Nalates Urriah

I used to do lots of SL Video. See it here. As you look at my older and newer work you'll, hopefully, see a difference in quality. Practice improves quality. Started with FRAPS and moved to OBS. For work I have Adobe's tools. So Premiere Pro for video, Audition for audio, and Photoshop for editing still images. But there are free and cheap tools available. And some that cost a few hundred to purchase. It isn't so much the tools as is it is the talent that is using them. But better tools make it more fun. My first video was a tribute to NecronomVI (barely SFW) in 2014. I used FRAPS, Firestorm with a mouse, and Adobe. Later I got OBS as the developer of FRAPS stopped developing and Windows left it behind. I also changed to using a SpaceNavigaor for camera control, which made it nicer and easier. There are many people that make SL Video or aka machinima. Lots of tutorials online. For VLogs to be popular you need interesting and frequent content. YouTube's SHORTS have become very popular. They are 30 seconds to may be 5 minutes. Regularly appearing new content is the key to building a popular channel.

@TrishSummers It depends on what the avatars have sat on. Strawberry Singh, aka Strawberry Linden now, has a blog with instructions for posing avatars NOT sitting on furniture but using 'poses' purchased and run by the viewer. Her tutorials are here. Plus there is lots of other stuff too. Then there is SL furniture... meaning all the stuff an avatar can sit on, couch, chair, bed, car, etc, Depending on which posing software the designer used, there are different ways to adjust our poses. Some make it easy and include controls in the furniture's menu. The blue dialogs that popup have a button for ADJUST or some variation of that. This will let each person in couples poses/animations adjust their 'pose' in X, Y, & Z directions. Depending how the furniture is positioned the orientation may or may not match the world x,y,z. I'll often open the mini-map and figure out the orientation and how the adjustments move the avatar. Other times I just trial-and-error it. Typically you can select whether to move the avatar position 1, 5, or 25 cm per click. You also have the choice to save your personal position for the current pose/animation. Often you can save the change you have made across all the poses/animations. I find the later a bit flaky. While it is often possible to find and move the pose balls via system edit (alt-ctrl-T to toggle invisible-visible, right-click the ball and edit) these edits are not saved. The next time the pose ball is rezzed it returns to its default position. But often this is the quickest way to adjust a pose for a one time photo. When couples are playing on furniture one or the other will adjust position. If both try to adjust as the same time it just gets silly. Because of the exaggerated differences in avatars in SL it often impossible to fit two avatars together in a believable way. I won't dance or hook up with avatars that are way larger or smaller than me. There is another way to adjust an avatars sitting position. You can adjust Avatar Height. (FS: right-click the avatar, select Appearance->Hover Height). The downside is you have to adjust back when you stand. And it only works for up and down (Z axis).

@AmyPinkLegend Slink use is on the way out. I am definitely a Slink fan. The Redux bodies were/are the technology leaders providing low ACI and low script count while providing a wide collection of tools for working with the body. BUT... if you never got the tools... there is no legal way to get them. Whoever told you the body looks old... its in their head. I suspect if you don't tell them which body you are wearing and they don't use a "What Is She Wearing?" they won't be able to tell which body you are wearing. . However, now that we have PBR rendering in SL Viewers and other 3rd party viewers are adopting PBR we will see clothes designers start to take advantage of that tech. Which means the clothes on Slink bodies WILL start to show their age. I think Belliza and Maitreya LaraX are the the most similar to Slink Hourglass and Original. While I still mostly wear my Slink bodies and still buy some new clothes for them I am shopping more and more for LaraX. I sort of boycott Belliza because they are restrictive in who they will allow to make clothes for them. ppppffftthh!

I didn't start tracking until early 2012. I added a feature to drop out the numbers of a massive drop in users when the servers go down. I started tracking because I saw a seasonal variation in the number of concurrent users. There is seasonal variation. More users during North American winter and less in summer. This variation appears to have changed during the pandemic. But I have had problems with my in-world data tracker. I suspect Midnoot's graph is more accurate than mine. Peak use is about 2 to 3PM SLT. Minimum use is about 2-3AM SLT. Depending on when North American users are logged in they will see the numbers in the mid to high 40,000s. Others are likey to see from the mid 30k's to mid 40k's. I catch the high and low concurrent user numbers for the month by querying the SL API. Not sure where Midnoot gets the numbers. The pandemic broke the trend. The most significant change appears to be in the minimum number of concurrent users. 2024 will likely show the trend as resuming or permanently broken.

OBS Studio is the ONE! You can keep things simple or get as advanced as you want.

A simple image editor is PhotoScape X. There is a free version and a Pro version US$40. Technically more complex and more creatively diverse are GIMP & Paint.Net. Both free. There are numerous pro editors, like PhotoShop. Search for image editors.

In many cases, it is a matter of time. Eventually, your name scrolls out of the ban list. Depending on a region or group's popularity it can be days or months.

I have yet to figure out the fascination with mirrors. They are an interesting new tech in SL... but in a world where my makeup and hair remain perfect, what's the point? Wait... are the models to be painted with watercolors? Or did you mean nude models for a painting done with watercolors? 🤔

Let us know how it goes... best wishes.

Not everyone uses a dark theme. When you post consider using a format that works for light and dark themes.

Unfortunately, that is about the only way. I assume you will open inventory, find the AO in one of your outfit folders and copy it. Then you can paste it as a link in all the other outfit folders. If that is too tedious... I make Add and Remove Outfits. I use these for things I may want to add or remove from whatever outfit I am wearing at the moment. I have a SciFi Eye and Hand Effects that is a collection of 11 parts. Another is Wings and Butterflies. And of course all the sex stuff. These allow me to right-click such a folder in the Outfits panel and Add to Outfit or Remove from Outfit. You could make one with just AO and then add it to any outfit you wear that is missing the AO. Save the outfit and eventually, you'll have them all updated. It may seem less tedious than doing them all at once. Regardless, however, you do it, it's going to be a bit of work.

It can be tedious waiting for your AO to play the part of the animation you want. I've found I can speed up or slow down the animations using Firestorm. Try DEVELOPER (top menu - Ctrl-Alt-Q to reveal/hide) ->Avatar->Animation Speed->... You can increase or decrease playback speed in increments of 10%. It helps. But not as simple as I would like. Being able to move a playhead through the animation would be great. In the camera, there is a Firestorm option to Freeze Frame. The result is a static render. It is a bit fuzzy and tricky to learn to use Freeze Frame. But experiment to learn. Ignore the fuzzy. Your snaps will render at whatever setting you select. When I know I will primarily be taking images I use Black Dragon and its POSER. I let an animation play until it is close to the pose I want then I trigger the POSER to start and tweak my pose. It is still not a perfect solution. But it is really handy.

There are script 'weight' scales in the marketplace for free. They usually say something about being under (yay) or over (boo) 3MB of scripts. When it comes to performance issues things get complex. There is viewer, server, and network performance. FPS is mostly a viewer-side thing. Script performance is more a server-side thing shown by Percent of Scripts Run and free script time. Sailing when less than 50% of scripts run per frame... SUCKS! Scene render time and mouse/keyboard responsiveness is more an indication of a good or poor network connection. But, these are not PURE distinctions. Many of these factors mix viewer, network, and server performance. I suggest you not get overly concerned with performance or avatar render cost (ARC/ACI) It is nice to be considerate of others. Thanks. But if you are exploring a region with you and one or two other avatars in it... it doesn't matter. A region with 20+ avatars is a different case. When crossing regions we easily run into the limits. The number of items we wear and our script weight has a big impact on how quickly and successfully we cross. With scripts the number and size are factors. However, it is the amount of DATA the script is using that slows the transfer. I haven't read the system code to know whether the body of the script is transferred. I doubt it. But, the data is and it is unique for each user of the script. While the script code is reusable among users the data isn't. So... depending on what you are doing and where you are the important performance factors change.

Most FPS games are highly optimized for a single style of play. So guns and vehicles are highly optimized. The surroundings, clothes, avatars, animations, and just about everything in the game except movement are downloaded to your computer when the game is installed. You'll also find that play areas in FPShooters are either small or procedural-spaces. Plus the entire space is pre-installed and never changes. The result is in a FPS there are a dozen or so guns. SL, literally, has thousands of different guns. All that information about which gun and where it is attached and which animations are associated with it has to be communicated to every SL player. For a FPS the communication is very terse 'this gun'. The FPS game on your computer already has all the info about the gun. The variety of clothes available in SL is enormous. The possible combination of colors and textures for a single shirt is huge. The SL system is designed to handle that variety. FPSs are optimized and the possibility of that measure of variety is eliminated. Basically a FPS is designed to minimize the information needed to be exchanged between players. SL to provide the creative space people like can't do that.

OUCH! THAT is a NEEDLE.

I disagree... it is possible. It gets complicated and ambiguous if one attempts to circumscribe the real subject. Which in these forums leads to arguments from and misunderstanding by those with a weak attachment to reality. SL to some degree is an escape from reality. So the less attached seem to like it here.

No... it is not a legit question. It is a fantasy detached from reality. So you have any idea how much money Amazon makes from sex and porn?

This is a shot for viewer DoF. Cinn's hair and the monarchs would be a difficult separation. I find even AI selection in a case like has problems when colors are similar. If I wanted a high quality editable image I would use freeze frame and take color and depth captures. Then do the depth in PS with Filter->Lens Blur. I would probably tweak the depth map to increase contrast turning Cinn and you into 100% black.

Yes. Everything in SL is calaculated. The calculations happen on the server and client sides to distribute the work. Plus the work is highly optimized to reduce duplication and minimize the data needing to be transferred. Consider animations. Animations are localized to the viewer. The viewer moves the arms and legs doing all the calculations required. That movement is not transmitted to others. The amount of information needed for legs, arms, hands, fingers, tails, wings, face, and boobie bounce would overwhelm the system. Only which animation is being played is sent to others, well to the server which then tells everyone else which animation to use for your avatar. If you could see everyone's screen at the same time, you would see that we are not all in perfect sync. Each viewer, at any given instant, is showing a frame of the animation playing on your avatar depending on how long the animation has played on that specific viewer. The when is controlled by when they or you came into the region and when you entered their field of view. While control-S (Firestorm) will sync all animations in your viewer it does not affect what other viewers show. SL avatars have a collision... capsule... an oblong cylinder with rounded ends. Animations do NOT move the collision capsule. This is why avatars do not collide on the dance floor. To appear more realistic and avoid griefing, collisions with avatars and things, like walking on the floor, are calculated on the server side using the Havok collision engine, which is optimized for the type of math used for coordinate intersections. The viewer sends position/movement info and the Havok server decides if that is possible and sends the results to all people in the area. Thus our avatars do not walk through walls. If there is lag, we may see an avatar walk into a wall and then bounce back. Every viewer must render the entire world and all the avatars in it plus keep track of what all the avatars are doing. So the viewer advises the servers of what you are doing. The server aggregates all that info and advises all other viewers about what each avatar is doing. Each avatar in a region adds exponentially to the amount of data needing to be transmitted. For a time OpenSim and Microsoft were working to optimize the math and data flow to get more avatars into a region without lag. Last I looked, which has been years, they were up to 150+ per region. I suspect patents are why we have not seen that tech applied to SL. Desktop computing power is growing but we are nowhere near what is needed for a truly realistic virtual world where clothes and hair do not pass through the body or clothes are realistic and a full skirt can swish around our legs and not distort. Mobile devices are orders of magnitude behind our desktops. If you were to do all the calculations to render a single frame of SL on an abacus... it would take centuries. And yet it is the data transmission that is bottlenecking us.

Add to your list of "how to Check" the wireframe mode of the viewer. Ctrl-Shift-R switches the viewer in and out of wireframe mode. You can see the triangles of an object. Look at your Classic avatar body while in wireframe, no mesh body or mesh clothes. Use the triangle density of the classic avatar you see as the density of a HIGHLY optimized mesh character for SL. Well-optimized stuff will be similar. Higher density is not necessarily worse. Also, graphics card manufacturers have been optimizing their hardware for decades. Polygons per second is now an old performance measure because the count was getting bizarre. How many 100 billion polygons do you want to render in a second? Is your mesh body 8,000 polygons or 80,000? And how much difference will it make in render time? I doubt you can measure it. It is too short a time. The download time of a vertex list is minimal. The time to load a defuse map (basic color texture), normal map (bump/3D surface map), and specular map (shiny) is significant. The memory used by those textures is significant. So it is by far the textures that drag down render time. But neither of these are issues in crossings or for server loads. However, the number of items and the number of scripts greatly impact crossings. Thus we are held to 38 attachments. We are pushed to keep a low script weight, 3 MB per avatar is considered reasonable. If you fly or sail fewer scripts and attachments are significantly better. The number of avatars and the number of items they are wearing affect the region server performance because of the data load. Much of the data is avatar movement information. I am not sure standing still lessens the load. Seems like it would but I suspect the code sends a continuous stream of position data. But, maybe they did some optimization. I do know that it is easier to cam through an event than to walk through one. You can optimize your experience by lowering the number of Non-Imposter Avatars your viewer renders, lowering your draw distance, and Max Particle count. Draw distance has an effect on the regions. Less draw distance means fewer regions need to send you information and the region you are in often sends less information to your viewer. Consider if you use 128m DD while standing at the edge of a region, only half the region (256x256m) you are in needs to send you information, and the same for the nearby region. So, 2 servers send about 1 region of data. Using a 1024m DD you have 9 regions sending you 9 regions of information. You are creating some serious lag and it is lag that affects everyone, not just you. Reducing lag and increasing performance in SL gets W A Y technical and complicated.

I tend to store all my SL images on my computer. The ones I think are worth editing in Photoshop often make it to the SL Form in different places; landscapes, Tasteful Nudes, SL today, Avatar Looks today... I mostly avoid posting the same image in multiple places. I like finding the people from SL posting on Flickr. And there is the group FOCUS Art Magazine which ties Flickr and SL together. If I like the edited results of images and think they are interesting I'll post them on Flickr. If I think they are sexy enough I'll post them on Slushe.com. However, SL images are definitely looked down on at Slushe. Those posting there are talented and perverse.

£50... 😲 ...well... MY suggestion would be ME!

The change is the upgrade to the SL System to add PBR rendering. The Lab's PBR is in the early stages of development. Firestorm has an Alpha version of their viewer that uses PBR. You can talk to the Firestorm peps and join the Alpha-level testing team. They have an Apha viewer available. Beq just announced it in this section of the forum. You can learn how to change your water or... OR... help the FS and Linden devs fix the viewers to handle your water as it should.

This is a common problem known as Texture Thrashing. You can search the net for help with Second Life texture thrashing. Specifiy your viewer brand for more specific help. The cause is your video card running out of video memory and discarding textures to render other textures. So a texture render starts blurry and progresses to sharp and clear and then reverts to blurry and re-renders repeating the process again and again. There are workarounds. One can reduce Draw Distance, remove HUDs not in use, turn off thumbnails in chat, restart the viewer, and pay attention to what you are wearing and your ACI/ARC. Depending on your computer's graphics system you may be able to make tweaks to get more video memory (VRAM). When using the CPU's built-in graphics one can assign system memory for use as VRAM. Which is not possible with a dedicated graphics card. One can add to system memory relatively easily. If you turn around, like 180 - stop a minute - turn another 180, and find textures previously rendered have turned gray, try increasing your viewer cache size to the max. The setting is in Preferences.

Hummmm...... 🤔 NiranV has the same idea, make a better user interface. You can see his efforts in Black Dragon. Henri likes the old v1 user interface. You can see that in use in Cool VL Viewer. The Firestorm Viewer has multiple user interfaces a user can switch between. The SL Viewer has a UI designed by professionals trained in UI design. They have done considerable A-B testing with the SL Viewer. The Lindens think the SL Viewer is best for the new user. Debatable. The SL Viewer and third-party viewers have very similar features built into the viewer's foundation code. The major difference is in the UI. Firestorm makes many more features available in their version. Apparently, users prefer the more complex viewer as about 75% of users use the Firestorm Viewer. Your idea of editing the UI XML files is not something a newbie is going to do. Those making viewers already work with the XML files. I don't expect anyone to pick up your idea of editing and publishing a modified viewer. So, if you think it is a good idea, you'll need to do it yourself.