Kwakkelde Kwak

Sounds like you're better off in the wanted or scripting forums. I think most "normal" texture changers work by object name (or linknumber?). For mesh you need a face number since everything is one object. It wouldn't take a whole lot to change the texture changers, as long as they are modifiable. If you use one UV for everything that means you only have one material. The normal texture changers should work with this. Downside is you'll need more and bigger textures, so I wouldn't advice doing that. More and bigger textures = more lag.

I think it's good practice to make windows that way, so I thought I'd explain. What else can I do but answer questions on the SL forums on a sunday? You're not suggesting I should go out and enjoy the weather do you?

Erm, first comment is about modern buildings made out of cubes. They are so low poly I wouldn't worry about anything. The second comment is about windows. If you have a big exterior wall with small windows, you can seperate walls and windows and make the windows go opaque from a certain distance. Since the windows are small, both visually and as an object, the next LoD will show earlier than the next LoD of the interior. So if you make the windows opaque at one of the lower LoDs, you won't notice the interior disappearing. When you have very large windows, they might look funny when they switch to opaque.

No idea why you get such low performance from your new card. The SL viewer defaults my previous computer, a 6 year old dual core AMD3800+, 3.5GB and underclocked 9600GT to med-high. It could be system RAM, it could be the CPU if you are running lots of things in the background. Could be drivers. Sorry I can't help with it other than saying it should perform a lot better. On my current computer, intel 3770K, 16GB, GTX670 I have to throttle the fps to 60, even on ultra (to which SL defaults). In very crowded places I do not get more than 25fps though, but that doesn't happen very often. Usually I get my capped 60fps.

Actually those buildings should be the easiest and low LI ones around. All shapes are very primitive. Anyway, if it can be built in RL, it can certainly be built in virtual space. The problem with the windows is, with small ones you can make them opaque at a certain LoD. With very large glass surfaces (biodomes?) that could look very distactive.

I can, lots of modern houses have those kinds of walls, floors and ceilings. Example Big pieces of glass might also be an issue if the interior disappears.

WhiteRabbit0 wrote: THE MESH DEFORMER IS DONE, TESTED AND PERFORMS EXCEPTIONALLY WELL. WE JUST NEED THE COMMUNITY TO DEMAND IT'S RELEASE LOUD ENOUGH FOR LINDEN LABS TO HEAR. If you think this is the case, take a step back and look at the situation. Why on earth would LL NOT implement it if it is 100% ready and tested? It makes no sense at all. (Yes I know LL sometimes seems to make little sense). There has to be a very valid reason why LL is holding it back, performance maybe? You can't make a switch for it to turn it off at lower graphical settings, it has to be on for everyone or LL's "shared experience" is gone. People with high end systems would see a very nice piece of clothing, moving with the avatar, people with a slow computer would see an avatar sticking out of this piece of clothing in about 500 places. Maybe there's another reason, I don't know. I would really like to hear from LL why they aren't releasing it, little chance of that I'm afraid. That doesn't mean they don't have a valid reason. I would also like to see the feature, but only if it works well, for everyone and for the entire grid. It's only been tested by a fraction of the population, not everyone at once.

Chic Aeon wrote: So my question is == where does that difference come in and is she really staying away from mesh for a good reason? If the tool the landowner uses is really counting prims (=objects), like some old viewers do, mesh should be the perfect way to cheat the system. Depending on how many different textures you need, you can link a bunch your meshes together before upload. Even without cheating, well built mesh is usually a lot lower in landimpact with the same or less amount of unique objects. So any info appreciated. Also, where can you tell the actual LI and what comprises it after importing? I know there is a way to see physics costs and such but didn't take note of where it is in the viewer. As far as I know all the V2 based viewers have a button in the edit menu, right above the tabs. It's called "More" or something and will show you all the different weights, the highest of them determines the LI. V1 based viewers do not have this function I think and will return a number of prims in the edit menu, pretty much always a completely useless number when the object is mesh.

Ciaran Laval wrote: Setting LOD to the highest LOD level on all four levels doesn't hit land impact, [...] Being as they are likely to be planes or cubes, there's not much to reduce in terms of triangles. You just gave the answer yourself. If your highest LoD model is very simple to begin with, there's nothing to reduce and you do not have to reduce. You can use the same model four times. What you can reduce over distance, so per LoD, is detail such as window frames or cornices, interior parts etc, anything that you do not have to see from far away. I usually split up exterior, interior, windows and if present cornices. The exterior is usually big so either the very highest or the highest two LoDs will be enough. Setting the unused LoDs is useless since you'll never see them (you might if you crank up the draw distance to more than 256). I think the uploader doesn't count the lower LoDs in big objects for this very reason.

Ciaran Laval wrote: Well the document lists triangles/mesh as the most expensive physics type. I don't know though how inworld prims are composed, whether they are triangle based meshes too. It really depends on the prim. A box (no matter the proportions) is seen as a convex hull. That is until you use any modifiers. The same is the case for cylinders, except a different x and y value will turn it to triangle based as well. Spheres without modifiers and a 1:1:1 proportion are convex hull. All other prims are triangle based going by the metadata in the develop menu. This means you should be careful with using them. It does not mean you should always use prim boxes as physical shapes. Both server and download weight will increase by adding prims. Even if this doesn't affect LI, it does affect performance. Better to use the same box shapes in a seperate file and let the uploader "analyze" that. For floors that might be an issue, since you can't rezz on convex hull mesh items, at least as far as I've experienced. Floors might be the only objects where a prim could be preferred. Can't think of any other ones, maybe others can. What I read in the article is that one should use convex hulls or physical primitives(NOT SL primitives!) where one can. But the article also says "a" triangle is cheap. So if you need a lot of convex hulls to replace a few triangles, that's probably not a good idea. It also depends on the situation. On a racetrack a wall is best done as convex hull from what I understand, since you can't get trapped in those. "Speed+collision=get trapped" in most cases when the shapes are triangle based. Walking into a wall is less likely to give you issues.

I know I was the first to suggest the RenderVolumeLODFactor, but after having a second look at especially the last picture I think we can completely ignore that. The last picture shows the distorted object from up close and I mean CLOSE. If the LoD was causing it, even a RenderVolumeLODFactor of 1 should be plenty to see the sculpt in all its glory. I'm pretty sure it's a caching issue. PS Setting the RenderVolumeLODFactor too high means extra load on your system, the connection and the servers. It's not in the debug settings just for the annoyance of it. Use with care...

Looks like the gpu is doing its job just fine to me. Looks more like sculpties not loading properly. Clearing cache or (what normally isn't a good plan) setting the RenderVolumeLODFactor to 4 in the debug settings will probably fix it.

As far as I know, only estate owners can export the raw terrain file of a region. For mainland that would be Linden Lab (Governor Linden?). In other words, I'm afraid you can't access the map, there's something else that should work though: If you can rezz prims on the entire piece of land you want mapped, you should be able to retrieve the ground height by script, using llGround. With the information you retreive by such a script you could construct the height map. This page might be helpful. If you aren't able to write such a script or if you have trouble making it work, you could try either the wanted or scripting forum.

Trying to find some information about how the Havok physics engine works and how to minimise physical load on the servers, I stumbled across this document, on the SL servers of all places. Artist Best Practices I love the footer btw.

In this case I think that might work out better. It's still the same worthless advice though It's like saying "I have a flat tire, let's get a new bicycle." It would solve your issue, as long as the issue isn't caused by a nail factory across the street, but can hardly be considered the right solution. Fortunately many people here on the forums, and I bet inworld as well, provide ways to test what's actually wrong. Again, it really doesn't take a brand new high end computer to run SL. This week I installed SL on my previous computer to see how it did. On a fairly loaded sim (I know that's very subjective) I got 20-30 fps on med-high settings, the settings SL chose for me. On my near empty building platform I saw over 70 fps. Specs are AMD X64 3800+ 2GHz, 3.5 GB RAM, factory underclocked 9600GT and Win XP Pro, wireless DSL connection (about 8Mbits measured) through a 20cm reinforced concrete floor and a bunch of metal shelves. I think nobody would call that either high end or expensive. I do have to add I have it at a low resolution, since it's hooked up to my tv.

You can use up to 8 materials in one object, the triangle you see on medium is one of the 49 specified in the uploader I bet, the rest is probably too small to see. For angular objects like this you should really use LoD models or you end up with either a visual mess or with an enormous graphical load with matching high landimpact.

Could be a ton of things, I'd suspect overuse of materials or overuse of geometry first. It would really help others trying to help you if you posted some pics with some data and wireframe of your model. 2012 had a bad exporter for SL too, but I don't recall people having the issue you describe with it. A simple first step could be replacing your exporter with 2013.2 (FBX plugin) or newer.

For content from Mass Effect you can contact EA, for Halo it's Microsoft I think. I don't think either has inworld activities. Seriously, you wouldn't ask if anyone wants to sell you a stolen car on these forums, so you shouldn't ask for this either.

And there we have it for all the people who can't stop saying "buy a new computer, buy a new computer!" SL will run pretty well on any mid range computer less than 5-10 years old as long as it has a reasonable graphics card. The issues you describe smell like a bad connection to me, not faulty or outdated hardware or LL bugs. It's just a hunch and as long as you don't post your computer and network specs it will remain just that. A snapshot of the ctrl-shift-1 window in SL might also help determine what's wrong, especially the network data such as bandwidth and ping sim.

So you're saying a child prim can affect another prim in the linkset when the other prim has a triangle based physics shape? That's pretty serious indeed.

Sudden lag, crashing and slow rezzing sound like connection issues to me. You might want to reset your router, just unplug it, leave it for a couple of minutes and plug it back in. Your computer is on the slow side, but if you add a better video card it should be plenty for SL at medium settings when in a sim that's not packed with avatars. Something like a second hand NVidia 9600 GT or 9800 GT should be enough and very affordable at 25 or so bucks. Don't expect any fireworks of course.

Zak Kozlov wrote: I'm using Maya 2013, is that evul? I'll try to update Blender, i'm still using 2.65, but since Blender to Blender .DAE save are going great I was thinking that the problem was Maya not exporting things properly, not Blender hehe I'll try an update, if not i'll report it All 3ds Max 2012 and the first 2013 Autodesk Collada exporters (2013.0 and 2013.1 I think) didn't work with SL. You can download a higher version though from Autodesk. Version 2013.2 works, I think version 2013.3 does as well. Since 3ds Max and Maya seem to have the same issues with exporting for SL and both programs being owned by the same company, I suspect what is the case for 3ds Max is also the case for Maya. Autodesk FBX plugin (2013.3)

arton Rotaru wrote: The bug I mentioned is a pretty nasty one though. Which makes cheap triangle based physics meshes even for houses problematic. I must be missing something, why is that? What kind of script would set a house to physical and maybe more important, why? I can imagine the bug can cause issues on doors and other moving parts. I never ran into any problems with houses, the analyzed house physics are worthless for floors though, since you can't rezz anything on them, at least that's my experience. Triangle based shapes always work for me.

I experience that from time to time, with a small note that "rebake" shows my textures crisp while rebaking. What fixes it for me, for a certain amount of time anyway, is clearing the cache. The "clear" button in the preferences menu (is it under advanced?) is sufficient, no need to manually remove any files.

yw