Nalates Urriah

The revised new prim/Land Impact accounting should arrive with the Pathfinding Project. When that is going to be is uncertain. Listening to Falcon and Lorca Linden... it sounds like it is getting close. May be 2 to 4 months, is my guess.

With mesh products some people make a base mesh which they sell as a text or Blender file. They include a template. This allows people to upload the mesh and show as the creator. They can use the template to texture the item. It is hard to know if something has been copybot'd or otherwise stolen. If you know the original creator, check with them. Otherwise buy from vendors you know to be reputable.

Yes... within limits. If you make the mesh with different weighting, you can minimize the stretch. When you pose the avatar in Blender with legs spread or mid-stride in a walk animation you can see the problem. Most tutorials show using the avatar legs (lowerbody) to weight clothes. You'll find that a very small area between the legs gets all the deformation when the avatar's legs move. You can extend that area with weighting and add more vertices in the area. You run into problems getting the weighting to work well but it can done to a point. So, to a degree you iminmize the stretch. A problem comes in when you 'sit' the avatar. The change from standing and walk to sitting is rather extreme. It is much harder to get the sit-weighting to work with the standing-walking weighting. To get around the problem the clothes must be loose fitting. Or one must alpha layer the legs out. This makes short (mid thigh) and mini skirts look rediculious. It is concevable one could make s skirt with folds and weighting to reduce stretch even farther. But weighting is already tedious enough. This leads to the discussion on STORM-1716 where people are asking for a better weighted avatar to start from, which spins off into discussion avout Avatar 2.0. We may see a better weighted avatar. I doubt we will see Avatar 2.0. http://blog.nalates.net/2012/05/26/the-great-sl-deformer-debate/

I'll add Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. It has information about installing Blender for easy update and running multiple versions. Blender is updaing quickly. Some updates don't work so well with SL. So, it is common to design in one version of Blender and use another version to export the Collada file needed for SL.

For now it is a problem. We hope the Mesh Deformer or AKA: Parametric Deformer Project will correct the problem. There is some debate about how the Deformer will work. The Great #SL Deformer Debate #SL Mesh Deformer Debate Update A problem is existing mesh objects will not work with the Deformer. They must be uploaded with the new Mesh Uploader to turn on the Deformer active feature. Right now that can only be done with the Deformer Project Viewer. There are Deformer Test Clothes in Hippo Hollow. When the Deformer is in use, mesh clothes jiggle with Avatar Enhanced Physcis. With any luck we will see the Deformer come online this year.

That is why they call it a bug... its broken. I suspect the Lindens thought the new tp function would only work in the Magnum RC. Appreantly that is not the case. Scripts made in Magnum then taken out apparently work and because the premissions system hasn't been changed outside of Magnum. Oops. They'll get it fixed. Might be a bumpy week.

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. 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.

Run through these steps to find your connection problem and figure out what to fix or who to call: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection. Another way to describe SL is: a cooperative developement platform. You can use SL to build your own virtual world, a role play game, a first or third person shooter, a golf game... it goes on and on. You are only limited by your imagination. You can do whatever as a single person or as part of team. I think the only downfall of SL is it does not cater to the TV kids lacking imagination. It doesn't entertain you, but it gives you a nearly infinite range of possibilities for being engaged. The shiny new What Is SL page is here: http://secondlife.com/whatis/

Satine is right about memory leaks, but they are not limited to Firestorm. Expect memory leaks with any viewer based on the new viewer code. Cool VL Viewer is made with the latest V3 code base, with Henri's fixes, and a V1 user interface. You will likely find it the most V1 like. Cool and Singularity are both good viewers. The Singularity team takes some time to make new releases. Lately they have released a new version about every 3 or 4 months. So, you'll have a stable platform for months at a time. Cool updates more frequently, roughly monthly. Firestorm is a good viewer if you want to start getting framiliar with the new V3 interface. It allows you to change to a V1 user interface simulation. It is pretty close. So, I think you'll be able to find most things in framiliar places. Also, more than half the people in SL use Firestorm/Phoenix. So, there are plenty of people around to help you find things and explain the power user features. We have a load of new things coming to SL. We know about Pathfinding, Advanced Creator Tools, Auto-Replace and Spell Check and I am expecting other things we seldom hear about. Many of these things require new controls and panels. New features require user interface changes. So, regardless of what viewer you use, you are going to have user interface changes. The problem with V1 UI changes is those making the new V1 UI's don't always do things the same ways. So, I'm finding the V1 UI's more and more confusing and fewer people that can help. I expect the V1 user interface to disappear in a couple of years as people move to the V3 UI to get new features. While I like Exodus and Nirans viewers, those have non-standard UI's. Niran is always changing the Interface. He changes it so fast I have problems with it. I think he is in search of the best UI. Otherwise it is a great viewer. Plus the fast update cycle means things get fixed quickly. If some problem interupts your daily work/play activity, grab a copy of Niran's and it is likely it has a fix. ...and these are my opinions from using the viewers. You can find viewer reviews by searching Google. I thin Inara Pey and I do the most viewer reviews. On my site look in the menu for VIEWERS.

Try opening the Search Filters, in the gear lower left, and setting a date for the day you made the upload. If you made an unnoticed typo in the name this should find it. Before clearing the cache I would relog to a place like Furball or Pooley, deserted and empty. Then open Inventory and type single letters in search to simulate loading. Forego cache clearing until you are certain you have a cache problem. If the viewer is downloading a ton of stuff and the servers gets behind, the Inventory download is more likely to stall and lag behind.

If you are new to Blender you'll find that it updates frequently. Some versions work well with the SL Mesh Uploader and some don't. You'll need to have multiple versions installed. Read about that in: Second Life Mesh Clothes Blender 2.6 Setup 2012 Tutorial. That tutorial helps you get setup for mesh clothes and explains away the confusion over Default Avatar and Default Shape that will be used with the Mesh Deformer. Gaia Clary has a collection of tutorial on YouTube. They are a mix of Blender version from 2.49 to 2.63.

Before you start re-installing and changing things check your connection. You go through numerous devices to connect to SL. Any one of them may be failing or overloading. You can test your connection and check the region servers to see where the problem is using this information: Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection.

Kwak is probably right. Leashes are made from particles. The setting for them is in Preferences -> Graphics.

Clearing your cache is mentioned by Kwak. Clearning the cache was an easy first fix thing to do prior to 2011. The protocol for downloading things was UDP and it is prone to losing packets and not recovering them. So, it was common to have corrupted files in the cache. That is no longer true. The protocol was changed to HTTP and is much more reliable, in a pass/fail sense. Cache corrupt is rare now. Also, the size of the cache was increased and the Lindens added cache indexing. So, it is not as sensitive to full-cache-syndrome, which is where things slow down as the computer has to select thngs to delete from the cache to make room for new things. That removes that reason to empty the cache. Now clearing the cache is a last resort fix. Clearing the cache can make avatar render problems from connection issues even worse. The viewer has to download all the cached material again. ONLY clear the cache if you are certain you have a cache corruption problem.

The nVidia cards do shadows better. AMD/ATI does not support OpenGL as well as nVidia does. With the Radeon you're fighting an uphill battle. 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. The video driver versions are important. As is the OpenGL version and the viewer version. All of these are updating. Was your viewer on auto-update? There are versions of the viewer that have broken anti-aliasing. The current versions are running AA as far as I know. One can force AA on via the nVidia control panel. If you do, disable it in the viewer. Other versions have a problem with the high rez photos. Check the standard photo against a high rez. You should be able to tell if the AA quality is the same. If it is a viewer version issue, you can get older versions here: https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Old_versions I think the Singularity Viewer is the only viewer using older Snowglobe code. You might try it to see if it does better. Nirans Viewer is for photographers and machinamists. Niran is into images and videos. If it is having a photo problem he is likely to provide the fastest fix. Since you have changed video cards it would be more likely the viewer. Since most viewers use the same render engine you could see the same problem across several different viewers, which is why I suggest Singularity and Nirans. The current download for the Exodus viewer is from December 2011. So, it may be worth a try.

Run the install program as an Administrator, generally right click and Run as... Disable your anti-virus before starting the install. You may have a bad download. Download another copy. Save it with a different name and compare the sizes of your previous download. Get a copy of the Beta Viewer while you are at it. Peggy makes a good suggestion about placing the install file on the desktop to make it easy to find. I'll suggest you save the download in a place where it is easy to find. After the install save the file. Keep it until the next upgrade. When the next upgrade installs and WORKS... then delete the old file. It has saved me a bunch of times. If you decide to run more than one brand of viewer, as many of us do, read: Second Life Clean Install. It will explain somethings and help you be sure your install is CLEAN.

What I would really like to see is the mesh... Depending on how you made the mesh you may have a seam with a row of double vertices, or a crease. You may also not have the adjoining polys sharing the same vertces. Try selecting a single poly along the edges of the problem polygon. Move it and see if the faces are really joined.

Look through Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection It explains how to tell if it is you, your ISP, SL, or the region. If a region is lagging you can get false Packet Loss and Ping values from the Viewer Statistics. With the collection of data you'll know whether to report to SL or your ISP. If you find it is the ISP, get a friend to collect the same information, presumably they are not having a problem, and include it with your information to show the contrast. You problem with an ISP is getting to teir two support. If you can get the info to second level and there is an ISP or backbone problem they will recognize it and you'll have a chance to get it fixed.

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 get a free program CPU-Z that will tell you all the tech info about your CPU. Most important is the SOCKET type. If you have a LGA775 type socket, you can upgrade the CPU. The LGA775 socket came out in 2000, I think. If you have a LGA775 then look on eBay for a Core2 Quad. Find the fastest one. There are a couple of different models. The difference in cost is from the speed of the chips, ranging from 2.4 to 3.2 Mhz. That's from memory, so... The Core2 chips have SSE1, 2, 3, 3s support depending on their release date. Depending the chip you have now, you may need to add a better heat sink and cooling fan for the CPU. Also CPU-Z will tell yo about your motherboard. Check the specs to see what it supports. The l o n g story on upgrading is here: How To get a Faster Second Life

I can change the viewer to drop AA and several other features and push tasks off to the GPU. If I let the viewer do the work, I run at about 6 to 25 FPS with the avarage in 8 to 13 FPS on HIGH with L&S, Ambiant, and Sun/Moon. If I do, I see the GPU running at 99%. I can leave all the graphics render process in the viewer and still get 6 to 25 w/6 to 13 avarage and the GPU bouncing between 20 and 60%. The overall render image and user interface is much better if I let the viewer handle the graphics. I'm puzzled because others with similar setups are running 30 - to 50 FPS. The only significant difference appears to be they are in Win7 - 64 bit. I've tried over clocking to push the CPU to 3Mhz. That gets me from 15 FPS to a weak 17 FPS and runs the box way hot. Second Life 3.3.3 (258100) May 26 2012 05:42:20 (Second Life Development) Release Notes CPU: Intel® Core2 Quad CPU Q6700 @ 2.66GHz (2666.66 MHz) Memory: 3326 MB OS Version: Microsoft Windows Vista 32-bit Service Pack 2 (Build 6002) Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 560 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 Windows Graphics Driver Version: 8.17.0013.0142 OpenGL Version: 4.2.0 libcurl Version: libcurl/7.21.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8q zlib/1.2.5 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: KDU v6.4.1 Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000 Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1 (version number hard-coded) Voice Server Version: Not Connected Built with MSVC version 1600 When I asked what others were getting (How Fast is Your Viewer? - Second Life) the most noticable difference is in the 64 bit systems.

So far I've only seen the Blog Announcement and some new functions in the LSL Wiki. The code is running in Magnum RC. Has anyone found anything more than that? Is this still a semi-closed beta now? #SL News Week 22 Advanced Experience Tools Preview llTeleportAgentGlobalCoords() Oskar added some information to this weeks Server Deploys: NOTE: the new LSL functions work with the current runtime permissions system and are precursor to future work with experience permissions. More information about the runtime permission is here:PERMISSION_TELEPORT. These functions only work on the RC regions and not grid wide.

Describe a good user case and file a feature request in the JIRA.

There is a list: All keyboard shortcut keys

Game physics are calc'd on the server so there are no settings in the viewer for that. The viewer deals with Enhanced Avatar Physics... boobies, bellys, and butts bounce. You cantrol the amount of bounce by wearing a Physcis Layer. In Appearance or Edit My Shape or Appearance (right click on avatar) you can create a new Physics Layer and wear it and edit it. I haven't looked but I suspect you can buy premade physics layers in the market place. The V3 viewers have the same avatar appearance conrtols as the old V1 viewers did. They are just harder to find. If you start trying to edit shape or appearance you'll intuitively end up in the right place.