Nalates Urriah

There are occasionally problems that cause a failed log out. So, if you have been able to login, it may be a failed log out that is preventing your login. If you have never been able to login, then it is some registration problem and I suggest using one of the phone numbers to call and ask for help. Contacting Second Life/Linden Lab Assuming you have been able to login... There are currently some errors that can crash the viewer on log out. You won't notice a problem as the viewer just closes. But, when you try to login the next time there is a problem. The problem usually clears when the region you log out from is restarted. That usually happens on Tuesday or Wednesday morning SLT/PST, but not always. Rather than wait, I say like someone would actually would, there are several things you can try. Rather than repeat that information in multiple posts here I have written a blog article on how to get past the login problems. It has several options the Lindens don't support or explain. See: I Can’t Login Hopefully, those tricks will get you logged in.

You may want to file this as a JIRA and provide copies of the DAE files so the mesh team can see what is happening. You can provide files so only the Lindens can access them.

Some merchants offer a GIFT style of purchase. If they do it is usually clearly marked as a gift. Look around the store. If it is a special item that you particularly want and there is no gift option, contact the merchant. You can right-click on any of their stuff, vendors or display models, and look through the objects properties for the owner/creator name. Look in their profile for how to contact them. Merchant's usually run into IM limits and once capped your IM's to them are lost. So, most explain their preferred method of contact. The SL Market Place (SMP or SLMP) has GIFT capability too. You can search the SLMP on a merchant name to find the product. It is also possible to PAY another avatar. Right-click on them or open thier profile from with in Friends or Chat and look in the options for PAY.

For making sculpties with Blender or Primstar the best video tutorials are at Machinimatrix.org (IMO). New tutorials are being released on how to make mesh models for SL too.

Chic and Jessika gave good answers. It is a good thing to make your own shape. That allows you to make copies of your shape. One can be modified for skin tight dresses. Another can be rump reduced for use with skirts as skirts tend to make your rear look bigger. Places like Free Dove have free skins and shapes. Many shops in the adult regions have free skin and shapes. Search on Free Skin or Free Shape. Most places that have skin have shapes too.

As Chic said, it can take some time. But, it shouldn't. The map generally loads for me in way less than a minute. The slow map may be the region. If the region is lagging, try another region. You can check the connection speed to Dallas, Tx, USA, which is where most of the servers are. Or, grab the IP Address of the server your intersted in from the viewer's Help -> About (you have to be logged in). Use SpeedTest.net or a similar site to test the connection. Your bandwidth setting in Preferences needs to be some percent of your Download Speed from the test. People suggest from 20% to 75% depending on who you talk to. There is no absolute number. Experiement to find the best setting for your equipment and location. Some have problems with any speed over 2 mb/sec. Also, press Ctrl-Shift-1 (toggle) to open the Stats Panel. Look at Ping and Lost Packets. If Ping is over 250, you'll see some loss of performance. The higher the Ping the worse things get. If Packet Loss is more than zero you'll loose performance. Somewhere over 5% SL becomes unplayable, IMO. How the map performs is also a matter of which viewer you are using. Series 1 viewers have a slower process for getting the map tiles.

If you are thinking of a place to put your information on scale and building in SL, consider putting it in the SL Wiki. I started my building in SL after reading the wiki and used those suggestions. Your OP points make lots of sense. I only found this post because Lee ponzu placed a note into the Open Source Development mailing list with a link. I've added it to my blog, so my friends can see it. I know a couple of what I label big name tutorial makers and I'll be pointing them to this thread. Torley Linden is fun and he might help or at least advise you on how to add your information to the wiki.

Each server in SL runs about 4 regions. When you have a logon problem you can type in a region name. That will have your avatar rez in that region and may resolve the problem. You can log into another GRID. SL is the main grid named AGNI. You can log into the Preview Grid named ADITI. To do this you need to set Show on Logon in Preferences -> General. You can set this preference before you login. ADITI is a separate grid and whatever you buy or build there cannot be found on the main grid. Plus money spent in ADITI does not count against your main grid account. The grid is for testing. You can upload textures for free, but they won't be in your inventory on the main grid. BUT, logging in there will tell you if it is a grid related problem or your account problem. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Preview_Grid for details on logging into ADITI for the first time. There are a number of things that can prevent you logging in. Being GHOSTED is the problematic one. The long explanation of how to work around that problem is here: I Can’t Login A viewer crash can happen as you log out. That leaves you thinking you logged off and SL thinking you are still logged in. You can resolve that with some fancy login footwork.

Also, if you are male or female makes a difference. A female can be anatomically correct with just a skin change. However, the male parts cannot just be painted on. An attachment is required to complete the male anatomy. If you are trying for a... fully functional avatar... you can find all the anatomical parts in-world. The kits for female and male genitalia, pregnancy simulation, pregnancy tests, and on and on are available. FULLY functional... They range in price from free to several hundreds of Lindens. The better ones provide consideration for various sexual preferences. In SL compatibility among lovers is more complex than just personality and sexual preference. Various brands of genitalia are and aren't compatible. So, that next level relationship talk has added aspects.

For a more advanced/complex answer read: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth

There are some simple ways. But, there are some complications that may require you dig deeper. First try the easy ones. Change your group. That may sound odd but it often works. Just make any other group active. Also try Ctrl-Shift-R to force a rebake. Repeat 3 times waiting a minute between tries. Travel to a deserted area, few or no avatars. Open your invenotry and type anything in the inventory search window. Once inventory is loaded retry group and re-bake. If these fail dig deeper: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth The forum is full of answers for this problem. If you search for an answer to a question, you may find you can avoid waitng for someone to answre you.

The viewer (software you use to see Second Life) has two modes; Basic and Advanced. In Basic you can select from a group of prebuilt avatars. To have a personalized avatar you need to change to Advanced mode. Once in Advanced you will have access to an inventory. You can find the prebuilt avatars in the Library section of Inventory. Now you can mix an match parts of the avatar. There are numerous places in SL where there are good freebies. Use Search to find Free Dove. They have good stuff. There are male and female skins, hair and clothes. There are other good freebie stores. For new people there are 30 day deals. If you are less than 30 days old, some businesses will give you a starter gift worth hundreds of Lindens (L$). I got my first nice hair do that way. To find people to meet... open your sidebar using the HOME tab. They have a thing to get you to chat friendly places. Also the destinations part will take you to neat places. Because the places are listed on destinations many people are going there. So, you will likely meet people there. Be friendly say Hi. Be warned the women here have heard all the bad pickup lines... Also open Search and look for Events. Events will be loaded with people. You will notice Destinations appear in Search too.

Verify that your connection is good at SpeedTest.net. You don't say what version or brand viewer you are using. You may want to read:  Latest Second Life Viewer Update Dramatically Improves My Second Life - How About You?

At any given time there are up to 5 versions of the simulator software running on the main grid. To have an idea of why you may be experiencing problems we need to know which sim software is causing you problems. While in-world click HELP -> About in the top menu. This will open an info panel and give you the versions of software that you are using. That includes viewer, viewer support, and the sim. You can copy paste the entire panel when asking any tech question. You may also check the Second Life Grid Status. The main grid typically gets new software on Tuesday morning. The release channels get new software on Wednesday mornings. There are special channels that we may or may not be told about at any given time. They may change at any time. AFAIK those special channels are usually made from parts of the release channels. There are also features in the sim software that LL may enable or disable. The Lab does not give us much information about the Utility Servers that support the grid, i.e., login, asset, chat, and etc. Obviously it will be difficult to know what is or may cause problems at any given time. What we do know is that Version 1 viewers are having more problems as time passes. The main LL viewer is several versions behind. Even the Beta version is behind current developments. Lots of things are being upgraded at a very fast pace. A number of performance enhancements are in the release channels. They don't always look glamorious as those versions may run more debugging and data collection code than the final release will. With any luck some of the upgrades like Mono2 that have been stuck in a test/fix cycle for weeks will pass and get to the main grid this coming Tuesday.

Rolig's answer is definitely the first thing to try. If you are still having problems with your Phoenix inventory read throught this: Lost Inventory and Missing Inventory Fix – Help I wrote the article for those of us that use more than one viewer and switch back and forth. Unless you are using features in Phoenix that are not yet in Firestorm (FS), you may want to change over. At first FS may seem to V2-ish. But, with a little effort (little being key) you can make your FS very much like Phoenix. There are some things like toasts that one cannot completely change, but one can get pretty close. I like the FS Beta enough I have uninstalled Phoenix. But, I'm more of a V2 girl.

Innula gave a good answer. The new and older viewers use different processes to retrieve inventory. However, there are other possible issues. You can read through this to see if any of it will help. Lost Inventory and Missing Inventory Fix – Help

I'm unsure exactly what is causing the problem. So, consider this with some salt. This is an error from media in SL. Typically this comes from problems with the in viewer web browser (Webkit based) and media on a prim (MOAP). Some driver is missing. You can try switching to your external browser to see if that fixes it. Make sure you have QuickTime on your computer. If you still have a problem, try installing the Safari Internet BROWSER. That usually gets you all the 'extra' drivers you need for SL.

The suggestions to use some viewer that is based on series 2 viewer code are good. For finding people I would use at least the SL Beta Viewer that has the new search feature. When you use the People Filter when searching, you don't have to worry about whether you are trying to find a Display or login name.

Yes, others are running into this. I first heard about this in the Kirsten Viewer group. The problem is dependent on your video card and driver version. With my 8800 GTS and driver 270.?? I do not have the problem. Discussion in the group indicates the 275.xx series of nVidia drivers has a problem with newer SL viewers. A roll back to an earlier driver version can correct the problem. I suggest you find a JIRA Bug Report before replacing the driver. Crash the viewer and copy the log file to a folder where it won't get over written. Include it in the JIRA you file. Be sure you understand what needs to be included in a bug report. It is explained on the first page of the JIRA. ...and you might roll the viewer back rather than the video driver. There is a previous version link on the download page.

Gaia and Feynt have given you good answers. I'm going to give you a very different and basic answer. Most Blender problems are install issues. Especially when you have two or more versions of Blender installed and have to start dealing with Python versions. However there is a simple solution. Uninstall all versions except one. May sure it is working. If there is any doubt, remove and reinstall it. Now visit the Blender download and get the Zip Archive Blender. Unzip it to a folder. It really doesn't matter where. Nor does it matter which Python version your running because the zip files has the right one and places a copy with the unzipped Blender. Find the blender.exe file in the folder you unzipped to. Right-click and drag it to the desktop. When you drop it select Create Shortcut Here... you now have a working copy of Blender and the appropriate Python version to go with it. It won't mess up your other version or Python installs. If you want more information on this install process see: http://blog.nalates.net/2011/05/15/blender-2-57b-released/ This makes it easy to add and remove versions and if you have other programs using Python, as I do, you don't have to worry about breaking them. Plus Python upgrades for other purpses won't break your Blender versions.

The RenderUnloadedAvatar setting forces the viewer to render an avatar, whether it has all the information needed to render it or not. If you want your avatar to look like what others are seeing, you need to fix the problem that is causing your avavatar not to render. Otherwise the viewer uses Ruth (default avatar) to fill in the missing parts. There are 2 primary causes. A poor Internet connection is one. Try SpeedTest.net to see how your connection is actually performaing. When in-world press Ctrl-Shift-1 (this is a toggle so press it again to turn it off) to open the viewer statistics panel. Look for Ping and Lost Packets. If ping is over 250ms then you MAY have a connection problem. Visit another couple of regions to see if ping improves. Ping can be a sim problem too, which all you can do is move to another region. Look at Packet Loss. If it is over 2 or 3 % you will have problems. Again try another region to see if it is you or SL. If it is you, talk to your ISP. You can send them the SpeedTest.net results if it shows packet loss. If your wireless, try using a network cable. Also, try these two quick fixes. Ctrl-Alt-R, which is rebake. It forces both the viewer and SL servers to take another look at your avatar and try to render it. The other quick fix is to change groups... set any other group you beleong to to avtive. Odd as it sounds this is an effective fix. If these fixes are not working, read this: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth It gets into the technical stuff. It explains why sometimes this problem happens and how to generally avoid the problem.

If you are having a problem getting you avatar to rez, read this: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth

If an item is Copy OK, there is no chance of a refund. People could return a copy and keep a copy. With my scripts and vendors I'll give a refund if the product does not work for them and let them keep it. But, we first try to find out why it is not working for them and get it working. But, SL is not Nordstrom's.

I'll wear my sword...

There is a post in this forum section about a problem with MAD links. They refer to this location for the newest Mesh Project MAD Viewer. http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/mesh-development/rev/232677/index.html