Candide LeMay

We don't pay VAT when buying L$. OP, did you pay with a credit/debit card or with paypal? I also use euros and I have found that when paying with a card it has the worst exchange rates. When paying with paypal you get somewhat better exchange rates. In an ideal situation we should be able to say "charge this payment in USD" and have our local bank do the conversion which gives you the most favorable rate. But obviously every leech in the chain wants to collect some fees so...

The person who uploaded the mesh into SL (and butchered the LODs in the process) is not necessarily the same person who created the model. There's a staggering amount of 3rd party content in SL, in various levels of legality ranging from public domain to assets ripped from PC games.

Right. You don't know what EEP settings people are using so you can't rely on it. You also can't create scenes where you're in a dark place yet can see through a window/door/opening that it's sunny outside etc. I'm guessing it would be computationally expensive to automatically detect surfaces and objects that are occluded from the sun/moon, hence the flag.

I would welcome a flag to indicate if an object should receive EEP lighting or not. It's very hard to make caves and other enclosed dark places unless you make a custom EEP to hide the sun and the moon, which has its own drawbacks.

For such a simple object, why are you even bothering with LODs? Just reuse the highest one for all levels and be done with it. It shouldn't affect the LI that much. Also, you're a beginner, don't fret about LI and rendering cost etc at this stage. Get comfortable with making stuff first.

Another aspect of this change that bothers me is this: How much of the collected revenue from these fees stays in SL and could at least in principle be reinvested and how much goes to Tilia? Tilia is a separate business entity and them making more money does diddly squat for SL/us.

The question was how to increase revenue. As far as I can tell SL has been profitable the whole time. Good ole Ebbe described it as a cash machine few years back.

Attract more cows instead of milking the existing ones more and more. I know they've tried and failed repeatedly, so maybe if they can't figure out how to do that they don't deserve increased revenue?

https://www.blendersecrets.org/book I have not read the book version but I like their videos very much (they are free on youtubes). Short and to the point. I'm not sure if it's suitable for someone who doesn't know blender at all, but once you know some basics it's fun to explore based on what your interests are.

You can max out the GPU once you go to higher resolutions. Firestorm 6.6.3 with everything turned on, 240m draw distance, 2560x1440px, no frame limiter (getting 56fps in this scene):

Has been going on for a long time

Whitelist your cache location in your antivirus/defender if you haven't already.

If we have a resident curated list of interesting places it needs to be kept up to date. That could be an opportunity for new avatars to explore the grid and earn some money (although I would not restrict it to only new avatars) - verify if these 5 places in the list are still current, update the listings with a fresh snapshot and get 10L. Who will finance this? LL certainly won't, but we could crowdfund this ourselves. If there are say 1000 places to check, weekly, that would require only 8000L for the rewards each month. I'd be happy to donate few hundred L into the pot regularly for this to happen. With few dozens donors this could be a viable thing with a positive effect.

In the PBR viewer it's no longer possible to disable ALM - it's always on, so everyone should (finally!) see the same thing.

https://secondlife-status.statuspage.io/incidents/5rjh7k9wlvyj

The did improve avatar rendering performance quite a bit since last summer. I was at a music event with 58 avatars (ALM on, shadows off, no av impostors or av complexity limits) and still got ~25 FPS on my gaming rig. That would have been unheard of just a year ago.

Also check that you don't have "Show property lines" activated inworld. Toggling that setting (ctrl-alt-shift-p) makes my GPU usage go from 10% to 60% without changing anything else.

It's neither a TPV issue nor a privacy breach. I can type your name into the inworld (or web) search and if I get no result back I can assume you have show in search turned off. It's as simple as that.

Set your frame limiter to something reasonable (30-40FPS) in the rendering prefs. Do not use v-sync (this used to be on by default and is now off by default, which might explain your experience). You don't need 200+ FPS to SL.

Only Linden Lab has the power to set and enforce standards and their interest in doing so is inversely proportional to how much effort it takes.

I've seen such errors before when switching video cards. Try to delete your viewer settings completely (make a copy first etc just in case) and restart the viewer. For FS it's typically stored in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Firestorm_x64\

1440p but I've been eyeing a 4K monitor

That ship has long sailed. LL made two mistakes here 1) they included the LOD generator in the uploader instead of forcing people to provide lods 2) implemented adjustable LOD factor in the client (how are you supposed to fine tune the lod switching if the distance at which it happens is different for different people??). Each of them is bad but the combination of both at the same time is lethal. We'll swim in vertex vomit until the end of times. (for extra amusement, try to run around with LOD factor set to 0 for a while and weep. there's basically no preserved object silhouette in sight, unless it's old skool prims)

I've just tested this with a basic alt. Sent 30 offline IMs to it (with pauses between them). The alt received 30 emails, one for each IM. After I've logged in with the alt I saw the first 25 IMs inworld. So it seems the limits are for whatever LL stores for your inworld viewing, not the number of emails they send (and why would they limit this? sending emails is cheap/free).

Last time I looked you only get about 30% of the revenue generated by your items in Roblox, the rest is swallowed by various fees&leeches. If that still makes commercial sense for creators compared to SL's much more favorable fee structure it paints a bleak picture about the state of SL's economy.