Nalates Urriah

Oskar talked about what rolled out at the Beta Server Group meeting. There was a mess up and Le Tigre had to be rerolled because of a build/version hickup. PF is on Le Tigre now. But, not all of Le Tigre has PF ENABLED. The Lab now uses a new process that allows enableing and disabking a feature without having to restart the region. They are using that to enable various regions within Le Tigre. Also, a number of region owners that asked to be in the PF Beta did not make it in pre-RC. Those regions have now been added to the Le Tigre RC.

We can't tell you much without knowing which version of Blender... Blender 2.61 and 2.62 have known problems. The current 2.63a does a pretty good job of exporting Collafa for SL.

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. You can tell us you have 'current' drivers. But, we have seen way too many people think that and have it turn out they don't. Do the About->Help... and post. Currently Firestorm is the most stable viewer available for use with SL. You can try it. If it crashes too, it is likely your computer. You can get SpeedFans, a free program, to check the computer component temperatures. The free GPU-Z will give you temperatures for your graphics card. It will also show the graphics load your video card is carrying. Heat problems seldom start suddenly, unless a fan has locked up. You can open the case and look to see if all the fans are turning. Dell cases are a pain. You may have to look up (Google) how to open the case for your model. Heat problems affect all programs running at the time, not just the SL viewer. The viewer may force the heating, but everything is affected. If only SL is affected, it is very likely a driver. Start Speedfans and watch it as the SL Viewer starts running. If temps spike over 75C, something is wrong with your cooling. Before logging into SL open preferences and set graphics to LOW. If that makes a difference, it is driver or heat.

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. Otherwise, on Windows click Start and type DXDIAG, case doesn’t matter. That will open the dxdiag in a window. It will give you your system specs. We need to now video driver version, OpenGL version, … I'm curious how many of the threads you have read and still missed the requests to include driver info with tech questions... All the threads ask for error messages, description of what happens when the viewer fails... you are mitting all the things that give anyone a starting place to help you. Also, since you have read everything suggested and only want 'new' stuff... how are we supposed to know what you have read and what you have missed to guide what we tell you? I know you have not read it all, you would have found the fix or reason your computer doesn't work with SL.

Include your tracert outputs in a trouble ticket to SL Support. Send the Same information to your ISP and ask for help. Since the problem is neither at SL or your end of the communication link, there is little you can do about it. The problem has to be worked out by those that have some pull with the backbone providers. Before firing off the complaints check through the troubleshooting steps to see if you have missed anything. Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection

Once a region is loaded I've seen the bacdwidth drop to 30-90kbps. There is a problem with a UDP throttle. The Phoenix viewer team says it is in the Linden code and Max Bandwidth should be kept under 1900 mb. We should see that fix roll out with a 3.3.5 version viewer. In general the Max Bandwidth setting should be 80% or less of your tested max bandwidth and less than 1,900kbps. See: Understanding the Maximum Bandwidth Option in the Second Life™ Viewer. If you want to see what your video card is doing get a free program GPU-Z. It will show you how much of the graphics load the card is carrying. My GTX560Ti with 8x CSAA loads the GPU to 15% and knocks along at 17 FPS. I do use the nVidia AA rather than the viewer's AA. This is one setting that is very obvious. If the card did not pickup the AA I would easily see the jaggies. I am not sure the card's ansotropic is that good. I also don't find that the viewer's ansotropic makes that much of a performance hit. But, experiement with your system to see how it affects your performance. Also, make sure you have all the multi-threaded stuff possible turned on. See: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life. Get the free program System Explorer or use the Windows built in Performance Monitors to see if your system is paging memory to disk. You can also see in System Explorer or the Task Manager how well your multiple CPU cores are being used. I get 18-25 FPS high HIGH without Sun/Moon Shadows on my Core2 Quad and 560. With shadows on that comes down to 12 to 18. Some with similar hardware and 64bit Windows get around 50 FPS.

You aren't giving us much to go on... Did you turn on Cycles by any chance?

There are several causes for the avatar not to render. Try picking one of the avatars in the Library in your Inventory. They are special avatars that should rez faster then a custom avatar. 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 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.

From Gaia Clary we know that Blender 2.64 will soon be here. So, expect to upgrades again soon. It is a good idea to use the Install Archive to install Blender. It allows you to have multiple copies of Blender installed without messing up the Python installs. See: Blender Archive Install Blender 2.62 has a glitch that affects export for SL. It is fixed in 2.63a. Version 2.64 should have additional fixes for SL Export problems.

OMG! There is so much we could tell you without breaking the rules... In SL there is a huge fashion industry. Skins are a big part of it. Currently there is fund raising event going on and a number of the BEST skin makers are selling products at discount for a good cause. Visit One Voice for some great deals and excellent skins. There are numerous skin makers participating. There is no way I can be fair to the skin makers and list them, there are just too many good ones. Thus I suppose in some part the rules to not advertise. BUT, there is an entire blogosphere reviewing skins and showing images of them. Visit Google and search for skins. Open search while in world or on the Market Place and search on skins. You can add ethnic terms to the search if you are looking for exotic races. Asian and Afro skins are harder to find but there is a good number of people making them. So, don't give up. If you mean exotic in terms of fae, demon, furry, and other mythical creatures... those are available too. Just adjust your search terms. You may have some challenges with SL Search. I'm not a fan of it. But, it is the only in-world search we have. For the market place you can use Google and get way better results. Type your search query as: site:marketplace.secondlife.com/ Asian skins or replace 'Asian skins' part with whatever your interest is. The SPACE before 'Asian' is important. There are big name brands in the SL skin business. Most are big because they make great skins. But, some small start ups make really good skins too. Pricing can run from free to 2 or 3 thousand Lindens. With the new layers we can do more with makeup. So, skins with a nude version are way more useful. In SL we have a counter fit product knock-offs problem. There is no easy way to check out skin makers or other other creative artists. So, while shopping and reading the reviews in the Market Place and remember we have lots of liars and gamesmanship going on. Ask around in world. Read the fashion blogs. Do what you can to avoid buying a counterfeit or 'copybot' skin because the Lab may remove them from the grid. If they do there is no way to get your L$ back.

Please under stand the basics... 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 For you this is probably the first thing to check. For whatever reason your inventory is having a problem downloading. Avoid clearing your cache. Clearning it just increases the downloads needed. 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 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. If you are using an older Phoenix or V1 vintage viewer, you WILL have inventory problems. If you use one of the older viewers with newer viewers you will be very likely to have inventory and appearance problems. Stick with one or the other. Older viewers use the UDP protocol for inventory download. It is subject to connection problem corruption. The newer viewers use HTTP with more error recovery and tend to better survive connection problems. With what you have given us, there isn't much more I can suggest. The more specific you are, the beter our answers will be. Also... you will get facter anwswers by posting this type of question in the Answers section of this forum. Or... you could search answers and find that this question has been answered a number of times, thus you would not have to have waited.

You don't really give us enough of your system information to see what the problem may be. When you ask a tech question include SL specific 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. I suggest you get some monitoring software to see what your system is actually doing. All this stuff is free. Use System Explorer to see what all the CPU cores are doing and which tasks Windows is spending its time with. It graphs page faults so you'll have an idea if your short on system ram. Download CPU-Z and GPU-Z. CPU-Z will reveal what SSE level your CPU can handle. GPU-Z will show you what load the GPU is actually carrying. It will also show available video ram. With these tools you can start to sort out what the problem is. I think you should get the FPS you see on LOW at the HIGH setting. You can search this forum to see what rates other 260 users are getting. You can play with the settings described in: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life.

The Intel HD graphics is primarily for displaying video. It is not the GPU type chip found in dedicated graphics cards. It will work well for playing Facebook games, so some decided they can make the claim that such machines are 'gaming machines'. The HD graphics chips tend to use system RAM rather than video RAM. The data transfer path for system RAM is slower than the dedicated video RAM path onboard a video card. For use with SL this is a big problem resulting in exceptionally poor performance. Whatever laptop you settle on make sure it has a separate video chip. For use with SL the NVIDIA chips are preferable. Laptops tend to turn off the separate video chip to save battery power. So, even with a separate video chip you may have to explicitly tell the computer to use the chip with SL. The i3 CPU's are a newer well performing chip. The I5 and I7 are newer and more powerful. All if the 'i' CPU's come in various core counts. The more cores the better. The i3 is the least expensive. With a decent video card it can handle SL. Search this forum to find out what type of frame rates people with i3 corese are getting. With fast memory an i3 and a good video chip should do better than my Core2 Quad with a similar video card, 15 to 30 FPS on HIGH w/L&S and Occlusion.

Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial - This includes instruction on exporting a shape from SL. Specifically see PAGE 4 It is a bit complex but there is a way to do it for free.

Pink Prims Bug - Some time ago this came up. In general terms your video card is having a problem indexing textures and getting the right one in the right place. Pink is used when the texture the index points to can't be found. Relogging should clear it, but it will likely come back. Either update or roll back your video card's driver. 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.

Visit the RLV site. They have instructions for adding RLV to the standard SL Viewer 1.23. I haven't read enough to know if you can add RLV to current release of the standard viewer. See: http://www.erestraint.com/realrestraint/

For prim vehicles the Lindens said that was a bug. So... there may be a fix in this release... or not. We also don't know exactly what the deal is on sculpties.

There are a number of things you can try. If it is a rolling restart thing, you can wait as suggested or try a different region. In Preferences (Ctrl-P) -> General (tab) you can set the viewer to show your login location. You can make that change before logging in. That allows you set a region to initially log into, like: last location, home, or whatever region name you type in. Last location should log you on the region you were in when you logged off. BUT... if that region is unavailable, the system will automatically change to another region. Using HOME will log you into whatever region you have set as your home region. You can type in a region name like Pooley or Furball to be logged in on those regions. There are a number of other reasons one cannot login. So, if you still can't make it in, post back here and someone will give you more information. Whenever you cannot login it is a good idea to check the Second Life Grid Status Reports.

The Facebook like social networking can be fun and handy. The best part is you can share images without having to pay to upload the image.

There is a setting that needs to change. Unfortunately it is the land owner's settings that need to change. Try the double land mark thing in other regions where it used to work. See if it still works. When I lived in Minkarta I used the same double land mark trick. But, I haven't needed to do that for some time. So, I'm not certain if there has been a change or not. I suspect not and SL change, but a land owner's change is likely.

NVIDIA has beta drivers you can try. Niran is recommending s roll back to 296.10. I'm running a 560 on 301.42. Shadows seem ok. I am assuming you can run Exodus and the standard Linden Lab viewer. If the problem is the same in both voewers, that pretty much says it is your video card. You can also talk to the Exodus dev's and see if they have any ideas.

It is not looking good for SLCC 2012. The group that usually handles the production of the convention has declined the agreement that Linden Lab offered. We have yet to hear anything either way from the Lab. See: http://blog.nalates.net/ tomorrow, Tuesday. My article won't post until then.

As most have pointed out here... Second Life is not going to preform at the Frames Rates you see in professionally made games. My Core2 Quad w/GTX560Ti on Vista 32x on HIGH w/o shadows runs about 20 to 25 FPS and w/Shadows 15 to 18. It also make some difference which viewer I use. Cool VL and Singularity viewers get higher frame rates. Both use the older V1 user interface, which I can no longer tolerate. You have to understand SL and video processing to tweak SL Viewer for the best frame rates. Unfortunately there is no good single setting for a number of viewer settings and all setting need to vary by your hardware and connection. Everything from Max Bandwidth, cache size, the choice of HTTP vs UDP, Anti-Aliasing, MIPS settings, and multi-threading have to balanced and most of these settings are affected by other settings. You can try to get a handle on it: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life And things change, so at the least annual graphics tweaking is needed...

While you are fiddling with DNS run these checks: DNS Changer Virus.

When downloading textures and mesh vertices lists those files are being checked by your Anti-Virus (AV). You can speed up that process by white listing the cache folder and sub-folders. Make sure AVG is not running a firewall too. Double firewals can both mess things up and slow down the data stream.