Nalates Urriah

If you play in combat regions, you may find that the managers recommend removing all the Calling Cards. The viewer does updates for online/offline status. Removing them can save some CPU cycles. Its been some time since I've checked to see if that has a measurable effect.

You can see images of the new chat user interface panel in: #SL CHUI Quick Review. The download is on the Second Life Alternate Viewers page.

Look through Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection to see if there is anything you have missed. This is an SL specific guide. Make sure you restart the router. For these types of questions the ISP and the type of router and model you have is helpful. Alwaays get yuor commputer specs from About->Help... and include them. There are other viewers you can try too. The main release viewer has problems with some Microsoft programs like Skydrive. The Beta and Development viewers will have fewer of those problems because of efforts to fix those problems. You can have all three installed without conflict. BUT... if you decide to remove any of then avoid the uninstall program. Manually delete the install folder. The uninstall can wipe your chat logs and settings for other viewers. (I've been told this is fixed and an uninstall only unlinstalls for a specific version. I'm paranoid on the point.)

Crossfire is the ATI equivalent of nVidia's SLI. SL does and does not use dual GPU's. So, answers either way can be correct depending on context. First, the SL viewer's render process is currently a single thread. That thread can only use one GPU. So, technically SL does not use more than one GPU. But... SL's render process runs numerous threads to decompress textures. With nVidia it takes some tweaking in the control panel to enable a second GPU for use by SL. I'm not sure what is required for ATI. Using 2 GPU's gains some performance because the decompression work is off loaded to a second GPU and the primary rendering GPU has less work to do resulting in higher FPS. Currently the rendering process is being revised to handle the materials system that is being added. I don't know if it will become a multi-threaded process. But, there is a chance. Other games certainly do use multiple GPU's. Depending on cost, your budget, and how you plan to use the computer having 2 GPU's may be worthwhile. Jean's advice is good and most points made are valid considrations. The AMD CPU's are good. The ATI/AMD graphics cards have weak support for OpenGL, which SL uses. That can cause problems.

I suggest you consider updating your CPU and video card. You can get both from eBay. Look up what you motherboard will support. CPU-Z, not the same as GPU-Z, will give you motherboard information. In particular the socket information and mb brand and model. Look up what it will handle and get the hottest CPU with the max number of cores the mb will handle. Consider your memory too. CPU-Z will tell you about it. Consider getting faster memory chips. You want the fastest the mb will handle. On the video card, I like nVidia. 8800's and up will improve things. The 8800 and 9800 are getting old so they are cheap on eBay. The 60 series are good, so 260, 460, 560 and up are going to improve things too. If you are not comfortable changing out the CPU, a local computer repair center will do it. You'll have to shop for the best service price. Be sure you see the computer run after the upgrade and before you take possession. You can do these upgrades one at a time or all at once. Much of the equipment you want is old but they are selling new unused parts on eBay. I suppose these are coming from overstocked inventory. Whatever, you can take advantage of it.

Most limits can be found in Second Life Limits. But, I don't see a tag/title limit. I would guess 128 or 256... or unlimited.

The Dev Viewer 3-4-2-265141 is very crashy. The Firestorm 4.2.2 is NOT crashy. It is the most stable viewer in use. Ro Whitesong's GeForce 6150SE is a border line card. The 175.21 is a way old driver. I would expect problems. LisaMarie's card (GeForce 9500 GT) and driver (306.23) should be good. I've just updated to 306.97. It fixed some non-SL problems I've had in Vista. But, I don't know if it will help your problem. First try changing to the Beta Viewer version: 3-4-1-265642. It has a different memory manager. If that solves the problem then your issue is a memory conflict with another application running in Windows. One candidate is the Microsoft Skydrive. If you are using in-cloud storage that could be the problem. The beta viewer should work with it. If that does not solve your problem... I suggest you get some free programs so we can see what is happening in your computer. Speedfan is a program that will show you fan speeds (Duh!) and chip temperatures. If you have an over heating problem, that program should show it. Get System Explorer so you can see what the CPU is doing and whats happening with memory. There is a graph that shows memory use. You can see if memory is being consumed by the viewer or other program. GPU-Z will show details of what is happening with the video card. I am not using Win7 but I know it has an Event Viewer. You can start it and look to see what is actually failing. If it is something other than the SL viewer, you'll have to fix that and see if it fixes the viewer. Type EVENT VIEWER in the START field. Once the viewer is open look in Custom Views and Administrative Events. You will see various errors in red. Look at those. If they show the 'Faulting Application' as Second Life you need to move to the next step. But first, look for error just prior to the SL fail. It could be that messing up SL which then crashes in turn. If it still looks like it is the viewer, look in the SL log to see what may have been reported as the crash cause. Look in: C:\Users\[win_login_name]]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs\SecondLife.log. Start at the end of the file and work toward the beginning looking for errors and warnings. Those may give you an idea what is going wrong.

Peggy Paperdoll is being subtle. You need to look for a laptop/notebook with an nVidia graphics chip. These are typically reported as M460 or M560. I suppose the M stands for the power saving MOBILE version of the chip. Whatever, the HD Graphics found in Intel based notebooks are NOT adequite for SL. Some will run SL, but not well. You can get reasonably priced notebooks from Geeks.com. The i3 and i5 based units are usually well priced. Finding one with a graphics chip is hard. But, from time to time they have them.

Before logging in... open Preferences and select the General tab. Look for Start Location and then Show on Login. Check it. When enabled it will place a location field on your login screen. You can type in a region name and an optional location in the region. The format is: region_name/e-w_coord/n-s_coord/elevation. Example: Pooley/50/100/0. Or just: Pooley. You can visit the web map of SL and find your region. You will then be able to see a region next to the one you want to go to. You can use the world map from within the viewer to accomplish the same thing. Plus the in-viewer world map will usually show if the region is on or off line.

Knowle's answer to the problem, being in RUN Mode, would have been solved by relogging and certainly be re-installing the viewer. You don't give us much to go on. 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. How do you move your avatar? I press W and steer with my mouse. But, you might have a SpaceNavigator... Are you on a Mac and which viewer are you using? Since this is your second post I am assuming you are using a default Linden Lab viewer. If that is the case look at the movement controls section of the Knowledge Base. Ctrl-R turns on and off run mode. The behavior sounds more like a connection problem. But, the problem could be caused by your AV or firewall. To test whether it is you or SL read Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection. For a quick check, open the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1). Look at PING and Lost Packets to see if you are having a connection problem. Ping over 250ms is going to create some control lag. Lost Packets up to 3% is livable, but over that it starts to create inconsistent problems.

Rendering the avatar is a special case. It is a more complex process than rendering in the rest of Second Life. The idea with avatars is to save CPU cycles on users' computers and the SL servers. The idea requires your viewer to download all the textures that make up your avatar and its clothes; a shape, skin, top, pants, hair, and shoes textures. The viewer ‘bakes’ those into a single composite texture. You see your avatar render nice and sharp when that bake completes. Then your viewer uploads that composite texture for all to see. That saves others downloading all the individual textures and baking them. Your avatar goes blurry as it downloads and decompresses the composite texture you just uploaded and it becomes sharp when that process finishes. You are the only one that sees the double blurry for your avatar. If that process hangs or fails there is a problem. Where it fails affects what you or others see. You can try the old standby quick fixes for avatar rez problems: Change your active group or group tag. Press rebake (Ctrl-Alt-R) once a minute for 3 minutes. Change your bald. Change your shape. Move to another region and try 1 to 4 again. When those fail, check your connection as it is the most likely problem: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection There is a longer explanation of the problem here: #SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars. More in depth fixes are here: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth. This whole avatar render process is changing now. It will still be some time before the process is replaced. So, we have to deal with it for now. But see: Second Life Changes Coming

Lindal Kidd provided an excellent answer to your question. Rolig Loon provides important advice on checking rental prices. I'll give you more detailed advice. There are several things to consider when buying or renting land for a shop. For a shop you need to get people there. You either do that by placing your shop where people are... or you use some method to bring them to your shop. Some of us use the Market Place and from there direct them to our in-world shop. Decide which way works best for you. When you rent/lease land you will be given a prim limit. Divide the weekly cost of the land/shop you plan to rent to get your per prim cost. Use that for comparing deals. Also consider the amount of space you get, square meters. Most importantly consider the people traveling through the region and the lag in the region. Some feel that busy lagged places should be cheaper because they cause you vending machines to lag and create deleivery problems. You have to decide if that is realistic. Either way the lagging vendors are very likely to cost you sales. For that reason many of us use shops and the Market Place. If you use both and you are in a busy region, make sure people can find your market place store front. I think getting people walking past your shop is important. When Minkarta (my former home) ran hunts my sales would increase and traffic would go way up. Regions with hunts and other shops tend to draw more people. That has value. How you factor it in with your per prim cost is up to you.

The choices for video are ATI, NVIDIA, and the Intel built-in HD graphics. The HD Graphics is inadequate. ATI has weak support for OpenGL, which SL uses. NVIDIA is generally considered the best possible. With the small screen and a 650 card you should be able to run on ULTRA and get good frame rates. You need to manually go in and set the graphics card for SL when you install SL. In the nVidia Control Panel you have a choice to run in Power Save or Performance. Set it to use performance. Many laptops will force power save mode on and disable the graphics card (chip in laptops) to save power, UNLESS you use wall power. So, if you have performance issues, check the nVidia settings.

How you are measuring PING may be making a difference too. If you use the viewer's stats, it is dependent on the viewer and server. Use your OS's ping to check the network. Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection

This week saw the Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) shifted to a different memory manager. Without knowing which version you were having problems with, we can't know if this is a worthwhile fix. Both the main release and Beta viewers currently have low crash rates. The Beta and Development viewers have had high crash rates until this last week (41). But, the Beta viewer changed this last week and dramatically improved its crash rate. I have used both main and Beta for well over an hour without problems. So, your problem may not be in the viewer. Oz Linden has stated the operating systems without the most recent updates have twice the crash rate of updated systems. Even those system without updates only have crash rates in the high 20's.

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. Without knowing if you are WIndows or Mac based it makes it a bit hard to guess what might be wrong. Without driver versions there are even more possibilities to guess. The current Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) and main release viewer (3-4-2-265141) have low crash rates. If you are seeing high crash rates it is likely something in your system. So, with no information on your system, we can't help much.

Be sure you understand gimbal lock. It can cause confusing results. See: Scripting News Week 34 and scroll down for a video.

It sounds like you have made cerain nothing is attached to the avatar. So... I can only think of two things. One would be you are trapped in a bit of the Wear Entire Inventory bug... that there was a miss click in inventory strongly suggests something got queued to attach with each login in... I would run the fixes for Wear All Inventory... one of which is swtiching to the character test. Second Life Wearing All Inventory. I don't hold out much hope for this process fixing your problem, but there is not much else. While you have made considerable effort to make sure you have nothing attached... you may still be over looking something. Try putting on a full body alpha layer and see if it reveals something inside the avatar... The only other thing I can think of is you have managed to program the hover text into your avatar... which as far as I know is impossible. But, hover text is an ATTRIBUTE of things in SL. So, maybe something glitched and the script stuck the attribute on the avatar, which would make it part of the avatar rather than an attachment. I would still bet on there being something attached to or following the avatar. 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. It is hard to know when the data will help one of us figure out a problem. So, just always include it.

There was test code for groups in the Dev Viewer, if I remember correctly. #SL Group Edit Roll to RC Second Life Group Edit Update Week 36 - Baker talks about the Proj Viewer needed for ADITI. It is unclear to me whether this particular version, listed in week 36, is needed or whether the Beta and current Dev viewers can be used... Someone post back here and let us know.

There is a reason you see no difference after a setting of 4. The SL system supports 4 levels of detail. When we design a mesh object, we build in four levels of detail, four actual models of the object. Well, some of us do. The Prims and sculpties use 4 LoD's generated by the viewer. Mesh objects download 4 models of the object, when the designed provides them. As best I can tell the setting controls the minimum size model to use. LoD 4 being the most detailed model. When the viewer is set to LoD 4 it will ignore the lower poly models 1 to 3 and always show the LoD 4 model. There is a render speed hit for doing that. When objects are farther away we see less detail. Fewer polygons are needed to tell the computer how to color the smaller number of pixels a small object uses. When LoD is set, the viewer has to download the high detail model and render it. That can lengthen initial rez time by a little. Having to render EVERY polygon in the high detail model every frame regardless of where you can seem or not adds load to the viewer and decreases Frames per Second (FPS) for no improvement in visual quality. I think the default setting is 1.x. Why real numbers work is a mystery to me. I'm not sure exactly what they do with the value. A setting of 2 improves things. If you can see a difference at 2 and your FPS is above 25, you should have no problem going to 3. As long as you can get 25 FPS keep turning it up. If you computer and bandwidth can handle it, go for it.

New Super Lag Currently there is a new lag problem. See: New Lag Problem. There is one flavor that is apparently a griefer attack. Another is something odd in the servers. People are trying to track down the problem. It is hitting event holders hard and consistently. See the thread in this forum for more information: Major Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crash during large events

Your question is not very clear. You might try rephrasing it. In most cases the people in tech support are not highly trained in the inner workings of SL. They have a book of symptoms and fixes. It is sort of a cookbook they walk people through. I am not sure if they have to be connected to SL to do phone support. But, I expect they do have to be able to connect to Linden Lab.

There are a myrid of things happening to your computer of which you will never be aware. If you do not have a surge supressor on your power line, you can get voltage spikes that throw off the system clocks pushing things out of sync. Sometimes they come back in some times not. The same thing can happen to your network connection. If the network cable doesn't go through a surge protector, it can let a spike in. If you d not have a power conditioner on the line, low voltage can cause problems. Or short micro-second power interuptions that would not even cause a light to flicker can cause problems. If it is dry in your area static electricity can run trought the mouse or keyboard when you touch them to wake up your computer and that can create a problem. If you have automatic updates turned on, you can get an update without noticing and while whoever made the update thinks a restart is not needed, that isn't always true. An anti-virus program can update and slam a vrius that snuck in earlier. My ESET jumps up a number of times per day flashing an update notice that only lasts for seconds. JAVA currently has an exploit that can be used (update now if it has been awhile). Depending on whether you are getting hit by an attack and when you last updated JAVA, the anti-virus may be fighting of problems. A reasonably new computer fan should not stall. But, even new equipment can fail. So, one fan may be lagging and letting a component run hot, which can cause problems. Most of these problems are transient. A computer restart is the first step for most any problem with a computer and SL. Especially before starting to uninstall things. Worry when the problem continues after a restart. 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.

Months ago the number of users and the total hours of login time for people with mesh capable viewers went well over 90%. Worrying about people not being able to see mesh at this point, is just silly. However, they are the client. Sculpties can have 1 face and 1 texture.See the Wiki: Sculpted Prims and Sculpty FAQ Q. Can I texture a Sculpted Prim just like a regular one?Yes. Each sculpted prim has one texture face. The texture space of a sculpted prim is defined by the sculpt texture. Knutz Scorpio links to a hack that will allow you to use more than one texture. The problem is you never know when the Lindens will do something that breaks the hack. I suggest you show the client the FAQ. If the client wants to go ahead, make sure the client understands you are not guaranteeing the thing to NEVER break.

Theresa’s answer is pretty accurate and I think explains the probable cause of the notices. There is another possibility. There are griefer tools out right now that are causing some problems. There is some debate as to whether the New Lag Problem is a server bug of a griefer problem. Check it out as I provide some information about what to look for to see if you are being affected by the problem. Rolig’s answer is the Firestorm/Phoenix position, which I disagree with. Turning Pathfinding off really doesn’t help. Turning Pathfinding off is like making a region ‘No Build’. It changes permissions not the processes running on the server. Disabling PF can stop people from adding Pathfinding Characters, and that could theoretically save you up to 4ms/frame… but if you have no PF Characters running around, it isn’t going to make much difference, if any. Also, anyone with rez rights in an area can use Pathfinding Tools. Only region owners and EM's can use the console command to disable/enable Pathfinding.