Nalates Urriah

LiIMs, when you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... before logging in and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. I've been crashing like crazy with the Main, Beta, and Dev SL Viewers. 10 to 30 minutes is all I can stay on. The logs say there is a problem with image size (0x0x1px).

I'm in SoCal and yesterday I crashed every 10 to 20 minutes as I photographed Fantasy Fair. I tried the SL Dev, Beta, and Main viewer 3.5.1 (274821). All had about the same crash rates. According tot he logs there is some issue with mis-sized images 0x0x1px. Which obvioulsy is not going to work. Firestorm was able to survive and stay up and running. But, it was increadible slow; 0.5 to 7 FPS. I have the 314.22 NVIDIA driver for a GTX560. It was working fine so, I doubt it is that driver. I cleared the cache and that made no difference. I cleared the settings and that made no difference. Reboots and gateway restarts did not help. At this point we probably need to get the Lindens attention. File a JIRA with all the information you can. An item the JIRA system does not ask for is the TIME of the problem. Be sure to include as exact a time as you can and a location. That allows them to look at the correct server's logs.

That is usually a problem with the ATI video card driver. Try updating your video driver. Search this forum using you video card model name and number. There will be others with the same card. With ATI the newest driver is not always the best. See what driver others with the same card are using. When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

You need to be in an area where you have rez rights. Any sandbox will do. Use SEARCH to find public sandboxes. Find the item in inventory. Drag it to the ground. Then you should be able to open it.

Take a look at this: Second Life Shape Export. It may help you understand what is happening with OBJ exports and XML exports of shapes.

We are assuming you are in an SL Viewer... not a third party viewer. In the SL Viewer from the top menu click: Me -> Camera Controls. In the control that opens click the Eye looking icon and make sure REAR is selected. If that does not solve the problem, Rolig's answer is part of the answer. The camera is controlled by two settings, where it is looking from and where it is looking toward. Get more information on these settings here: Camera Position Tips.

There are several things that may cause the problem. Rolig's suggestion is a good first step. When you ask a tech question include the Help->About... info from the viewer. It gives us version numbers and specific driver information that give us clues. Also, does this happen with just one account/avatar? Or all your avatars? It helps to have an Alt-Avatar to test for account specific problems. So, if you can make a second avatar and login, then we have a good hint that it is the account and not the viewer.

When you submit a tech question like this we need verions of the software in use. Click Help-About... and copy paste that info into your post (Edit is in Options in the upper right of your post and is the only way to add to your post). If you see the problem in both the Sl Viewer and Firestorm, then to problem is likely your video driver. With AMD the latest driver is not always the best driver for SL. You can search this forum and the SLUniverse for fore your video card (Radeon 7800). You'll probably find some advice on which driver is best. The card is just a bit over a year old, so that should not be a problem. It is comparable to NVIDIA 480, so it should work well with SL. It is AMD/ATI and their OpenGL is lame, so that may a problem, which is why you may need an older version rather than the newest. Also, you can ask about which driver in the FS Support Group in-world.

To add to what friscolives says... Memory speed is a big factor in SL performance. The faster the system ram, the better your frame rates will be. Unless you are talking to a total geek, they probably won't know what memory speeds are installed in the unit. Nor will they know what is available. You can get specific information on a site like Tom's Hardware. Also online memory chip sales people can give you good information on chips. Kingston and Crucial are good brands. Chips too fast for your computer are a waste of money but won't hurt it. Slower chips won't hurt the computer but they will slow it down. You may also want to get what ever memory chips comes with it and update at a later time.

I'll second what Paperdoll says. I have Core2 Quad and a GTX560. I run with custom settings that puts me between Ultra and the first notch down. I get from 25 to 65 FPS. I have AnitAliasing and other lag producing features on. That includes Shadows Sun/Moon + Projectors. The 660 should be good for some time. 64 bit OS is important. The Lab does not make a 64 bit viewer. But, there are a number of Large Address Aware (LAA) viewers out there that can take advantage of LAA. I am seeing some beta testing stuff for an update of Win 8 floating around the Internet. So, at this point you won't be far from a fix for problems that Win 8 may present you, if any. There are people running Win 8 with SL. You can search the forum for Win and f ind some of the posts. Also search and ask on SLUniverse.

According to the specs you don't really have a graphics card. That model is shown with Mobile Intel® HD, which is a video chip designed for streaming video. To be certain... When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. While the i5 is a great CPU, the video support is not for games... well it will do well with Facebook games.

Your building is a great user case for filing a JIRA. Ping in the viewer is not the ping you are used to from using your computer's network ping. A factor in viewer ping is the higher level server time to respond is added. Most ping only requires a response from the lower level network card. A viewer ping requires a response from the simulator task running on the server. So, a slow server at the Lab can distort ping time. This is why when you see server FPS degrade it paralells ping time growing. If you get the server address and ping with your system in one window and watch the viewers ping at the same time, you can see the disparity. My article on Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection gets into testing to see if it is you, the ISP, or the Lab. At this point the Lindens are not sure if there are physical SL network problems or something in the new HTTP Library. For us it is even harder to know. We get almost no information on hardware changes at the Lab or data centers. Plus there is the cyber-war issues going on. DoS attacks fill up network tubes and network admins adjust routing to handle traffic loads and compensate for attacks. So, the world's network is very fluid right now. Chasing a problem down is a pain.

You should read this article to understand some of the problems with the current OBJ exports from Sl and TPViewers. Second Life Shape Export - If you are unaware of these problems, it can be hard to get clothes made for custom shapes to work well. The Mesh Deformer would help with this, but we are not likely to see it any time soon.

When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. If the viewer will at least show the login screen, get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. AND... the best place for Firestorm questions is the Firestorm in-world support group. The Firestorm web sites are also great sources of information. If you can get in-world with the SL Viewer, then it is a Firestorm problem. There are a number of problems that are new and few of us know what is a common and thus likely cause of your problem. The SSA rollout is likely to change things a lot. So, we need as much information as possible to know where to start looking. So, understand that installing and testing with the SL Viewer is just a troubleshooting step. But, it is needed to know where the problem is. If you were a SL Viewer user, installing and trying Firestorm woth be the same step. There is so much changing in the SL System it is hard to know if it is a viewer, server, account, or connection problem.

If you upload 2048x2048 textures that means you would upload 3 – 12.6mb images for the avatar. Of course the SL system will immediately resize those to 1024x1024 JPEG2000 images. So, there is going to be image quality loss. The SL system will squeeze the size to something under 6mb. Still that is a lot of texture download for something that generally puts so few pixels on screen. The coming SSA (Server Side Appearance) baking will likely reduce that load even more. I am not sure how good a quality the SSA system is going to produce. I expect it, from personal experience to date, to do a good job. I have not seen where anyone has tested whether initial image size has a significant visible affect on avatar appearance. But, I wouldn’t be surprised to find it does. Many feel the optimum size for avatar stuff in-world is 128x128 to 512x512 pixels. The smaller the image the better. Ambient Occlusion is part of the viewer. If you add AO to skins and clothes, a significant number of users will see doubled AO, yours and what the viewer adds. AFAIK, there is no way to test to see if the viewer has AO enabled. So we can’t have a script select the texture to use. Plus other features are being added to third party viewers (TPV). Designing for the best render is not a simple decision. See Exodus Viewer and NiranV’s Viewer. With the arrival of the Materials System we will move more toward high-poly models in Blender that bake normal maps for use with low-poly models we upload into SL.

Thanks Rahkis and Gaia. I would never have thought that would work... well I would have once I got a round to Gaia's video.

Your viewer should send the HUD position to the server side record of your appearance. If that is not happening the HUD will return to its previous position. You can force the information to the server. Position the HUD as you want it. Give it 60 seconds or more. That should allow the appearance data to arrive at the server. Detach the HUD. This will force a save of the position with the HUD information. Plus, this elminates viewer shut down problems that may be preventing a good transfer of appearance values. Give it another 60+ seconds and then wear the HUD again. It should come back in the position you set. If it does not, then the other recommendations are likely right, it is a script in the HUD that is repositioning it. It really helps to know which viewer and HUD you are using. When you ask a tech question include information about your computer and viewer. Get the info from the viewer's Help-About... and paste that into your post with your question. Help->About... provides all the version numbers we need. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

We know what Experience Permissions started out to be: http://blog.nalates.net/2012/05/30/sl-news-week-22/ -- that includes a Linden made video. There was a problem: Greifer Monday which made for a chaotic day in SL. That caused a delay as the concept was rethought and some new means of accomplishing similar things was coded. This seems to have grown into a project named Advanced Creator Tools. We expect some special registration requirements to use the tools.

You can find some very comprehensive discussions of mesh and LI if you look up Codewarrior Congrejo's and Drongle McMahon's posts in this fourm... which for whatever reason I don't see mentioined in this thread.

I found it hard to sort out all the information I was getting about SL Avatars and which files are what and how things work. So, I have a series of tutorials targeted for SL users. Click the link in the signature. Then find the menu and select The Stuff then Clothing Tutorial Index. We also have a thing called the Mesh Deformer. This is a bit of code that allows a mesh to be based on a specific shape and to adjust according to the appearance settings. This would allow clothes made for any avatar shape to fit an avatar of another shape/size. But, that code is held up by various considerations. This means that for now, clothes are made that only partially conform to differently shaped avatars. In general it is a big mess. If you want to catch up on that project and get your hands on the project viewer, search my blog for Mesh Deformer. There is a TAG on those articles so you can pull up all the related articles. Machinimatrix.org has good tutorials and a retail product that makes this all much easier to understand and accomplish.

Can these changes be imported into Second Life? And do they have an effect on the SL render?

Seems like... but no. They do waste a huge amount of effort chasing griefers.

If you don't know, this change is about changing which program responds when you click a SLURL in a web page. If you install a Linden Lan viewer it will take over that type of URL/SLURL. Messing with the registry is dangerous for those that do not know what they are doing. So, make a backup of the registry or make a system Restore Point. There is a longer article on making the change that I wrote years ago, which still works: Emerald Viewer vs SLURL But, there is an even easier way. Install your favorite viewer last and then avoid installing Linden manual viewer updates. There is no option in the Linden manual install to NOT change the handler for SLURL's. So, if you make this change you will probably want to stay with automatic updates. (Some of them may change the handler.) Also, Internet Browsers have ways of setting which protocol handler to user for secondlife:. Anyone can Google for that info. So, different browsers installed on a system can call different viewers. ============ To understand what is happening, visit the web side of the SL Destination Guide. Pick a place and it will take you to the SL Maps web page. When you see the Visit This Location button copy the URL and paste it into a word processor where you can examine it. It will look like: secondlife://LEA20/122/119/3501 In a URL the secondlife: part defines the communication protocol the browser or other program is to use. You can tell Windows, or any system, how to handle that protocol, which is what this post is about.

Both Chosen's and Rahkis' answers are good. I'll add that Materials are coming and that will enable normal maps. If you look at what professinal modelers are doing, you'll see they do a higher poly model and bake a normal map from it to put on a much lower poly final model. Consider this in you design. In the next month, may be 2, we will see materials rollout. The server side is already done. The viewer side is completing now and there are versions of the Materials Project Viewer rolling out every week. Once that merges with the Developement viewer we will only be a couple of weeks away. Overall I am guessing 4 to 8 weeks.

The region Morris is the home of the Sever Beta group meeting. That region is almost always up and running. I tend to use Last Location for my Aditi login. Occassionally that fails and I type in Morris.