Nalates Urriah

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.

I see you figured out the problem... but this info may help you in the future. There is a section in the SL Wiki about working with the user interface (see Starlight link below). It explains how to make viewer skins. So, it should have all the information you need to make changes. I suspect it is out of date... specifics will change but most of the ideas remain the same. There are a number of people that would probably be happy to help or at least point you in the right direction. Try attending the Open Source user group run by Oz Linden. Also, chase down Hitomi Tiponi. She wrote much of the Starlight Skin article in the wiki. Hitomi's posts The furry Amythist that builds the Niran Viewer does a load of skin and interface changes. She seems to be an XML in SL wizard. I write about technical changes in SL in my blog. But, I don't cover viewer skins at the technical level that would interest you.

If you hope to have us tell you... Nyll is right. We need to know more about the computer. Check this computer against the System Requirements | Second Life. Get the free programs CPU-Z and GPU-Z to easily see what is installed and how it is running. Get the free System Explorer to watch what the CPU's are doing while the SL Viewer runs.

Your system shows it is running OpenGL 2... so you are not running the latest Nvidia drivers. If there is no new driver for the GeForce 6150SE, you have a problem. You can get some excellent Nvidia 400 and 500 cards on eBay now that the 600's are out. The GeForce 6150SE is a 2007 vintage GPU and was considered a 'Budget' card at the time. As the Lab advances their render pipeline you will likely have worse performance with this card. The minimum requirement is now: NVIDIA GeForce 6600 or better (reference).

You can use some free programs to see what is happening inside your laptop. I don't know if these come in Linux flavors. But, something similar will be available for Linux. GPU-Z tells you what your graphics card is doing, heat, fans, GPU load... Windows has a free add-on System Explorer that shows wht the CPU's are doing. SpeedFans tells you all the temperture and fan information for devices in the computer. If you run unplugged your version of Linux may be throttling the fans back to save power. If you purchased the machine with Linux installed, you may want to search for known problems with Acer/Linux. Check that Acer got fan control correct. Test that it works as it should. You should be able to find Linux tools to force your fans to 100% before starting SL. I am mostly saying, check out what your laptop is actually doing. It may not be recognizing SL as a graphics heavy game. If so, it may fail to switch on the Radeon and speed up the fans. It may run other games much cooler because it recognizes them sets up for graphics intense running.

You have two different but related problems going on. Everything being slow to rez could be a connection that is having a problem or the SL region or their connection having a problem. You can read Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection to figure out if something in the connection has gone sideways and if so if it it is on your side or SL's side. You know how to get the info to send SL to get them moving on a fix from the article. You may need to change your Max Bandwidth setting to 500 to 1500 to improve performance. Settings over 1900 can cause problems in special scenarios. Preferences -> Setup. If you have turned off HTTP Texture Get, try turning it back on. If you have it on, try turning it off. I think the setting only appers in the Debug Settings now. ImagePipelineUseHTTP UseHTTPInventory These are new features, 2011, for the viewer. The Lab is activiely improving the HTTP process. So, you want to use HTTP when possible. However, there are times when the old UDP protocol seems to work better. The Firestorm/Phoenix Team and support often recommends turning HTTP off. It can be a temp fix. But, in general HTTP is faster when it is working correctly. Your other problem... 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. See: Second Life Changes Coming

Perrie Juran wrote: Could they also be having a problem with Optimus not switching from the on board graphics to the card? I can't find it now but I know this problem and solution has been discussed. Could be. I honestly have no idea what Optimus is.

Perrie is probably right... Right click on an empty part of the desktop image and select Nvidia Control Panel. You can set up game paramaters for the video card to use with Second Life. Make sure you have it set for PERFORMANCE. Also, your laptop will try to save battery power if you run unpluged. That can force the computer to use the CPU's HD graphics and disable the Nvidia video chip, which will kill your SL performance. When you are plougged into the wall the laptop should automatically change to Nvidia for graphics. Some laptops don't change over as they should. I think the free program GPU-Z will tell you which video processor your computer is using at any given moment. Graphics Tweaking for Second Life

You can set Blender up to use any default setup you like too. You could open blender or start a new file and have your mesh there by default. All the settings for Blender are in a startup.blend file located in the folders listed below. It is just another Blender file. The only things special about it are the name and its location. I setup a file that represents what I want to see when starting Blender. Which for me is deleting the lights and default cube. I arrange my windows for my work style. Once all is as I want it I save it as the default. You can do that by clicking FILE -> User Preferences -> Save As Default. You can always restore the Blender Defaults by deleting startup.blend. You will find it here: Linux: /home/$user/.blender/'Version Number'/config/startup.blend (you'll need to show hidden files). Windows 7 and Windows Vista: C:\Users\$user\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\'Version Number'\config\startup.blend MacOS: /Users/$user/Library/Application Support/Blender/'Version Number'/config/startup.blend (you'll need to show hidden files). I also make files for special use. I have a female-263.blend and a male-263.blend files that are setup for making female and male clothes. The avatar and UVMaps are all setup for SL system clothes and ready for mesh clothes. I could save them as the defualt startup file. It is technically possible. Doing that just doesn't fit me personally. I prefer a near empty scene with the windows arranged as I like them.

I'm not sure we understand the question your asking. You seem to think software could be made to automatically make clothes. That is possible. It has never been done because no one wants it. Blender is for designers to create clothes that have never been thought of before. Machine design tends to standardize. You may be asking why clothes just doesn't fit? If so that is simple. When SL was created they made the shirt, pants, and other things we WEAR, which fit perfectly. The mesh clothes that we ATTACH were not planned for and we have fit problems with them. You will hear many say the Lab did not complete the implementation of mesh. While that is a rather ignorant simplification in some ways that is an accurate explanation and could answer your question. The more complex and real answer is in the way 3D models are built. Just as a word processing program manipulates letters so too a 3D modeling programs manipulates vertices (points represented by numeric attributes). AS a word processor knows about words, sentence structure, and paragraphs so too does a 3D modeling program. It knows about circles, cubes, materials, and such. Word processoers never tell you when to break your writing into paragraphs. They can't because they can't deal with the 'subject' of your writing. They cannot tell when your idea completes and a new idea or thought is being expressed. 3D modeling programs do not know about cloth. You can tell them to treat a group of vertices as cloth. You can tell a modeling program that an avatar body, which is another group of vertices, is an object the cloth collides with and is not to penetrate. It is possible to so designate those things in Blender or 3D Max. But, those features have not been built into Second Life. We are just now adding them. That is what the deformer is about. Even the deformer doesn't recognize clothes. It sees a group of vertices. It knows that it should move those vertices in special ways according to certain rules. So, while dresses can follow the movement of our legs, they cannot swish and swirl like cloth can. Flexies are a way to fake cloth movment. While you may see cloth in other games, there are no games I know of where user created content can have real cloth simulation. Even in Blender with CUDA and the GPU helping rendering cloth behavor brings my quad core CPU and 560 GPU to their knees. Said in a more technical way... SL is being retro-fitted to render specially designated groups of vertices attached to other specially designated groups of vertices according to distances and relationships established by 3rd party designers that are to be added to settings estabished by users. No where in this equation does the idea of clothes and FIT even start to appear. So, while it can be done, the actual task is far more complex than most people think simply because computers have yet to be taought what clothes are...

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.

Good point... but like I said, just for shape, no. The muscle boys are going for definition and detail, way beyond shape.

There is sort of a standard model. I suggest you read the rather long tutorial here: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. There are some things you need to know about the files and how to use them. That tutorial is the only one I know that explains the terms being used in SL and what the differences are between the various files with an SL avatar. Also, if you used the 'install' program for Blender you are walking into a wall. The tutorial explains how to avoid problems with Blender installs and have multiple version installed. The longer you work Blender the more important this becomes. I'm writing a tutorial on how to use the male shape hidden in the files. I am including information on how to export the male shape for use in SL. I will probably have it up in week 27.

I use Blender. I may be biased and I have not used 3DS in forever and I have only seen screen shots of Maya. I got TrueSpace while it was free, I think you still can. But, I have only ever played with it and not much. So, salt hat a say accordingly. I blog about what I learn in Blender, link in signature. Use the menu to find collection s of articles and tutorials. Blender changed with the 2.5 releases. The user interface became a bit more intuitive. Using intuitive with 3D modeling is a stretch. But, it is way easier to learn than the previous 2.4x versions. Still it is an unusual program and requires some devotion and time to learn. There is more support from Linden Lab and the user community for Blender than most other modeling programs. Gaia Clary and Domino Marama work with the Blender development team to add Second Life specific modifications and features. Linden Lab is a registered stakeholder in Blender. I think all this means that Blender will support SL changes before other modeling programs do. It is the program that the Lab expects users to use. The lab is pen to other programs and will support them as best they can with time available. But, it is likely Blender that they will remain focused on because of its popularity with SL users. Like SL Blender changes often. This can be a curse and a blessing. There are other programs that may be easier to learn and get started with. But, I think Blender is the most powerful with the most options for modeling and animating for Second Life.

Thanks. Works great.