Peggy Paperdoll

You could use one of the clothing alpha layers.

Empting your trash folder in SL is just like emptying your trash folder in a Windows operating system. Those items can be recovered but you need special software or features in the program to do so. In Windows, you can recover deleted items unless those items are overwritten after you deleted them. The items you deleted, however, are not stored on your computer so you cannot do anything to recover them......they're gone for good. Linden Lab could recover the items (just like you could if you have a program or feature to do so). But, the same problem exists about "until that data is overwritten". The amount of data being sent to the LL servers is tremendous so that overwrting is going to happen considerably faster than your computer (instead of a day or two, or even a week to two, the time for the the data to be destroyed by other data be written over it is much much shorter......it could be minutes or seconds). Though that is not the primary reason LL generally won't even try to recover items you've emptied from your trash folder, it is a big reason. Time, effort, along with a pretty good chance it won't be possible LL's policy is not to "undelete" the items. You can certainly try though by submitting a support ticket....but I serously doubt LL will help A lesson learned. Sometimes those lessons are hard but learn from it.

I, too, have no experience with MSI laptops (no experience with laptops at all, in fact). But I have a little experience with MSI graphics cards and I've read some reviews on the MSI motherboards. Both hardware devices seem to be very reliable (I know the video cards are from direct experience). Judging by that, alone, I'd say you can trust the brand. But for the performance f\or neither are known to be top of the line. Good, but there's better on the market. That's probably why you are seeing a good deal for the money.

I'm sorry I haven't been on the forums since I posted earlier.....I just now saw your edit. It may not be all your problem but your video card is not less than 90% of your problem. The 405 card is the lowest performing card in the 400 series. It's not up to the 3D requirements that SL needs for a good experience. It's barely above most of the onboard graphic accelerators that come with low spec'd computers. I had no success finding an independent review for the card. All I could find (after quite a search) was a benchmark for the card. It shows where the card stands against the more recent cards from both nVidia and AMD........it's at the bottom of the heap. Sorry for the bad news about that. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu.php?gpu=GeForce 405 That aside, since you can log in you might try setting your graphics preferences to the lowest settings to see if that helps. You can do that before you log at the log in screen. If it helps then one slider at a time move to the right, in small increments, until you reach the point of problems then back off slightly. That will be what you'll have to live with until you get a better performing video card.

"Hardware is good enough" doesn't really tell anyone much about the hardware. Good enough as in the listed minimum requirements is not really good enough for anything but getting in-world.......your quality of graphics is going to be very low. Launch your viewer (you don't need to log in). Under the "Help" menu click on "About Second Life". In the dialog that pops up you'll see your basic system spec's that are reported to the servers. Copy those and post back here. Don't start a new thread to add that information. Instead use the "Options" at the upper right corrner of you post and "Edit". And you said your ADSL speed is 2.5 kbps. I don't think that's correct since a phone line connection is typically 56 kbps and that absolutely will not be enough for SL. Did you mean 2.5 mbps? If so, that's plenty fast enough.

Relax. Nothing severe happened and you almost definitely lost nothing from your inventory or your friends list. That "kicked out" part is when you lost the connection to the servers and/or crashed. Your cache is corrupted (the probably reason that happened is that you lost the connection and/or crashed). The first step is the do the simple........clear you cache using your preferences then try SL again. About half the time that clears up the problem and everything is back as you had it before (though it will take a little longer to log in and for everything to rezz around you). If that doesn't do the trick the next step is to manually clear your cache (which in nothing more than deleting everything in the cache folder). To do that, launch your viewer but don't bother to log in. Open your preferences go the the same tab you went to to clear your cache using the preferences. Next to the button to click to clear the cache you'll see where the cache is located on your computer. Note that path (write it down with a pencil or pen or copy and paste it to some text edittor.........any way to give you the location of the cache on your computer). Close the viewer and navigate to that location your computer. Open the file names "cache" and delete everything in it (select all - delete). It's sometimes helpful to restart your computer but I really don't think it's necessary.......do that if you want. Then log back into SL but instead of logging back in to your normal log location log into one of the Linden Lab maintained sims (if you don't have the "Locaton" field shown in your viewer go to preferences and on the general tab you check the box to show it (that's for SL's viewer 3...........if you are using another viewer or a TPV then you'll have to look for that option in your preferences). Type in that location field "Pooley, Lime, or Aqua" (that's just three of the many LL sims but those are the ones I remember off the top of my head). Log in. You'll arrive at a water sim under water with no prims or scripts in the sims and the textures will be very limited. Move a few steps away from the landing point to avoid others arriving from landing on top you. The open your inventory and look at your texture count near the top of the box.....it will say something like "fetching xxx items". If your counter hasn't started then jump start it by typing some random letters in the search field until it does start. Now, just wait for the inventory to fully load. You can tell with it is fully loaded by the ""fetching xxx items" turns to "xxx items fetched". This process can take a while so be patient. Don't chat, IM, change clothing or anything else........just wait. Once your inventory has fully loaded, close the inventory and TP back home or where ever you normally log into. Your stuff should be back and all fixed. Editing to add: Doing as Dilbert suggested is also somthing do that might clear your problem too..........In fact, you might do both his an my suggestions. At the same time that you manually clear your cache. Just reboot the router and modem by unpluging from the electrical source for 3 to 5 minutes the plugging back in. I would do that after I deleted the cache contents but before I restarted my computer. It's easiest to regain your Internet connection by restarting your computer.

"Your concerns are for the base SL user, correct? I question what the base SL user is. I do not believe it is someone on an antiquated system, running no graphics. I consider that a fringe extreme." ------------------ Then you consider a brand new computer that has an i5 CPU with the HD 2000 video adapter a system that is fully capable of delivering the proformance that my I5 system with a GTX 550 Ti is capable of doing? Or forget the HD 2000 and say they have an nVidia GT 510 discrete card.......is that going to deliver the same proformance as my system? No, Charollote niether of the examples I mentioned would........not even close. And that's not even considering my connection or how I have my system configured or how I have my graphics set for both my nVidia card and my SL preferences. How many users have their cache set up as I have mine (or yours, even)? How many users insist on connecting wirelessly? Or how many people insist on having yaHoo chat running while in SL? Voice users...do they know what the additional bandwidth requirement is for that "simple" feature? How many users browse sites and download music or videos from You tube while in SL? Many people have brand new computers with sales oriented "high specs"........they don't know better so they cannot be blamed. But, believe me, they are numerous and that is a very big reason for the low retention rate for SL. And, honey, an "antiquated" system could be defined as one that is two years old (even less). It's all about dealing with a basically ignorant audience. That is not meant to be derogatory in any way. It's just a fact of life that most users who are residents of SL are just like most users of the Internet in general. They don't know what is happening when they do anything on their computer........and, in most cases, that is just fine since they don't need to know. We have to compensate for the facts of life with an average user of SL.

"... Perhaps we can get Gracie to tell us what size the textures are?" -------------------------------------------------------------- That certainly would be helpful, along with the total texture count for the project. But on the image size, it's sort of irrelevant since we already know we are going to be required to use textures that have, at least, one dimension at 1024 pixels. That means that each texture is going to be large (larger than most requirements for textures in SL but for any chance of quality we have to go with it). I'm pretty sure Gracie's textures are smaller than the size we are pushed into........a 256 by 256 texture delivers a pretty darn good quality (even for a snapshot of an avatar). What I saw was a very goo level of detail and quality and suspect the textures used were 512 by 512..........that's entirely a guess since I have no way of know the resolution of the textures she used. I really doubt those textures were 1024 at any dimension. That meass they were smaller than what we are going to use (possibly significantly smaller). The lagging down after a few minutes indicates your graphics abilities on your computer are working harder than what they are capable to working for sustained, continuous rendering (you are probably running out of video memory). Each individual's computer and it's associated hardware will be different. The system (not the viewer, the computer system itself) has a lot to do with it too. We cannot do anything about any of that except make it as easy as we possibly can for the average user and maintain a reasonable level of quality. I'm just trying to find out that that "reasonable level or quality" is. I've met a lot of resistance on that (plus a couple of other things)..........that has caused a little bit of friction so I'm lowering my rhetoric a little. I want a defined project, the goals, who we plan to get to those goals plus the logistics (recieving the images, obtaining the images for edit after we've recieved them, returning the images after editing, some way to tie to the images to the residents who have submitted............a whole long list) Some of what I want cannot be gotten until we have a defined "mission" and a "mission goal". We are not there yet..........I'm not sure are even close. So my ruffling of feathers at this stage is really unnecessary so I'm going to stop injection my concerns until we get something done about priorties and ojbectives. Sorry if you or anyone else cannot understand where I'm coming from and the reasons I put out my concerns. As far as anything that has broadly (broadly because I don't know exactly what we want to do and how we want to get there) mentioned there's nothing that I cannot do for the portion of the project that I've volunteered for. I wanted to try to arrive at the things that need to be arrived at before we can go forward but that has caused friction so I'll let someone else take up my slack.

I wouldn't with that exchange you showed. I, too, subspect the user as being underaged. But a suspicion based of that flimsy back and forth is not enough to justify an AR. The reason I say that is that LL has a history (might be a policy) to, in cases like this, to err on the side of caution. They would block access to the person, request confirmation of age by requiring the person to provide concert evidence of their age before unblocking the account. That can be difficult due to some people's reluctance to place any personal information on the Internet (even in an email directly to LL). There is also a problem with local laws for the person that must be taken into account. If the person is truly underage, then no harm, no foul........but it the person is not underaged then you just put that person into a difficult situation for just a "hunch".

Sorry, that is not true Char. The concerns that's I've so far is concerns for the project only and the people (you, Knowl, Dres, Luc, Tamara, and others who have voluteered in one way or another). I can mention a statement by Knowl last night when we chatting at the new meeting site. The statement that he was very concerned about the "workload" put on editors and wanted to limit the number of images to download for editing to 10 at a time. As far as I could tell his concern that putting 20 avatars on a single prim is too much work because 10 would be easier..........that's BS. It's easier to put 20 on single texture than 10. It's easier to put a hundred avatars on a single texture than 10. It's the files that you have be created to save each texture to to return the edited images for placement. How is it easier to edit 10 textures at a time for each different texture to return than 20 (or 40, or 50, or.......)? Photoshop, GIMP, Paint Shop Pro, and even Paint.NET can handle as many layers as you want on a single texture. Put a hundred on one texture it's easier than putting 10 each on 10 separate textrues. Worrying about the editors tells me that we are not concerned about the residents.........we are concerned about the project volunteers Each volunteer did so knowing what is required to accomplish what we want........if we did not then maybe we shouldn't have volunteered at all. I've heard too many references to that sort of "concern" and not enough about the very people we are supposedly doing this for and requesting their cooperation in the for submitting images for our project. Now I'm back to lurking.

No, I don't want you to anything. I mentioned your experience vs my experience for one reason and one reason only. You have issues with lag on a good system. I did not (also on a good system......not a high end system. Just a little better than average). You're system is better than what most people have and if you had issues, the very likely (almost a lead pipe cinche) that a lot of other users are going to have issues too. That's my concern with our project. We say that just because my system won't have issues (which I probably wouldn't) that we can say the residents visiting the site won't so it's not a problem. It is a potential huge problem that will only show up once we get well into the project.........after a huge amount of work has been done to create the display. Waiting for that to happen is waiting for the world to explode around our goals. I said it before, but got convinced to change my mind..........I'm not going to participate in this forum discussion anymore. I'm rubbing too many people wrong with my concerns and my insistance that we think seriously about what we are doing that will effect the outcome of the project. I volunteered to edit.............so that's what I'm going to do. Tell exactly what you want, how to get the images to edit, how to return the edited images for assembly and putting in place for the display. I'll do what you give me and let the project go where ever it goes....good, bad or somewhere in between. You want my opinions ask me directly.......otherwise I'm shutting the hell up.

My experience at the 1000 Avatar display was sort of the opposite. When I first arrived very little was rezzing for me an it was noticably lagged. I did not have my stats bar open so I do not know what the FPS were....but judging by eye it appeared to be somewhere around 10 or so. Maybe 30 seconds after arriving most of the textures in my cone of view were rezzed and I did have any noticable lag (again my stats bar was not open.......just my judging from what it looked and felt like) I walked up to the wall I was facing when I arrived to get a better look at the pictures and cammed around on that wall.........yes it was pretty impressive on the quality of the images (I tried to judge the image size by clicking on the prim which the image was placed on to see the prim size........I couldn't get that to make any good judgement but I figured the images were 512 x 512 pixels in size). It was about that time that Char mentioned that her system was suffering with dropping frame rates. I opened my stats bar at that time..........I was surprised to see that my FPS were well above 40 (even bumping to 70 or 80 in spikes). But it dawned on me that was probably due to having such a limited cone of view since I was cammed in pretty close to a single image. So I brought my cam back to the default view angle and spun around to change the cone of view to see what the frames did.........the dropped as I expected them to do down to about 25 or so until everything rezzed a few seconds later then started climbing again. Char had to leave since she was afraid she was in danger of crashing. I left soon after that. I never looked at the sim performance since that has little to do with my system performance unless there is something drastically wrong with the sim itself. Scripts, of course, will give sims headaches if they are poorly coded or excessive but that appears not the be the case at the 1000 Avatar display. I don't think anything we would do with our project that would effect the sim performance to a point of it being an issue as long as we stay away from scripts as much as possible. It's the individual users' computers that I'm concerned with. I have an above average system so I cannot say "well, it's good for me so it's going to be good for others". The case that Char encountered issues and I did not when our systems were under pretty much identical situations. I think Char has a pretty good computer too (I'm sure it's probably a little better than the average users of SL). If that experience can be avoided with our project then I want to make that happen.......if it's something we cannot avoid, then I want be confident that we did did everything we could to make the experience for the visitors as lag free as possible. Find the best trade off for quality while giving anyone visiting the display the least problems. Super quality is fantastic.....but useless if no one can enjoy it. Texture, by far, are the biggest component effectly lag....hence my concern about texture size (we anticipate a very high number of textures in this project which requires attention to all that rendering load we are going to place on every visitor's graphics hardware).

I misunderstood your question too. From what I've read and understood about single cards for two monitors vs two cards, one for each monitor is pretty much as your understanding appears to be. The two card setup will have more graphics performance for each, individual monitor. But that setup requires additional hardware features that are easily (and often) overlooked. The motherboard has to have 2 PCIe x 16 slots for both cards to perform equally and most motherboards have 1 x16 slot and 1 x 1 slot (gaming MB's have multiple x 16 slots but they are sustainially more expensive). Then there's the fact that an nVidia GTX 550 Ti card is physically twice as wide as lower end cards and the card will cover the slot directly below it on the motherboard which, of course makes that slot unavailable for use. The motherboard design has to be such that you can use 2 PCIe x16 slots. You need to make sure the slot layout for the PCIe x 16 slot will allow the installation of both cards. That often requires that the MB has 3, not just 2, x 16 slots (I've seen MB slots positioned so that the 2 x 16 slots are not directly above or below each other but I've also seen them positioned directly above and below each.....which, in my mind makes the effective 2 x 16 slot spec sort of misleading. If you can afford the addition expense and the graphics performance is that important to you for both monitors then the dual card is the way to go. But, just a note. I've heard the SL doesn't play very well with SL under the dual monitor setup (I've never attempted it myself so that may be hearsay).

The problem most likely has nothing to do with your viewer. If you are somewhere and you suddenly cannot move the typical issue is your connection to the servers. The symptoms are that you cannot walk/run, fly, or chat........but you can spin your avatar around. Everything remains the same so if someone is walking and is in your field of view they just keep walking. If you are dancing then you cannot stop dancing. Sometimes, if loose the connection and you are flying or walking you cannot stop and just keep going in the same direction (you can push the arrow keys to turn but all that does is change your view as if you used your camera to view yourself from another angle). You will also fly or walk through walls, buildings and other objects. Usually (but not always) you'll get a pop-up notice that you've been disconnected from the server and gives you a choice to stay and read chat history or quit). A relog is the only way to correct the lost connection. The first things you should check when that happens is your Internet connection. If the connection problem is severe you will not be able to go to a website. The problem is very seldom that severe though and if it is then you should to see of your modem and router are properly connected, your network interface device is working or your ISP is experiencing an outage. The normal fix for the problem is simple. Reboot your modem and router by unplugging them from the electrical source for 3 to 5 minutes then plugging them back in. Once the lights on the devices settle their normal blinking routine reboot your computer to re-establish your Internet connect. The other very common cause for your problem is the method used to connect to you local network......it's either wireless or hardwired with a Cat 5e Ethernet cable. The wireless connections are most prone to outside interference which will cause problems with programs like SL and it's huge amount of data transfer to and from your computer (plus it's sustainally slower). Avoid that method if at all possible. Connect with a good grade Ethernet cable instead.

Ah come on, Cinn. Everyone knows you are Rod's atl.

Aside from the region prim support the rest is irrelevant unless we get script happy. It's the users' hardware resources I'm speaking about. SL does great job of managing the resources for the sims. Region performance can be flawless and people with machines that have limited resources will have issues and problems..........some severe. Textures are, by far, the most problematic for a large percentage of users. I'm only trying to address that right now.

About 5 minutes at the 1000 Avatar exhibit when you and I were there you had to leave because you were afraid you were gong to crash.....that is going to happen a lot of people if we are not careful. I had no problem at all and after the initial rezz of the images my FPS were almost 30......even when I turned around forcing my graphics to render a how new set of images. But my system is not the same as yours. We have to consider the lowest denominator. If that person can enjoy the project without too many problems and the quality is still good (not excellent, good) then I believe that should be our goal.

Read some of the tech questions in "Answers"..........you're in for a bit surprise. I know several people who use 1.23 or TPV's coded to that base. I also know many people who use onboard GMA IGP's, and those in chip graphics like the HD 2000 Intel graphics. Weak graphics for 3D environments........okay for web surfing and streaming media. Not everyone wants or needs a computer that is more than just low to mid range in the graphics department. They don't even think of what is happening for them to be able to see anything...if it works for most of their needs it's great. We have to find a way to include as many of those people as possible (can we include them all? Probably not). Setting our image quality too high for the majority of users is not a good idea. On that other computer of mine. I have it because it was given to me by a friend who went to the dark side and got a laptop. I built this computer for her a vew years ago and did not put a graphics card in it because she couldn't make up her mind what she wanted and we were going to upgrade later..........we never did since the onboard was good enough for her needs. I have it connected with a KVM switch and sort of just play around with it sometimes. I just got a new card for this computer (GTX 550 Ti) a couple weeks ago and took the old card that was in this computer and put in that inherited computer (a GTX 250 ). All have to do is go into the BIOS and disable the discrete card (the GTS 250) and connect the monitor cable to that port. Not a hard thing to do. The problem is finding that setup file for 1.23 that I saved a long time ago. The GMA will not run the V-3 that is installed on that computer now.

I think you answered me. So the textures applied to a mesh have the exact same impact as textures applied to a standard prim. If there are two textures on two sides (or faces) of a prim or two polygons of a mesh the texture load for the graphics card is the same. That's what I thought.....which means there might be a saving in prims but the texture load is going to be the same. Lots of grey meshes or prims for a low graphics machine. That's undesirable in my opinion.

My problem is that I'm not convinved that we are not setting a too high quality standard for the product. I believe we can put more than 10 avatars on each texture for the "hall of avatars" method. Let me experiment a little. I'm thinking of a pssibility of 20 per texture. But there certainly will be a quality hit. I'll see it and anyone with a higher end graphics card will see it.....but I wonder how would a low end computer see it? I have another computer that has the old Intel GMA 945 IGP (this computer has no onboard graphics at all). If I can find the old viewer 1.23 setup file I have saved somewhere I can install it and disable the discrete card on the other machine, connect the onboard graphics and see for myself. I don't think the difference is going to be significant myself........but I need to test it to say one way or the other. If we are going for the most residents being able to see our work then we need to find a way for that to happen..........setting too high of a quality standard, in my opinion, will limit who can enjoy the work we are trying to do. I'm going to PM Dres to see if he can get me the textures he used for his prototype with all the layers so we are looking at the same image to compare the quality fairly. It migh take a while for me to put this experiment together.

Then I'm for exploring this option. If I understand you correctly the total texture size is still limited to the 1024 x 1024 hard limit for the texture no matter if it's done off line or in-world. We may have to settle for less than the highest detail for the textures if that's the case ir we are trying to reduce the overall prim count for the parcel........but on the other sides it seems to be possible to have higher quality images on each mesh with fewer avatars per texture. Some are more concerned with image detail than computer and sim impact. I'm trying to find a happy medium. We could get the best possible image for ever avatar if we don't concern ourselves with the users computer's hardware limitations and we have unlimited land resources. That's one extreme. The other extreme is that we could put 50 avatars on a single texture and have very low detail.........that lessens the land impact and puts a lot less stress on the users' computers graphics capabilities. There has to be a compromise somewhere........we need to find it.

Which requires that the mesh is textured (baked) before upload? If that's the case and we have someone who can (and is willing) to do that, then that could be a very good solution to both the prim count and texture rezzing issues. I can go for that. It's a great way to solve a couple of what I see as major problems for this project.

The only potential issue I can think of would be if your "DWP" logo uses any trademarked graphics such as the hand and eye SL logo. Otherwise it's just fine.

Quick question because I'm truly lost on things mesh. That ability to place more than one texture on a face of a mesh object (at least, that's what I understand you said) seems to say that more textures are going to be rendered by anyone's graphics. Prim count has two issues. One is the parcel's resource usage (which we have focused on and are focusing on here) and a prim has to be rendered no matter what the texture is to makes up the prim. My question is placing two 1024 x 512 textures on a mesh object (which is a prim) going to have the same texture rendering impact as it would if the textures were placed on two regular prims? My understanding of graphics rendering of graphics says yes it would since a texture has finite file size and that size determines how much work a graphics card/adapter needs to preform no matter what the size of the prim it's place on is. An example is prim jewerly. A necklace might have 10 gemstones, each with it's own texture and each of those textures could be different ( one a diamond, one a ruby, one an emerald, etc). Your graphics card has to render every texture for you to see it. The gemstones can be so tiny that you would have to zoom extremely close to identify what it is (diamand, ruby, or whatever) and the texture size determines how easily or difficult it is for people to see the necklace completely rezzed. A necklace with 10 1024 by 1024 unique textures will take substantially longer to rezz than a necklace with 10 128 x 128 unigue textures. Does a mesh, somehow, prevent such a rendering load on a graphics card? I can't see where would unless the textures were baked on the mesh before upload. It just a question I have before I can get behind using mesh prims for displaying anything. Trading texture load for prim count just doesn't seem like a good trade off to me.

Are you asking which is has more power? If that's the case that's hard to say definitely since the two manufacturers don't provide some specs on the all the features and capabilities. Both nVidia and AMD are going to highlight their cards best numbers in a way that makes their respective cards look the best. About the only "significant" spec difference I could see was that the nVidia has a slightly higher processor clock speed. Otherwise the card are pretty much indentical in performance. Both are suited for high demanding games. Both have a gig of DDR5 video memory. http://www.amd.com/us/products/desktop/graphics/amd-radeon-hd-6000/hd-6850/pages/amd-radeon-hd-6850-overview.aspx#2 http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-560ti/specifications Personally I'd go with the nVidia card. Not that it's so much more powerful but because I've been using nVidia cards for several years and I trust the chipset manutacturer. I've also had ATI (which is now AMD) cards and really didn't have any problems with them except that, at the time, ATI's drivers were a real pain to update with the catylist drivers. Both cards will run SL very well.