NiranV Dean

Shadows at high altitudes are currently majorly broken. Due to the massive code merge with the performance viewer i had to revert some code how shadow precision, bias and error settings scale at altitudes, it was necessary to get shadows to work at all (they were completely broken), this however left them in a weird mixed state between what the LL code does and what BD code does so right now with the LL settings and interaction, the shadow shaders break really hard on 1000+ height (this is due to precision rounding errors seen in all viewers not just with shadows). It will be fixed in the next update.

You might want to check RLV, it can lock you into running mode. Also some AO's and scripts can do it as well (somehow?). Also updating the Viewer can help, there was a bug with running mode in older versions where the always run option couldn't be turned off.

You can change the controls! Preferences - Keybindings. Unless you were talking about the Discord only "Beta" it wasn't incorporated until just now. Today marks the day they have been officially implemented, you will see MASSIVELY improved performance. FS on the other hand always takes a while to implement LL changes, they have release cycles, testing phases and so on. 3-6 months per update.

Now wouldn't that make Nekos both half-breeds and bastards? As far as i can tell it would be frowned upon having a human and furry married (here in germany for instance the court would most likely count it as beastia.. *caugh*) thus they would most likely NOT be married, making this a child of two unmarried people thus a bastard... and since humans and furries are considered two different "races" Nekos would also be half-breeds. I might be missing something here.

Who cares. Also i'm allergic to pollen and grass, are you trying to kill me?

Hating Nekos doesn't mean hating the person behind it. I just hate Nekos themselves. But then again i hate humans too.. and furries... oh well i guess i hate everything. Also a "bastard" is literally what it would be called unless i have a wrong idea of what a bastard is. More commonly we would call it a hybrid, hence why bastard was written in strikethrough. Also the furry community is very welcoming, just not to... specific other communities *caugh* bronies, good thing i'm not part of any "community", i can do, like and dislike whatever i want.

By no means i'd ever fit in Nekos into Furries, they are just that, Nekos. Their own thing they originally came from somewhere east (not sure if it was Japan or Korea). I find these furry scales funny that show the "progress" towards furry in steps whereas Neko would be somewhere inbetween. That's complete nonsense. Furry by definition is an animal with human characteristics. A Neko is literally a human with furry tail and ears (originally actually just a catgirl see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catgirl), nothing more. I'd group them with humans if it wasn't for my passionate dislike of Nekos. They are kinda the special snowflakes of special snowflakes, like someone couldn't choose between Furry or Human so they just said screw it take both. And if you come to think about it... how they would have been created... you'd think a human and a furry ... its a ̷b̷a̷s̷t̷a̷r̷d̷ hybrid.

Black Dragon has made some changes to prevent this from happening.

You can double click a bone to disable them (or click the disable button), this will free them up from the poser and allow animations to take control over these bones like normal.

Ehm, thats exactly what i said. I think you didnt understand that i was talking about it being an option in the official Viewer. I said "yes, in your viewer it maybe doesnt, but im sure in the LL Viewer it did in the chat console", i thought it was obvious we were talking about the official Viewer. Here's a full breakdown of what happened to clarify where this misunderstanding is coming from. My original comment and complaint about V1 chat having IM's mixed into the chat console (not the window), i know it was an option but having it mixed was the ONLY way of seeing (and reading) IMs without having the tabbed conversations window open. That's why i said V2 did this better by separating them into two different chat areas. First part is you confirming what i already knew and wrote above and what i was complaining about. Second part is you telling me that there is actually 2 different V1 style chats, the "good" one aka 1.18.0 and the "bad" one aka 1.18.2 and onward. Me obviously being confused that there are two V1 chats but also clarifying that the existence of 2 different V1 styles does not change my complaint since both styles have the same problem aka the only way to see IM's without the conversations window open being that you have to have IM's mixed into the local chat console. Which is what my original complaint was all about why i don't like V1 (both 1.18.0 and 1.18.2 which function exactly the same in that regard) You apparently thinking i'm talking about your Viewer (which i wasn't because i never used it outside of a single day or two when Kirstens broke down), i was also stating in my texts that i didn't have a picture of the official Viewer (only of Kirstens Viewer and since i was talking about the official Viewer and an official feature a picture of a TPV would have meant nothing as it could have been a TPV feature) Me clarifying again that "in your Viewer this may not be the case" (again i don't know since i didn't really use it) but in the official Viewer it was a thing and looked like that in chat console. I'm not being thick you are just misunderstanding what i'm saying because i assumed it was obvious that we were talking about the official Viewer and the local chat console.

In your Viewer. You said there is a 1.18.0 and post 1.18 V1 chat. It went like this: Normal chat would be: First Last: Text Whereas IM's would be mixed in: IM: First Last: Text That's where all the fake IM text gestures come from. I saw a lot of people fall for it unless they colored IM chat (or later were using Viewer 2). I still see those gestures pop up from time to time. Don't have a picture of it (the earliest shots i still have are from 2009 which was when i switched to Kirstens Viewer and Viewer 2 already)

Huh? I mean its far over 10 years ago (voice was introduced roughly at the same time windlight was introduced, end of 2009 i think?) but i don't remember the chat changing at all back then. V1 chat has always been a fixed chat panel at the bottom (above the button panel) with console style floating text, a chat history button to the left of the chat bar (all of which only showed when starting to chat and automatically hid when sending chat). I'm unsure what you mean with separate Friends and Groups, as in both separated from each other (which to my knowledge has always been the case) or separated from the chat window? (only TPV's added the friendlist and groups to the chat window and i've always and still adamantly declined to do that as it makes no sense having a friendlist or grouplist in a chat window, regardless of double-click starting a conversation with the user/group in question) I didn't know there was 2 V1 chats. For all i care they are equally bad because my problem wasn't with the changes you describe, it was with the general way of how IM chat works (e.g tabbed IMs and the local/IM mix, which as you say could be disabled and also colored to differentiate them better, which ultimately however was just polishing a turd). I like my chats separated, that is local and IM in two entirely different corners... group is a special case, i've always simply disabled group chat because it was annoying. But yes, to each their own, i prefer cleanly separated chats (and to an extend messages) at the cost of more space being used (although i'm unsure you can even say it uses more space considering that it doesn't use the entire screen like V1 chat could if enabled), this is also why i like the V3 style "extended" chat history a lot more than the V1 style "compact" mode, it separates chatters and groups their messages together unless significant time has passed, unlike compact which puts the name in front of every messages. I've had people complain because i was bursting short messages and it was taking large amounts of space in their chat window... a problem of their own making i suppose... everything has ups and downs. Hopes and dreams. First LL needs to stop being so antisocial, they need to come out more often and talk to us, rather than us always having to come to them and stalk them like a creep reminding them every day that we want to see some progress on a feature that we are willing to offer. I'd say we need more Lindens that use TPV's to see what we are actually doing and what people really like about each TPV, then have these people report back to LL so they get an idea what they might want to get from us.

Might be just me getting used to my own Viewer over the years but as far as i know "Enter" has always opened local chat, even with CHUI. It just doesn't close it anymore. This MIGHT have changed now that they have custom keybindings, previously "Start Chat" was a keybind set to Enter. What's not in CHUI anymore is closing local chat with Enter (or defocusing it) both when its empty or after sending a message. There is no option in the official viewer that i'm aware of that would change this behavior. There is just one to have letter keys start chat (which makes using AWSD for movement impossible). V1 Chat for me means a multitude of things, namely as you already said the "console" like local chat display, the horrid mix of local and IM chat in the very same console and the tabbed IM's. V2 Chat was a massive improvement over this by separating out IMs to the other corner of the screen to clearly differentiate between them at the cost of mixing them with group chats (because they weren't as clearly separated as local and IM, they looked almost like IM chats which they should have improved), they also (in addition to tabbed) implemented a separate per-session floater IM style that made full use of the newly implemented chiclets which were a massive improvement when it came to having a quick glance at all your chats without cluttering the screen too much, once again groups could have been slightly better separated other than coloring them green (for whatever reason) but overall the chiclets and the separate windows which automatically hid themselves after they lost focus made the UI incredibly space saving while at the same time giving you a glance at all chats at all times. This was a massive improvement not only over V1 but also the current V3 (CHUI) chat and every other MMO that has just lazily implemented the same atrocious tabbed IM chat we see in CHUI (although MMO's have it fixed in a corner usually and force it to horizontal tabs which is even worse than vertical tabs). V3 Chat is what we've got now, CHUI, which is essentially V1 Chat just betterworse. No IM/local mixing but several key features such as the aforementioned "Enter" can close chat missing. Personally V2 was the best out of all of them. It solved all the issues the other two chats (and every other MMO) have and kept your screen free of unnecessary windows. It also included a tabbed IM chat for those who wanted it back. I don't understand why they didn't keep it and implemented CHUI into the tabbed IM option instead of getting rid of all the improvements they made. CHUI is a sad story and a good example why LL should NOT listen to users. Especially those who do not use their Viewer to begin with. CHUI is the same tragic story we already saw with the sidebar. Just as it got good, they removed it because people who complained at the beginning and weren't even using the Viewer kept complaining about things that weren't even a problem anymore. The problem is that CHUI is in every V3 and up. This means we are not talking about a single Viewer but all of them.

The only thing clumsy is CHUI itself. It a devolution back to the horrid V1 system with extra steps.

As far as i can tell the field of view of depth of field is essentially what field of view in RL photography would be. Not sure what that means, you'd have to go read on wikipedia or some professional depth of field explanations on google to get a proper explanation what "field of view" really is. I'd describe it as view angle but separate but not really. Both work together and they add on top of each other. Turning down view angle will exaggerate the effects of field of view. From a user standpoint however field of view is essentially just "how strong do you want your depth of field to be according to the rest of your settings"

I think there is some confusing in this topic. View Angle and Field of View are not the same, not at all. The confusion comes from Field of View wrongly being labeled View Angle in Second Life (whereas you would expect it to be correctly Field of View). Field of View in SL however refers to a Depth of Field specific setting which determines the Field of View of Depth of Field whereas View Angle controls the Field of View of your camera.

The reason this doesn't happen on the official viewer is most likely because both BD and FS are not up to date with the latest code which happens to have a bugfix for some smaller items not showing up properly, which might be what you are seeing.

1) Faster but impossible with the current system. It's not a feature, it's a side effect of said window's abilities. The window itself is meant to set up animations for videos/photos. There is no need to do it while a live video is running, animations will never desync once synced unless they are time dilated (which only happens with impostors) unless the weird fast animation on distance bug makes a reappearance (which is something i could easily disable). 2) I don't know why single textures fail to load at higher resolutions, this is Second Life and it could be anything. Probably the Viewer getting stuck on decode or something. 3) Like i said, it is literally technically impossible to cause texture thrashing unless you set the available texture memory too low or manage to use all 8GB worth of memory (and even then there would still be the option to use full-res textures as last resort or simply set the value higher in debug, which is unsupported and possibly crashy though). As noted previously using full-res textures WILL cause texture thrasing when turned off and possibly bug the Viewer to the point it is stuck in perma-texture thrashing, do NOT use it unless you intend to relog afterwards.

Well framerate has always been an issue in SL, nothing new. You can do good machinima with down to 15 frames (already seen some), sure it could look smoother but you can't have everything, especially not fanciness and performance, one will necessarily exclude the other, rendering needs time, more rendering needs more time regardless of optimization, you can only reduce the additional impact. BD specific: BD has never been optimized at all (unless you count not rendering invisible faces and squaring shadow texture resolutions as optimization) beyond what LL offers. It also does not include the performance improvements yet which i hope is going to help with the slowest part of the viewer -> avatar rendering. 1) It can resync animations, since a long time actually. Dragon - My Useful Features - Animation Controls. Select everyone you want to sync, hit "Reset". 2) Texture refresh was a thing but broke at some point, i never felt the need to readd it, corrupted textures only ever happened to me after cache code changes and forgetting to clear the cache after said changes. I was planning to bring it back very soon (after merging all the way up to the latest code) 3) Impossible. Texture thrashing comes down solely to your settings and BD out of all Viewers gives you the most available texture memory (with 4GB for each memory pool, totaling up to 8GB). Either you have auto-memory off (which means you have to manually set it, in which case setting the maximum for your GPU and be done with it would be the best approach) or you are not seeing texture thrashing but rather textures simply not loading (or corrupting). Also there is no way you are filling all 4GB's worth of memory on both pools, by that point you won't be having anymore FPS anyway, it would require an obscene amount of faces and thus objects. We're talking 1000 1024x1024 textures visible onscreen and fully loaded to fill the scene pool (remember textures load in lower res on distance). The only way you feasibly fill that amount is by using Full Res Texture debug and then you WILL get texture thrashing after turning it off. 4) I cannot tell you what it is but slow loading has only ever happened very randomly for me, usually accompanied by connection issues (failing friendlists, broken outfit and the like). Outside of these rare cases BD loads perfectly fine and very fast for me and a lot others. This has been a rare issue for me in all Viewers ever since i joined SL and i'd say that is to be expected with a complex system like SL that breaks apart the moment the login chain in the Viewer gets slightly out of order. This could be anything, texture decoding getting stuck, downloading being slow, connections failing, servers having issues, router/provider/application throttling, your harddrive being too slow (or busy), too many things happening at the same time, the list goes on and on, whatever it is it is usually fixed by a relog or after some waiting. Crashes i do not experience outside of new code merges that broke something in the viewer or some new code that i messed up (which usually get fixed before they go live), any other random crash i cannot fix unless it is reproducible (on my side) or at the very least spits out a useful warning/error in the log files (which it will most likely not). 5) What you and me define as "much needed" are obviously subject to our own needs. I see going into preferences for joystick or control configuration as perfectly fine. Anyone can edit the UI and add more options to the sidebar if they so desire, just no one is willing to do so (its technically not even hard, does not require coding knowledge and can be done by any text editor that isn't trash like notepad). I also attempted to make a dynamic sidebar years ago but thanks to a bug in layout panels that prevented me from clearing/deleting said panels (it crashed the viewer) i was not able to make it happen beyond a couple smaller updates that progressively lagged more the more widgets you added (due to the removed ones still being there slowly bogging down the viewer). I have plans to bring it back because i too want a dynamic sidebar and remove all the options i don't need.

I do not seem to follow, being good for photography automatically makes it better for machinima too, how is the viewer not good for videos at all, it offers all the same machinima options as other viewers (and a lot more and unique ones specifically for that matter), after all the Viewer is specifically designed for photography AND machinima.

How has it drifted away if it hasn't changed anything in years.

Agree. Saves lots of space. Saves performance. Saves you headaches.

I'm sure there are quite a lot AMD users and they don't have that much of an issue, they have other issues (and AMD has been reportedly known for many years to be problematic in SL and also outside of SL in several games, even big triple A titles... just look at GTA4 which outright refused to start on AMD GPU's back then). It all seems to be coming down to their drivers, over and over again. It's not the GPU in itself that is bad, its their OpenGL support in their driver that is horrible. This also means each and every driver update can skew the performance of any single GPU to either side completely. If you ever find the issue, let me know. I've gone through everything i could think of, all kinds of solutions from all over the internet, we went through lots of settings, did setting checkups and comparisons (me with a weaker Nvidia GPU and weaker AMD CPU having easily 5 times the framerate), i've had several sessions with several users for hours trying to debug this (note remote debugging since i don't have an AMD GPU) and we have found absolutely nothing, not a single hint why AMD GPU's perform so absolutely horrible for no reason. Then there's those AMD users that don't (at least report) seem to have any outright horrible performance, often lowered performance or other weird issues (memory and texture issues) but nothing that goes as far as outright dropping into single digits for no reason regardless of settings. Like i mentioned above, this has been a thing for as long as i'm using Second Life, at this point i have never heard that AMD doesn't have some kind of issue with SL for a year... we just recently had the blue-everything issue... (which also later affected NVidia GPU's).

I've had reported cases of this before where someone couldn't save depth snapshots but was able to turn on Depth of Field (which absolutely needs depth information, like pretty much most of deferred rendering). It's important to note that the depth snapshot and the actual depth map the viewer uses are two entirely different things. We did not find a solution but that case was also an AMD GPU user and also had exceptionally low framerates for no reason. I'm led to believe this is just another one of AMD's poor openGL driver support issues.

Any and all baking in SL is bad, especially model-level baking. It's a leftover from PS1/N64 times where textures were limited and rendering wasn't fancy, baking some shading/lighting into the model itself for instance was a good way to get depth into the model without doing it on a texture, which essentially allows using smaller, repeating textures for greater detail while having the model itself handle the shading which you'd usually supply either by realtime rendering or via prebaked textures (like ambient occlusion maps). No one is SL really knows how and when to properly utilize baking since most content is made by entry-level modelers or users who barely managed to get a model done. Real good texture usage and proper materials utilization can make a scene look absolutely incredible (but will also quickly highlight where SL's rendering fails and lacks horribly) and i say can because whether said good looking content actually looks good also depends on your client side, you need to have the settings and features enabled to boot with and you need to configure them properly to make the most of it. SL unlike other environments isn't pregenerated, creators get very little control over how their stuff will look for each and every user as we have full control over how everything will look for us at all times.