Nalates Urriah

To get good answers you need to tell us a bit about your computer and which viewer you are using. If you are new and using the Basic Mode in an SL Viewer we need to know that too. But, I can make some guesses. Inventory problems are common for those that have a poor Internet connections. Visit some place like SpeedTest.net to test your connection. You can also use Ctrl-Shift-1 to open the viewer stats panel and check for Packet Loss and Ping time. Ideally packet loss is 0% and Ping is 80ms or less. One can live with 2 to 5% packet loss but you will have random problems. Up to 250ms of ping is not all that bad. Things get slower and problems increase as Ping exceeds 250ms. Another problem with inventory is a corrupted cache. Assuming you are using the SL Viewer in Advanced Mode, open Preferences (Ctrl-P) and find the Setup tab. There is a RESET button there. Click it and restart the viewer. There are additional steps you can take to assure a good inventory reload. The most effective one is to log into a deserted region with as little stuff as possible. To log into a deserted region open your map and search for Pooley. It is a nearly empty region owned by the Lindens. Often others are using to reload their inventories. So, look around for a nearby empty region and TP there. OPen Preferenes and make sure that on dialog for the General the Start Location is checked SHOW at Login. Then click the RESET as described above and logout. When you login select Last Location or you can type in Pooley or whatever region name you picked. Once logged in open your inventory and search for anything. That forces inventory to load. Stay in the region until your inventory completes loading. Now you can press Alt-Shift-R to force a rebake of the textures your avatar is wearing. You may have rebake 2 or 3 times. Wait about a minute between rebakes. Hopefully that clears the problem. But, there are loads of other steps to take. Even more if you use multiple viewers. So, if you still have problems read through: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth I consider Besos' answer to resort to the Test Avatar as a last resort and it is a bit of pain to have to rebuild your avatar. But, that is covered in the article.

Some of the wiki descriptions are old. Some are just incomplete. I don't know whether anyone will have a good answer for you, I don't. You may have to just run tests until you work out an answer. If you want to pursue an answer from the Lindens, ask in the Beta Server Office Hours. You can put the question on the Agenda. Whether you make it to the meeting or not, it will likely get answered. You will be able to read the answer in the meeting minutes a day or two after the meeting. It takes a bit for them to get posted. Don't be surprised if the Lindens don't know. They may have to find the answer or refer you to another Linden that knows. Once you have an answer, update the wiki entry.

There is a number of things you can do. Some work at different times. I'm sure which works has to do with how SL is behaving at the time. Some old bugs have come back. Regression testing is supposed to catch them. But, unless you have done real regression testing you can't imagine how absolutely mind numbing it can be. Nor can one imagine the scope of regression testing needed for SL. There are 500+ fixes for mesh, 25,000+ for the viewer, and I have no idea how many for the server. Each of those items would need to be retested... not gonna happen is my bet. The avatar-no-rez problem is an old problem. This seems to be the one that is cured by changing groups... I have no idea why that works. But, I have personally seen it work. My long list of fixes and attempted explanations for what is happening in some cases is at: Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth Look through it and see if there is something you have not tried. I play with a dozen or so viewers all installed and play on Sl and OSGrid. So, I wrote from a different perspective than the Lindens and different viewer developers. I have also found that a viewer problem can carry over from session to session if the computer is not restarted. And heaven help you if you play Facebook games and then log into SL. That can result in odd happenings.

quote: sculpts don't even count trangles they count verticies, big difference Ashasekayi Ra has made several good counter points. Just to drive it home… If one does not know that everything in a virtual world is a collection of vertices making up triangles and you can’t have one without the other, I can’t believe they have researched the issue or know anything about 3D modeling. Sorry ortiga Waco, you don’t know what you are talking about. Quote: by upgrading sculpts linden labs would stay with the times Quote: with sculpts you can already precisly control the LODs No professional modelers use sculpties. You may want to laugh at Blue Mars but the technical excellence is ahead of LL’s. Their business model sucks not their render engine and mesh tools. All the high-end games use mesh as the most efficent and advanced way to render worlds. May be a few professionals have learned to use sculpties for SL, but it restricts the content that universities can use in other places and then bring to SL. One just cannot import the millions of 3D objects out there as sculpties. It requires a major rework to turn most 3D models into sculpties. The restrictions and limitations on sculpties are ridiculous. (…compared to doing things with mesh.) Making a replacement avatar from a sculpty and providing weighted vertices… that would create a hybrid no one would know how to work with if it is even possible. The idea with SL is to get the learning curve down not up. UVMap control is, for practical purposes, non-existent with scupties. Sculpties data is encoded to an image, we call it a sculpty map. The X, Y, Z vales are in the Red, Blue, Green vales and can only range from 0 to 255. No other data can be included. No custom UVMaps, no edges (which are made in a sculpty by stacking up vertices in one point thus wasting vertices and triangles), no anchor point to bone information…yadda, yadda.... Simply said, a sculpty is a highly simplified mesh stripped of all the stuff professionals use to control their models. We are now getting the professional stuff lacking in sculpties. As to server load… to the server the mesh is another asset to be handed out. The only real server lag feature of mesh, AFAIK, is in the physics. SL mesh has a Physics Channel. A very simplified version of the mesh can be placed in that channel. If not, there is either no physics or the cost of the mesh is way high. So, with mesh we may see some decrease in server load for physics calcs. If you haven’t been to ADITI lately to see what people are doing with mesh in just the few months we have had them in Beta, you are clueless to what is coming. After years with sculpties there are nowhere near the number of sculpty models in SL that are built with mesh. Sculpties were a brilliant idea. Their purpose was to make apples and bannas and other organic shapes. Mesh is the all-purpose modeling medium for any shape and complex texturing. Servers… ortiga thinks the servers are not being upgraded, obviously not paying attention to the office hours minutes and Linden postings about internal networks and servers being updated and/or replaced. SL is not running on the first computer they started with. Plus we are seeing new software going on the servers every week. Also, more and more of the asset handling is moving of the simulators to be handled by other servers. Changes in how region crossing is handled have been added, new scripting, … on and on. Want to know what’s up with the servers? Geez, don’t listen to ortga, go read the minutes in: Server Beta

We can only assume you are using the latest Standard SL Viewer. It helps if you give us more informaton when asking for help. The ideal way is to click Help->About SL. A panel comes up that you can copy then paste into the post. You do not have to be logged in. To find a Third Psrty Viewer (TPV) look in the SL WIki: Third Party Viewer Directory When you decided to use a TPV there are complications. In spite of all the problems a huge percentage of people use TPV's. It is debatable whether the SL or TPV's have more or less problems. Remember. SL Support is not going to provide much help if you use a TPV. But, the leading viewers have forums and in-world groups where you can get help. Obviously the forums are your only support if you can't login. I have a blog that reviews viewers: http://blog.nalates.net/ One has to be able to trust the maker of the TPV they choose. Remember. You are intrusting your account ID/Password the the maker of the viewer. Thre is nothing but their integrety to keep them from having a copy of the account ID and password sent to them. It has happened in past.

Dilbert is right. We need to know more about your computer and which viewer you are using. You can easily get the information we need by clicking HELP in the viewer then About SL. Do a copy of the data and then paste it into your post. Older computers start to develop problems. There are maintenance things one can do to help them along. Cleaning the fans, as Dilbert suggests, and air intakes is easy and an important maintenance. The Second Life viewer is being upgraded. So, depending on how long the "in a while" is your machine may be reaching the minimum needed to run SL. Rumor is that will the release of mesh there will be higher minimum requirements for hardware and that the viewer will disable features based on your hardware. If you are running on Apple, the problem may be drivers. Apple tends to use ATI video cards. Some of the newer drivers have problems with SL. You will need to search the forum to see what ATI drivers to avoid.

Abigail is probably right. If you haven't been banned, then the error message is inappropriate. You can try to get a new IP address and see if that resolves it. On some networks simply restarting the modem will get you a new IP Address. On my COX connection I have to leave the modem off for hours to get a new IP. Visit http://whatismyipaddress.com/ before you try to change it. Get your IP and then check again after you try to change it to be sure it changed. If changing the address does not fix it, call Linden Lab or if you are not any a hurry, file a trouble ticket in support. It can take some time to get a response. The better you describe the problem and title the case, the faster you'll get a response. I am hearing that support is resonding faster. Check your email spam and see if Linden Lab sent you an email. You may have been banned by mistake. If so, you should have gotten an email recounting your sins and listing your options. If not, you may have inherited a previous banned IP address. Also, hardware can be banned. Have you tried logging into your account from a different computer? If that works, you will have to talk to LL to get the hardware ban lifted. We are assuming your are using a SL Viewer. If not, support will give you a hard time.

Contact support...

What the people are suggesting here are ways to deal with delivery failure. Checking your Transaction history will tell you if the purchase actually happened. If the vendor got the money, the system may have failed the delivery. If you get lots of IM's and notices it may have come in after your messages capped, in which case you could find it delivered to Lost & Found folder. If it just failed, as they said, contact the merchant. Recent should show it. But if you have bought other stuff and logged on off a few times, it may not. So, click the gear icon at the bottom of inventory and use Filters to control the date of recent. You should see all the folders with stuff within the date range. Some times it is easier to work with enventory after a shopping spree if you have it sort by date. Some new stuff arrives in the My Inventory Folder. That means it will be after the Trash folder. Other times it comes into Objects folder. On rare occassions a new item will go in the appropriate folder, i.e., an animation into the Animation folder, etc. Also there is just lost inventory. It takes time for inventory to load. So, do a search to force inventory to load. Once loaded there will be a number under the big "My Inventory" at the top. THat number changes as inventory loads. Once things have loaded, look for your item. Remember inventory loads may stall in a busy region. You need to remember the approximate number items in your inventory, so you'll have an idea if it failed to load. But, don't worry about it. A desolate place is best for working with inventory problems. You can search on a different term to restart the inventory load if it stalls or gets slow. There are two types of lost inventory. There is inventory that only appears lost and inventory that is actually lost. There are a number of fixes for apparently lost inventory that you can try. See: Lost Inventory and Missing Inventory Fix – Help If all of those fixes fail, you probably have actual lost inventory. You have to contact Linden Lab support to have a chance of getting it back.

To have a missing foot, you must have added a shoe or something that uses an Alpha Layer. Look in your appearance and look in WORN. You want to find the Alpha Layer item and Take OFF. Alpha Layers have to do with image transparency. THey are used in SL to make parts of the avatar invisible so that you can were a sexy foot and shoe without the avatar's klunky feet showing. It sounds like you got the shoe and foot off but missed the alpha layer, which is sort of a magic stocking. You cannot remove basic parts of the avatar. You can replace them. You can't remove brown eyes and wear blue eyes. You can however, wear the blue eyes and they will replace the brown ones without your having to take them off.

There a number of fixes and solutions. The long list of fixes is here: I Can’t Login If there is an account problem, like you got banned, you'll get an error message telling you that. In which case you will have to take it up with Linden Lab support. If the viewer crashes on start, uninstall it and reinstall it. I'm assuming you are using the standard SL Viewer and not a third party viewer. Another possibility is what is called GHOSTING. A network interupt or other error just as you log off can cause a ghost. Your vieer closes but your avatar stays in world. Things go odd. People can often walk through the avatar, thus the name ghost. Often it is necessary to restart the region to get ride of the ghost, force it to log off. On Tueday mornings all regions are restarted in a rolling restart as new server software is installed in the simulators. Otherwise, one has to get LL or the region owner to restart the region. That can be a pain. So, the alternatives are listed in "I Can't Login". Another problem is a bad network connection. Visit SpeedTest.net and test your connection. You need over 1mb persecond download and ideally under 150ms ping. All the fixes assume you are working in Advanced Mode. If you are a Basic Mode user, ask for help here.

You can get a quick take on SL Mesh by checking out Gaia's blog, Machinimatrix.org. The viewer and server code that supports mesh is still changing. One big change has been the removal of the Mesh Asset from inventory. See: Second Life Mesh Status Week 16 You need to use the Mesh Viewer Snapshot (nightly) to play with the latest changes. The ambiguity between whether updates and news appears in the Forums or the Wiki is confusing and updates seem haphazard. So, the information in the Wiki is mix of current and out of date. The viewer provided for download at: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh is an old one. It is ok for viewing mesh on the Preview Grid, but it does ot have the latest mesh uploader, AFAIK. You'll see the Dev Snapshot at the bottom of viewers download list. The current speculation is we may see mesh go on the Release Channels in June... but, that is total speculation. Lindens are not saying. The Mesh Status article has some more info.

Post a wire frame screen capture of the blike. We can give yu and idea if it is too complex or if there is a problem. If you do have 65k vertices for a bike, it may be too complex.

Once an SL Viewer crashes you may have to reboot the computer to clear problems. A crash may also corupt the viewer's settings file. C:\users\[user_name]\AppData\Roaming\SecondLife\user_settings\settings.xml Rename or delete the file. The viewer will make a new one with the default settings. A texture download can also corrupt and cause problems. So, try clearing the cache. C:\users\[user_name]\AppData\Local\SecondLife\ You can delete everything in the folder. It is important to know if you use only one viewer or whether you use 2 or more different viewers. If you use Phoenix, Imprudence, or others you need to make separate caches for each viewer. They do not play well together. I did not see your video card listed. If it is ATI, you may have a video driver problem.

Here is the LONG list of possible solutions: I Can’t Login As someone wrote (I can't see other posts once I start writng) this is the community forum NOT a direct line to the Lindens. If they were to see your request, the Lindens in general are not support staff and I suspect most lack the access to customer accounts needed to make fixes. THe chance of a support person having time to read the forum to find someone needing help is about zero. Many login problems are related to failed avatar logout. Those tend to get corrected by the Tuesday and Wednesday rolling restarts. Depending on when and where you get locked out the restarts can save you before support responds. I do hear support is getting better. But, until they are instant I'm too spoiled to wait. So, the Long List of fixes. It also helps to include the Error Message you get or describe what is happening. It helps us give you better answers. You can avoid waiting for an answer by searching the forum. This problem is common and the forum is full of answers. You can also post in ANSWERS where many people monitor the section for people in trouble. Plus, if you search from within Answers, you get suggested possible answers... which sometimes is right on.

Do you know if this version has the latest Collada updates from Notwory? Any information on how well it's Collada export works with SL?

We need to know which version of the viewer and which operating system you are using. If you got the 'prominent' viewer from http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh you got version 2.6.0 and it probably will give the error you are getting. Get the development snapshot viewer. It is here: Mesh Development viewer build The current version is 2.6.3. The Alternate Viewers Mesh Setup page is also misleading. They do not tell you that you MUST use a development version. There are warnings telling you to avoid that version, but it is the only version that works. At least there is a link to the latest version. Also once the viewer hangs, reboot your computer before trying again. Also, they are putting new servers into the mesh section of ADITI. So, you may be catching the system while it is down.

You are right, you are in the forum. The best place for your question is probably the Beta Server Group. Viewers are already able to handle prims larger than 10m. The size limit is enforced by the server. See: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Server_Beta_User_Group

I just came across your post... If you are interested in an answer to your questions, add them to the Server Group Agenda and attend the Office Hours Meeting of the group. The information on how to do that and the meeting times are in the wiki: Server Beta User Group If the meeting is at a bad time for you note that in email to the meeting facilitator. Let them know you'll watch for the answer in the meeting minutes, which are linked to from the wiki page link above. Palidin is right that things have changed. If you ask those that are having the most TP problems which viewer and version they are using you may start to see a pattern.

Notice at the bottom of the version download pages are links to older versions. Not all are listed. I don't understand how to navigate the various viewer branches to find specific versions. But, I am told it is possible. For instance finding the April 1 release 2.6.3-255638 with avatar physics was nearly impossible for me. Fortunately someone helped me.

The ADITI grid has had problems the last few days. If you login to Last Location, try logging into HOME. It will land you some place that is up and running. I've seen several regions down and been dropped into some odd locations using Last Location. You screen would seem to indicate you started logging in and then the region crashed... something went wrong. Give it some time and try again. It is hard to know if a specific region is down. However, you can test via ping, tracert, and http://www.speedtest.net/ to get an idea. Taget sim7016.aditi.lindenlab.com (216.82.40.112:13002) for areas outside the mesh region and sim9001.aditi.lindenlab.com (216.82.40.149:13007) for Mesh Sandbox 14. I don't know how often the names and IP address may change but these are good today as of 2:30 Pm SLT.

There is also a login issue depending on when you last or ever logged into the ADITI, beta/preview, grid. If you have never logged in it could take 24 hours, but that was supposed to be fixed. If you have not changed your password since a login some months age (there is a date but I've forgotten it) then you need to change your password and try logging in. That change is supposed to register quickly to the ADITI grid but can take some time. Clearing the install folder as mentioned by another is a good move. There is some problem with a file labeled winmm.dll (or somthing close to that). Removing it fixes the problem.

In the last couple of months a lot has changed. There are a number of mesh and viewer changes that make older meshes a problem. Also, depending on how you are building the meshes you may have some problems. Blender Collada has received a lot of attention over the last 2 or 3 weeks. See http://www.letworyinteractive.com/ I haven't done anything with weighted mesh, so you might want to search and read through posts here regarding weighted to see what has changed since you started.

Charlotte brought up a point that is important. When you use more than just the Second Life Viewer (SLV) you often have problems with cache corruption. But, rather than uninstall the TPV change the TPV's cache location and avoid to problem. In Preferences->Setup (SLV) and in Preferences->Network (Phoenix) are the controls for setting a new cache location. I suggest you leave your SLV's location unchanged. Change the Phoenix or other TPV's location. New versions of Phoenix and several other viewers, i.e., Kirsten's S21 for one, create their own cache without your needing to do anything extra. So, check where your TPV has placed the cache. If your TPV is using a cache in the SecondLife folder, create a new folder and point the viewer to it. You can do that from within the viewer in Preferences.

If you are just starting with Blender, there is a lot to learn. It will give you the most power in building. To get an idea of what you can do, visit Machinimatrix.org and watch Gaia's video tutorials. Most of the tutorials are for sculpties. Making mesh and sculpties is very similar, with mesh having better control and more possibilities.