Crim Mip

Pretty much if I want you to know if I'm online or not I'll have you in my contacts list. There are times when I'm trying to concentrate on building or such that I hide from eveyone including my contact list so I'm not interrupted. I consider it less rude than sitting their ignoring IM's. If you don't like it, don't interact with me, but you aren't entitled to know my status unless I choose to show it. Besides if you're in any of the same groups you can check that way as well which is a loophole I wish LL would close.

The data has to get to your viewer so it can get sent to your graphic card to be rendered. If your connection is spotty, it doesn't matter what card you have.

That would run SL just fine with decent frame rates with everything on in most cases with the possible exception of shadows. I don't know what the cost for that system is or where you are located, but you might want to check a few places that build to order to see if you can get a little more bang for the buck. CybertronPC, Cyberpower, etc are all fairly reputable and you can then use money saved in not paying for the generic keyboard/mouse and optical drive (if your current one is working) to put into a better graphics card and such. Building one yourself if you have the skill is the lowest cost in dollars, but in time it often just doesn't make sense.

If the 660 is in budget, I'd get that. Double the memory and a faster card. I wouldn't spend a ton on a PSU unless you plan to use it for a future system. If so, then go for it. Modular PSU's are nice. Keeps the minimum cables needed. This is more important if you don't have access to run the cables behind the motherboard mounting plate to help with airflow.

Nothing. LL won't listen to content theft complaints filed by anyone other than the content creator and then it has to be done through a DMCA filing. Letting the original creators know is pretty much the most you can do in this case.

I recently upgraded to a new system. I looked into updating my old one, but it just didn't make sense as there were failing electronics involved. I'm not sure it does in your case either. If your system is using DDR2, it's probably got fairly slow I/O by current system standards and some of the benefit of your proposed upgrades will be lost because of that. I'd especially question the SSD. If you absolutely can't budget for a new MB and CPU, then certainly a graphics card upgrade and memory increase will add a few more years of solid use. You'll also need to switch to a 64bit OS which depending on your means of obtaining it could be a siginificant part of the upgrade cost. Your current setup is still workable. Far more so than my old one was. How long would it take to save up the remainder of what you'd need for a complete new system? Barring things actually failing on the current one, waiting another 3-6 months to save up some more might well be your best bet. If you absolutely gotta toss money into souping up the current one, here are my thoughts for what they are worth. The 650 or 660 graphics cards will both let you run in ultra with even higher draw distances. I have a 650 and run with everything on at 200m or more with no issues. FPS is usually up above 30. They are kind of in the sweet spot price wise and I don't know that you'd get any real benefit from anything faster. I'd be really leery of a used graphic card. You have no way of knowing under what conditions they were used. Were they run overclocked to the point just before thermal shutdown by their previous owner since they were new? Were they in an adequately ventilated case? The higher end the card, the more chances it was run hard and maybe was just starting to not take the abuse. I know a couple gamers that do that and then sell them off while they are still operating under normal clock rates to offset getting the next board to abuse. Your 420W supply might well be enough, but as cheap as PSU's are, you might as well have the extra capacity. It usually means more stable power and a decent one can be used in your next system. Going to 6-8 gigs and a 64bit OS will also help a lot, not just for SL but overall. I'm sure you've run into the viewer going unstable about the point it hits 1.5 gigs of ram use. I've had Firestorm use as much as 2.6 gigs. No more worry there and you could use the 64 bit version of of one of the third party viewers which are getting a repuation for being a LOT more stable. It makes absolutely no sense to go from 3 gig to 4gig. I wouldn't bother with anything less than 6 which might be viable if you have 2 1 gig cards and two .5 gig cards currently. You definitely want to add in matched pairs. Be aware that while the other parts might be able to move on to a new system in the future, money spent on DDR2 modules is gone when the current system is. There's no point in getting brand name modules for that. As for the SSD, I'd really consider whether my keyboard, mouse, and headset were in good shape and worked well for me. If not I'd take care of those long before I'd worry about the fancy drive. Good luck.

If you're getting a couple hours between crashes, you're not doing badly. Just so you know, all the viewers have that texture discarded problem when they allocate more memory for textures than the system has. Firestorm just shows you when it happens. It's usually best to restart the viewer when you first see that because a crash is going to happen once it does and textures won't load right either. You might try turning your texture memory slider down to like 384. That will help lower the frequency of crashes. If you notice you crash really soon after restarting, it's possible you have a badly corrupted texture and can possibly get some benefit from clearing the cache. (only do that as a final resort though since it'll slow down your viewer as it recreates the texture cache) That 5450 isn't a very fast video card. If you upgrade it, I'd go with something NVidia and at least a Gforce 6 series. I just upgraded to a GTX 650 and can actually use all the shiny new features and get decent frame rates as long as shadows are off or only sun and moon. with atmospherics offf, framerate is capping (45 is the best you can get in real frame rate). Nvidia's Open GL drivers are better which seems to mean slightly lower tier Nvidia give similar persormance in SL to slightly higher tier ATI. For anything using DirectX, there's really no clear advantage to either.

A basic inworld texture editor is probably the number one thing LL could do to encourage new creation of objects. Ideally realtime painting on a 3d object would be possible, but I know that's likely too complex to include in the viewer. Even a simple 2d paint system would be really helpful for signs, or working with texture maps for objects inworld. Local textures are good to an extent, but sometimes it's a pain to have to switch out of SL for something simple like making a sign or such.

As long as it's a TPV that uses it's own folder, it's easy. I maintain both the official viewer and Firestorm and have no problems. Be aware that there are some TPV's that use the same folders as the official one by default and you'd want to change those locations if you needed to have both.

You can't. The Linden Water level is set on a sim wide basis. It would be neat if it was a separate terraformable layer, but for now it's not. If you had two sims side by side and really wanted to, you could have the water at different levels, but then you'd have to hide that across the entire shared border or have a wall of water showing.

I only ask about this when I need to see if it's somebody new who might need some help. If they are 2 days old and have a full set of groups and picks and a profile that looks like they knew what they were doing, I usually ask if they are actually as new as their account indicates. I've never had anyone BS me and wouldn't really care if they did.

This means you need to update your viewer. It's not a problem with liquid or fitted mesh which is now supported by LL.

Aries Hausdorff wrote: OOops! Those things had a specific function? I saw them in many places through the years, but thought they're just decorative elements! Yes, one could dial any other stargate and it would do an animated sequence similar to what appeared on the series. You could then click the liquid effect center and get a main map tp link to the other gate or if you had an RLV relay on, you could actually walk through and be teleported. There was a random dial function as well which would connect up to a random gate and you'd go through and explore. It was rather humorous in some cases as people occasionally set them up and didn't think about total strangers showing up (say in a private bedroom.) You could lock out that effect and there a number of third party addons made for them. Oh yeah, they were free so anyone could set one up if they wanted. I hope somebody comes up with a replacement. They were fun.

In case any of you who still used this network of jumpgates haven't yet heard, the offworld server the system depended on was taken offline permenently today. It had gotten more and more unstable and buggy and the ones running it simply didn't have time for it any longer. It was fun for the short time I had to play with it. I know there are many who used it for far longer.

The explanation of the login problem shows the human side of the coders who work there. I'm sure the original coder never considered that that there would be enough people using SL that it would only take 10 years to run out of identifiers. The number of those possible identifiers was probably considered 'more than we'll ever need' at the time. Also, I'd say it showed some darn good coding. It was doing it's job so well that there had never been a reason to look at it and so nobody did look at it. It went on quietly doing it's job for for 10 years. Sure, in hindsight, it's easy to say "It should have warned that it was going to run out of identifiers." Well to do that check would have been one more bit of code it would have had to run each time anyone logged in. Nobody could predict the growth spurt of users several years after that code was written. I bet there will be a code audit to check any code that hasn't actually been changed or updated in x number of years just to make sure there aren't any more inadvertent time bombs like this quietly doing their job until one day they simply can't. Thank you for the explanation.

One would think LL would maybe want to put in just a teensy bit of effort on the behalf of a region composed of 40+ privately owned sims. I guess they can't be bothered. God forbid the sims in said region all be located on the same server farm. Then again LL has never been able to handle that most basic issue even though a green, just out of trade school coder could probably write the needed scripting to handle it. I'll believe the new CEO gets the whole thing when he actually has his team fix some of the most basic crap such as this, such as group chat, etc.

The highest real frame rate you can get is 45. That's the fastest the SL servers will feed discreet frame information to your viewer under ideal circumstances. If you're frame rate is reporting higher, all that's happening is your video card is repeating frames while waiting for new frame data to arrive. In practical terms, you probably won't see any noticible difference at anything above 30 FPS or so. Feel free to increase the graphics settings until you get down to that point and enjoy.

Yeah, this is against the TOS if it's done inside of SL. File an AR if you have actual proof. On the other hand, I've rarely seen this happen where the IM's copied and passed along were of a positive nature. You'd better be very certain that nothing in the IMs that were passed along would in themselves be TOS violations. Given the almost impossibility of actually proving this one, I dont' see why LL even keeps it as a TOS violation. Just figure that if you're talking smack about somebody in IM's, the person you're talking smack about will eventually get to see the whole thing.

Coby Foden wrote: What I think is that of course it is safe. Fitted Mesh is officially released by Linden Lab. Thus it's safe and perfectly all right because it is an official SL feature. It does not matter the least bit how those who have not updated their viewers might see us - half naked, distorted or something else, it's no concern for the Fitted Mesh wearer. When a new feature is released why should we wait until "the majority" of users will see the new feature? And what is the majority after all? Is it 60, 70, 80, 90, 95 or 99 per cent of the users? And how do we know the percentage of people who see the new feature at any given time? Surely Linden Lab knows, but that info is not readily given to us users. __________________________________________________________________________________________ It's been safe to wear since it came out, but most people would rather know they aren't going to look like some mutant to most of those who will see them. Also, most content creators aren't going to jump in until they are convinced a fair percentage can see it as well because not only will customers who havent upgrated complain, but they don't want their products out there looking bad. Like it or not, this currently means it's pretty much a go when Firestorm adds the feature which they have. Adding fitted mesh capability was a relatively easy bit of code to merge in. Not to dis anyone's favorite viewer, but with LL, Firestorm, Singularity, and Cool VL having the feature, I see no reason not to wear or create fitted mesh at this point.

bigmoe Whitfield wrote: "refuses to upgrade" nope, upgraded, got 5fps with all viewers, uninstalled and moved back to pre-fitted. if it does not work right out of the box then there is no reason for me to use it. suffice my machine is less then 2 years old. suffice I should not have to work to make it work. when they can get their heads out of their collective asses and check bug reports and jira issues on this and then push a patch to everybody that will fix this collective mess they have thrown on us, then I will move to fitted as it stands right now. I'm using a tvp to blacklist all things fitted. so I can get my typical 50fps. __________________________________________________________________________________________ If you can't be bothered to change a few settings to get things working then you deserve to see the virtual world with less than optimal appearance. Given the number of different hardware combinations, there is no way it can work 'out of the box' for everyone. Also, you aren't actually getting 50FPS regardless of what the meter is telling you. The absolute fastest rate that the SL servers will feed frame data is 45 and that's under ideal conditions. If you're moving around or crossing sim borders, your true frame rate might hit 40. The rest of those frames are just repeat rendering of the same frame while the viewer waits for the next full frame to come in. In all likelyhood, I doubt you'd be able to see a difference between your viewer display and somebody else who was getting a consistent 30 fps. But you just go ahead and worry about that mostly meaningless number. I'd rather see the new content correctly.

Tarina Sewell wrote: well, not everyone is current. My friend on signularity cant see it. not sure his version. ** edit** also it takes a pretty powerful computer to run the viewers now.. and you cant blame people for not upgrading. Im not sure what a luddite is. Um if by 'powerful computer' you mean one that was maybe mid range at best 5 years ago when I got my current system, then yeah, it takes a powerful computer. Granted I can't run in ultra, but I don't have to minimize everything either to get 20+ FPS most places. At this point a pretty low end new system with maybe a $50 graphic card upgrade would outdo my system with no problems at all.

I actually do pay attention to reviews if they are detailed and appear fair. The more reviews that match, the more weight I give them. I have bought a product I was on the fence about because of good reviews and I've avoided others for negatiive ones. Usually this has helped me avoid bad products or products that didn't work as I expected. Occasionally I've not been happy and have left an honestly written negative review. I try to point out the good points in those even if they are outweighed by negative. In two cases the product maker offerered to refund my purchase in return for deleting my review. I'm not entirely comfortable with that, but in the interest of avoiding drama I've done so in those circumstances.

Many here have said just accept it. I disagree. If a club manager is sloppy and unprofessional enough not to take steps when they see cheaters (and it's generally pretty obvious), they are likely that way in other aspects of the club as well. Find a better club. There are some basic steps that can be taken. Closing contest entry 30 mins-1 hour before voting and requiring both entrants and voters to be there at vote close helps a lot. group locking the contest also helps. Finally, an astute club owner will boot and ban people they see cheating. I've seen votes be stopped, people booted and then the votes restarted. If you're a club owner and are going to run contests, do it right or don't do it at all. That said, choosing clubs by contest is probably not the best way to find one you'll have fun at. Pick ones that have people you like or a DJ who runs music you like or whatever. Worrying about earning L's from contests kind of takes some of the fun out of things. If you really need L's and can't afford to buy any, learn to DJ or build or script or hire on as a clothing model at a clothing store and earn them that way.

And that's a question that nobody can really answer for you because a lot depends on your specific hardware. I ran a dual boot system for a while. Linux is far better at managing multiple applications running at the same time and more efficient with memory use from what I saw. What I didn't like was the work required to get an SL viewer to work. Maybe it's gotten better now, but at that point every time one updated the viewer one had to go out and get updates for this or that package to get media, or voice, or a Space Nav working and sometimes one or more of those simply wouldn't work no matter what. Windows is bloated, slow at times, and not the most stable OS, but I know I can just download, install, and run software and generally have it work. If Linux ever manages to get somewhat close to that point, I'll probably try it out again.

I use a Logitech G700. Works wired or wireless. A full charge easily lasts a couple days. If I want to be wireless and the battery is getting low, it takes 5 seconds to pop open the battery door and replace it with another fully charged one. Uses standard AA batteries so it's not like I didn't already have those and a charger. For SL I don't mind the cord being hooked up so I rarely worry about changing out a battery