Nalates Urriah

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. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post.

To get a sense of what you are getting into take a look at: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. 3D modeling is not rocket science but it does require lots of learning. A large number of factors are part of efficient modeling, efficient for the time and effort you put into the model and efficient in terms of the load your model places on the servers and viewers.

Hitomi is right. However, I'll say it differently and expand a bit. Enableing or Disabling does not disable all that much of Pathfinding (PF). It was designed to be very light on server load. So, the enable is more like enabling or disabling land's build permissions. It mostly just turns off the ability for PF AI Characters to run on the land. All the rest of PF is apparently still there and running. The result is if you or anyone move anythng that touches the ground or rez or delete any prims at ground level, the Navmesh will attempt or at least plan to update and give you a notice the Navmesh is out of date. This is only a status change where a flag is set. You can ignore it. It should clear in 10 minutes or so. I am not certain whether the flag is set when you move things at altitude, like in a skybox. If you do not have AI Characters running around, the Navmesh being out of date is moot. It just does not matter. I suspect they will eventually have to change the button to be less annoying.

You may want to try explaining your problem differently. I am the 56th person to look at the post and no one has commented. I'm not understanding the problem either...

FPS is different in different viewers. Singularity is really fast. Anti-aliasing (AA) and Lighting & Shadows both make large differences in FPS rates. With a Core2 Quad and GTX560Ti I range from 15 to 60+ FPS. I start with the basic HIGH graphics setting and tweak various settings from there. I usually try to override the viewer's and use the video cards AA. That is done in the nVidia control panel and by turning off AA in the viewer. But things change so fast in the SL viewers I have to keep checking which is faster. Even at 7 or 8 FPS, Sun/Moon shadows and lots of avatars, I don't see the screen stutter. So, by choppy I suspect you mean control lag, where the mouse and arrow keys become sluggish. When one spins their avatar 360 while in one place, they are using viewer side only. So, that little dance seldom fails or jerks. Moving forward requires a server side update, but the viewer tries to anticipate what the server is going to tell it. A slow connection or server will cause the avatar to appear to move forward because the viewer side is faking it, then jerk back to a previous location when the server update arrives, its called rubberbanding. Watching the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) you can see most of the problems start when either ping goes high or the server FPS/PFPS goes low. If the server slows down, don't believe the ping numbers.

Your nVidia driver is old 285.58, about mid 2011. The current driver is 301.42. It may help to update the driver. Be sure you have a copy of the older driver or know how to roll Windows back. Some times a computer has more problems with the new driver. The new drivers are a bit more resistant to badly formed or overly complex mesh objects, which could be what is crashing you. Another possibility comes up... the location your avatar is in, either 'home' or Last Location, may have a griefer object that crashes the viewer when it attempts t rez the area. I may also be something the avatar is wearing. To check if it is the area, log into an area like Pooley or Furball. You can enable that ability in Preferences -> General by enabling Show Location -> Show at login. Then just type in a region name at login. If it is an object attached to the avatar, you won't be able to escape it. Try turning your graphics settings all the way down. Before logging in set your graphics preferences to LOW. Then try logging in. Without any error messages it is hard to know the cause, so we make some guesses. There are some things you can try. Try these things one at a time. First and most important, reboot your computer after each crash. Any time you are having problems with the viewer and crashing reboot before trying your next fix. You have been doing that, so keep at it with each fix. Sorry it is time consuming. Since it is a problem related to a specific avatar, try clearing avatar specific viewer settings. Win7/Vista -Navigate to C:\Users\[win_login_id]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\[avatar_name]\ Find the file: settings_per_account.xml Change its name or delete it. If that does not fix the problem you can try deleting all the XML files in that folder. If THAT doesn't fix it, try deleting the folder: Win7/Vista - C:\Users\[win_login_id]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\[avatar_name]\. Be warned that your chat logs are in the folder as TXT files. If you want them, move them to a safe place. If this fixes the problem, you can move them back one-by-one as it may be one of the chat logs causing the problem, unlikely but possible. Next while it is an unlikely fix, try resetting the viewer settings to their default values. Navigate to the user settings for the viewer. Win7/Vista: C:\Users\<win_login_id>\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings Mac OSX: Users/Username/Library/Application Support/SecondLife// Find the file: settings.xml and rename or delete it. Try installing the latest Development Viewer. This is a pre-beta version of Linden Lab’s viewer. SL Dev Viewer DL. See if it wll work. It installs in a separate folder so you can have the release viewer and the development viewer both installed without conflict. If you still can’t in with your avatar, look in the Second Life log file: C:\Users\[win_login_id]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\logs. Start from the end of the file and work your way toward the beginning. You are looking for errors. That text may give you a clue to the problem. If it is too geeky for you, post the error here or in a new thread. I hope something here helps.

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. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. 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

But, is it possible to bake that into a texture that can be used in SL?

Look through this article to understand what files have what in them and where to download them. Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial

The question is ambiguous. There are two 'restore to' types of restore. One is the restore to last position on rez. I think that is what the Linden quotes are referring to. That restore was causing problems when a prim was rezzed in one regions, taken to inventory, and then rezzed in another region. There is a Ctrl-Z restore that is used while building. It does not work in all cases, only some. But, it works most of the time when moving prims by the handles. It can also work even after clicking away from one item and then selecting it later. You have to experiment to get a feel for when it works and when it doesn't.

Drag and drop works for me in the SL Viewer 3.3.4 version... I was using a friends card. Try it again... try in different regions... try difference cards...

I disagree with Peggy. Use the largest cache possible. The more stuff you have in cache the more likely you are to have a cache hit (the viewer finds what it needs in the cache). Each hit reduces the load on the network. For all practical purposes, Peggy may be right. The cache does not work all that well, so you may not see any apparent improvement. The problem is in how the viewer and server handle the INTEREST LIST. That is the list of things the viewer needs to render a scene. That is being improved. So, eventually it will get better. Since each connection and computer setup is different you need to check how well you cache is working. Open the Viewer Statistics panel (Ctrl-Shift-1). Look down the vertical list of items for Advanced, click it to expand it. Look for Texture -> Cache Hit Rate. 100% is the theoretical ideal. In my home my hit rate runs around 95% or higher. A larger cache should help push that number up. HTTP is a protocol that includes error correction, something lacking in the UDP protocol, which if you turn off the HTTP Texture Get the the viewer then uses. Most texture corruption comes from connection problems. So, using UDP is going to increase the likelihood of cache problems. But depending on a number of factors, UDP can be faster. However the new HTTP Library being tested in Project Viewers is WAY WAY faster than anything we have now. You should know that your Ethernet cable can be up to 300 ft long without degrading the signal beyond useable. So, you could try a longer cable. If that significantly helps, talk to your parents about running a perminent cable.

Cully, the number of people interested in what the Lindens are saying is very small. Most office hour meetings, which are now called User Groups, have 10 to 30 people in attendance. If one reads the forum and bothers to notice the number of views a posting gets, we again see it is a very small number. Since you've been in SL since 2008 you have had the same opportunity to find out where the user groups/office hour meetings are listed that I have. Going to Google and typing in 'Second Life User Groups' seems obvious and simple. Wanting the Lindens to spend more time than do the communicating seems like a waste of time. Less than 0.5% of the 60+k concurrent users bother to read the communications. Only 2.5% of those users read my blog on a good day. I can't see the Lindens spending much time on something few care about. They do however talk to those that are interested. The Lindens like many of the rest of us, get tired of the drama and avoid it. The Bandwidth problem is thought to be fixed. The problem in dissiminating it is QA and being sure that fix does not break something else.

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. To add your info to an existing question use OPTIONS->EDIT. It’s in the upper right of your post. Tell us what you are entering for search terms. Tell us if the web search via a browser is working. Just to see if search is working at all search for a simple term like cat. Tell us which language you use, English? Dutch? Japanese?

Other than cache size and Max Bandwidth I can't think of anything that will affect the cache stats. The Interest list process in the viewer is changing, so the cache stats should change as the new code gets implemented. So, the numbers are likely to change. But, more hits and less latency will always be better.

You need to get in touch with the one that made the HUD. Right click the HUD and edit it or select show properties. You should see the creator's name. If the HUD is using a remote server, it may be having trouble updating data. The Lab is consolidating the server into 2 data centers from 3. So, the change may have affected the HUD's communication pathway.

You can see the effect of one avatar on a region's performance by doing some simple testing. Find one of the Linden owned regions like Pooley or Furball. You want a deserted one. So, you may have to look around the world map to find one where you will be the only avatar. Visit the region wearing as little as possible. A pair or pants and a top make little difference. Be sure you have no scripts on. Use a Script Weight/Counter device. They have them for free in the Market Place. People tend to forget the Firestorm/Phoenix bridge device. Open the Viewer Stats (Ctrl-Shift-1) and see how the region is performaing. Spare time is an interesting stat. Once you have an idea what an idle region is doing add the scripts and attachments you normally wear. Watch what that does to the region stats. I suggest you leave the mini map open so you can tell if someone comes into the region. This should give you an idea of what is actually happening based on scripts and other attachments. As the region runs out of Spare Time, which you can find in Viewer Stats, things start to slow down.How many scripts each avatar is wearing and how much they are moving around affects spare time. Avatar animation is not 'movement' in the sense that Havok physics engine time is needed. Walking is. This simple test will enable to to check what people tell you about what does and does not affect lag, at least in regard to what an avatar is wearing. Unfortunately, things are straight forward nor are they linear. So, it is hard to predict from these simple tests exactly how things scale. But, at least you'll start to have an idea. Thre are things that affect the viewer more than the region server. For instance wearing lots of sculpty stuff has more of a viewer impact than a server impact. It takes some study and thinking to get clear what affects what, which is the reason there is so much disagreement about what causes lag and what just doesn't matter.

The real answer is you won't know until you try it. Start one and see how it goes.

3D modeling is not as complex as it is voluminous... There is just so much to learn… So, my suggestion is to avoid getting bogged down in details and cover as many aspects of modeling as possible. Then as you choose to make things, get into the details related to your project. Modeling for each world or game has its restrictions and limits. You will find lots of generic modeling tutorials around. CG Cookie is a great source for good to great generic educational tutorials. The best stuff is not free. But, it is cheap. Also, some of the purchase-to-view stuff becomes free after a time. I tend to purchase a month’s access every now and then. I download the lessons so I can go back and review them later. YouTube tutorials range from great to good to awful to horrible to you can’t believe they put that on YouTube. So, you have to dig through lots of crap. Once you find a good video note the author and follow their work. For projects bound for Second Life and OpenSim you need to get more specific. SL does not support everything available in 3D modeling. One of the things not supported is a full materials system. We may have something we can play with in that regard by the end of this year. We are also limited by the evolution of SL. We can’t get a new avatar because it would break a huge amount of existing content. Legacy compatibility issues come up in a number of places. We have to work around them. So, we need specific tutorials for SL at some point. I collect information and learn modeling and I also learn modeling for SL. From time to time I put what I’ve learned into tutorials. See an example here: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. Other SL users are doing the same. Gaia Clary is making Avastar as a tool to simplify the process of modeling for SL using Blender. Fortunately for me, Gaia is also working with Blender developers to get Blender to work better with SL. Most important to the SL community is Gaia’s video tutorials that are SL specific. Check those out on Machinimatrix.org. You’ll need to poke around to find the free stuff and tutorials on creation not using Avastar and Primstar. If you want an easier learning curve, try out Avastar. Ashasekayi has a collection of tutorials on Youtube that are SL specific. There is some slow down in SL tutorials because of the mesh clothing size problems. Some are waiting on the release of the Mesh Deformer or possible alternate processes for getting clothes to conform to our shape. Once the Deformer is released, the tutorials will need to change. I plan to rewrite my tutorial to handle getting started with Blender and SL. But, we likely won’t see any new news on the Deformer until late September. Both Blender and SL are changing quickly. Blender is moving toward Cycles as a much easier way to texture and render models. Once Cycles develops to the point we can bake textures, normal and specular maps all the Blender Tutorials will need to change. Once the Materials System becomes available in SL all the tutorials for SL will need to change. These changes make lots of work for those making tutorials. It can take me 1 or 2 eight to twelve hour days per page of tutorial, about 1,000 words, to prepare, illustrate, and test a tutorial. It is a lot of work. If I am staring a big change in the face, I’ll wait to redo the tutorial. I suspect many others are doing the same. Building for SL is a moving target. Be prepared to see things changing.

Your problems are typical of a problem connection. Run through the article Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection to elminate your connection as a problem. Simple speed tests and pings may not reveal a problem.

nVidia does most of their benchmarking for DirectX games. OpenGL can run as well as DirectX and according to some benchmarks and tests even faster in some cases. HOWEVER, SL does not take advantage of all the neat OpenGL tricks and runs at a rather low FPS. The nVidia card will give the precent of increase they claim in DirectX games. It won't in SL. The next biggest performance improvement you can make is to put in the fastest memory chips your system can use. My GTX560 Ti blasts some benchmarks along at 1,000 FPS but only runs the SL Release viewer at 25-35 FPS on High.

I disagree with Echo. Your bandwidth will have some affect on your FPS but not much. Anything over 1mb/sec and your going to have all the FPS that you can get from connection performance. Once the area's textures are cached and your system is no longer decompressing textures you should see your pure render speed. Slow internet connections generally appear as sluggish mouse and arrow-key response (high PING). Poor Internet connections with lost packets create problems that can slow down the FPS as CPU is diverted to handle error corretions and repeated attemps to decompress corrupted textures. If you are going to test your connection see: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection

Looking at the snap of the computer performance screen, the computer is not that bad. Generally 5.8. However the graphics card sucks and is what holds the machine to a performance rating of 3.4. Get a new graphics card off eBay and you should see a big improvment. If it is a laptop, you are probably screwed. The Core2 CPU you have is gettnig old. But you could probably put a Core2 Quad 3.2ghz CPU in the board. Tha too would help. You'll have to look up the specs on your mother board to find out for sure. Use the free program CPU-Z to get the motherboard information. If you decide to go with a new computer be sure to 4gb or more of memory and the fastest memory the motherboard will handle. For Second Life you can get by with a moderate graphics card, preferably nVidia as nVidia works better with SL. nVidia 400's are cheap in eBay and 500's are coming down now that the 600's are out. The new i3 and i5 Intel CPU's are OK but the i3 is more for video than games. The i7 is the best for games. The i5 is in between. Other games are more dependent on the graphics card than SL is. A big step up in graphics card doesn't give you a big step in SL performance. The memory, CPU, and graphics card combnation ALL affects SL's preformance. They all need to upgrade to really help performance.

Dilbert has given you a good idea for troubleshooting. I suggest you run the SL Viewer then check the log to be sure the latest crash log is in the location he gave you. Check that your computer meets the System Requirements | Second Life. Try this site to see if you can run SL. This is not perfect, but it should give you and idea. Can I Run Second Life? Before logging in, open Preferences and set the Graphics to LOW. If that allows you to login, the viewer may be failing to correctly recognize your computer and graphics setup. If you are on a laptop, make sure the unit is actually enabling the graphics card for the SL Viewer. Many laptops do not recognize SL as a graphics intense program and turn off the on board graphics to save power, You can change your graphics settings on a per-program-basis. Set the SL Viewer use the Perfromance settings.

Technically it is possible. However, the Lab is not going to allow it. Since they control access to the servers providing backend services, it is unlikely that control can be circumvented. One of the main problems with allowing third party servers is protection of IP rights. That problem makes it very hard in the OpenSim worlds to protect IP rights. All items move through the region servers and can be ripped off by the one controlling the server. One of the big lag producers is the amount of cross communication between regions and users. Moving a server out of the main data centers would greatly increase packet travel time region to region. The Lab recently arranged adjacent regions to run in physically adjacent servers. That probably only changed packet travel time by a few milliseconds. But, it was enough to provide a significant performance improvement. Packet travel time in the data center is likely less than 10ms and probably 1 to 3 ms. Moving to an outside server would increase that time to 30 to 100 ms, which would be a huge hit.