Nalates Urriah

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.

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. I am assuming you mean the Favorite Land Marks. I also assume you mean by clicking in the top menu. You didn't give us much to go on. I'm running Second Life 3.3.3 (260300) Jun 21 2012 14:14:25 (Second Life Release). I can right click LM's in the top menu and they delete.

I've run the LL uninstaller and did not have those problems. You need to look elsewhere for the cause.

I am running an older Core2 Quad and a new GTX560Ti. I get 10 FPS on Ultra. I run about 25 with draw distance down to 128 and shadows off. In DirectX games I can blow 100 to 1,000 FPS (1k in some optimized benchmarks, which is sort of a cheat). In Blue Mars I can average over 100FPS. There are some with similar machines that are running 55FPS. I have not been able to track down the problem. I do know that the viewer's Anti-Aliasing (AA) is a bit slow. Some turn off the viewer's AA and use the cards AA. You can make an nVidia setting for SL in the nVidia Control Panel. See: Graphics Tweaking for Second Life. If you use the viewer's AA the 2X does pretty well with my 560. High AA settings can drag your system down. You can find the viewer setting in Preferences->Graphics->HARDWARE (button). The render pipeline in SL is being worked on and the rumor is some changs are coming. I use the Developement Viewer and have yet to see any great improvement in FPS. My basic point is: you are not going to get great frame rates with any hardware without understanding how to tweak the viewer.

There is lots of different information floating around SL about what the Max Bandwidth should be. Few understand what it actually does. Even fewer are aware there is a gotcha in the viewer code just now. See: Understanding the Maximum Bandwidth Option in the Second Life™ Viewer to understand what the setting affects. In general the safe settings range is 500 to 1,500kbps. There is a UDP gotcha that can fail when you set Max B over 1,900. The Phoenix/Firestorom team has an article on that problem in their wiki and an SL JIRA item. Another factor in the equation is the SL server. You and the server need to stay close to the same communication rates. The further apart those rates get the more likely one or the other will time out and fail the connection. So, the 500 to 1,500 range is a good setting to stay close to lightly and heavily loaded servers. There is only one way to find your best Max B... experiement. There is no one setting that works best for all systems and certainly not for all locations. Also, don't expect to set it and forget it. The net is changing over from IPv4 to IPv6. That changeover started in earnest this year. See: Happy World IPv6 Day. This means it is VERY likely some piece of hardware between you and SL will change everyday. Whenever you suddenly see things rezzing slow, figure something in the network or the SL server has changed. Try another region. If it is slow too, consider changing your Max B. Consider reseting your model, router, and computer. Above all remember that everything may change in the next hour or 24 hours. So, if you do NOTHING it may fix itself and start rezzing normally.

...and file and abuse report. Harassment is against the Terms of Service.

According to Oskar Linden we had network outages which caused numerious problems today. They were enough of a problem the weekly update, which had already been slide back 2 days, was stopped. Be sure to check the Second Life Grid Status Reports.

The SL servers are having problems. I'm using the 260300 build and it lets me edit. Give it an hour and try again.

Today we are having problems. I ran into the same thing. tried 3 different viewers. I just let the viewer I tried last sit. After 5 minutes or so it logged in.

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 the panel. It will give you your system specs. We need to know video driver version, OpenGL version, … Check your computer against the minimum the System Requirements | Second Life. They have probably changed since your last check. When you have been running ok and a viewer update takes you down, check that your video drivers are up to date.