature. If you are asking if you can run Zoom or Jit.si from within the viewer, no. The viewer is likely going to insulate those apps from your computer. They will be lost trying to find your camera and screen. SL servers running the apps would see them try to use the camera and mic on the server... You might get the apps to run on a prim using the MOAP feature. However, whoever you want to connect with in SL would have to have a copy of the prim. And the previous problems of finding camera, mic, and screen may exist in that scenario too. So ... basically no. You could run the app outside the viewer and pass a link within chat. This is what most people do now. A good percentage of people in SL refuse to use voice chat. I am certain they would avoid video too.

And there are various UNdeformers in the marketplace. (HERE) These are handy to have in your dressing-room.

Take the tech talk to a new thread. Use the Creation Forum->Art, Music, Photography and there is a Machinima section. You'll get more info from those into the tech side. Not really. The first chip generally sets the size. But there is always a way to set the canvas size. Put the biggest clip in first. You can make a clip the exact size you want for the final render. Add it first. Then add your other clips then remove the initial sizing clip. With a little practice you can make nice video from any collection of different size clips. It isn't hard. Kibitzing...