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Best Article on Lag

Source: http://analutetia.com/2009/06/22/anatomy-of-lag/
Credits: Gwyneth Llewelyn
Dated: 2009-09-22

[ Emilie Says: This article is somewhat dated, particularly as textures are now loaded via http rather than UDP and needs updating in many ways. I hope to come back to it and either comment or rewrite it, but in the meantime, it remains the best comprehensive view of lag I have found, and is full of useful suggestion, most of which have my agreement. The source blog is full of interesting material. I urge you to visit it.]

ANATOMY OF LAG

Hi! Ana Lutetia has kindly invited me to post on her blog, so don’t start wondering about the abrupt change of style (double-pub intended)  Rest assured, I’m not going to pester you with any fashion tips *grins*

Instead, for this blog post, I’m trying to cover some of the usual myths related to lag, what causes it, and what most definitely won’t make it go away…
The Grid Is Misbehaving — What Shall I do?

It’s a weekend where Hair Fair ’09 is in full force, and builders are happily finishing their work for SL6B. Guess what? Nothing could make Linden Lab more happy than having half the grid down, going through “emergency maintenance”, and dealing with the painfully long list of complains that dozens of thousands of residents are submitting…

There is nothing else but to be patient (Linden Lab will finish their work when they can… they’re not exactly asleep  ), and in the mean time, what are residents doing in-world in the very crippled grid?

They accuse each other of creating lag.

This is a typical pastime of the Lag & ARC Nazis. When things start to fail, specially in very popular events or highly-crowded areas, it’s far better than to blame everybody else than to deal patiently with the issue. However, you can have fun blaming everybody else, but that won’t fix the problems. Really. Let Linden Lab do their work. Eventually things will get back to normal. Blaming everybody around you for either a super-crowded event or a failing grid will not make it happen faster. You will just get angry and get other people angry. And when we all are furious with each other, we react irrationally, and lose all the fun we have with Second Life® — trust me, that’s the last thing you wish to happen.

The Lag Myths

Let’s set the time clock a few years… six or even seven. Back then, Linden Lab had a handful of servers and the grid had just 16 sims or so. If a dozen people stayed in the same place and just chatted, sitting on the ground, the sims would not only lag, but crash — both your SL client and the sim you were on. People tried to break records — who could join the highest numbers of avatars in the same place and stay online the longest? This was usually measured in minutes, not hours or days 

And of course a few would have found a trick. If you’d go in with your Linden skin, no attachments, and cleared the sim from all prims, textures, and scripts, it was quite likely they could all stay in-world for longer before the sim crashed.

Why was that so? It takes two to tango — the sim server (what Linden Lab hosts at their side) and your SL client application. Each contribute to render this wonderful virtual world. But each does quite different tasks. Each has also limitations, and that means that when you hit those limits, things start to break apart.

In the past, the sim servers behaved as if they could do just one thing at a time (which is, of course, an oversimplification). They sent each avatar prim data, and, most importantly, textures; they tracked down where on the sim your avatar was; they ran scripts; they handled physics (this does not only mean the cute physical-enabled objects — like vehicles! — but also much simpler things like knowing if your avatar was walking on the ground). The problem was that when one of those things was being overburdened for some reason, the whole sim was laggy, and this influenced all avatars on it. Similarly, your own SL client would first attempt to load all prims and all textures before showing you anything at all — even those tiny nanoprims on an earring that was 200 m away.

No wonder it was a grey world.

On those days, four or more years ago, people had only one way to deal with lag: make avatars as simple as possible; get rid of all attachments; stop scripts in the sim; keep event locations as simple as possible (cubes with blank textures); and hope for the best. The truth is, all these things actually helped. The technology was so little advanced that “keeping it simple” really improved the viewing experience. Even turning off title tags did have an effect on reducing lag!

Second Life in 2009 — Myth, Etiquette, and Anger

Well, things have changed since those days, and they have changed dramatically. Since SL pretty much looks the same — it just looks better, but not different — it’s natural that people wrongly assume that “the old methods of dealing with lag” still apply. They don’t, and they have little relevance to how SL actually works.

First and foremost, on the server side, the sims are now doing things in parallel much better, and allocate different priorities to different things. The largest impact has been on scripts. Scripts will only run when nothing else is to be done — this means they run at thelowest possible priority, and the more scripts in the sim, the slower they will run —without affecting texture download or avatar movement whatsoever. This is a crucial change. You might have noticed that sometimes your favourite AO or Dance HUD will respond slowly when you touch its buttons, on a very crowded event. That’s just the way things work now. First and foremost, you’ll get avatar data (their position), shortly followed by their shape, body textures and attachments. Then you get the sim’s prim data in your neighbourhood (it makes no sense to get you all those nanoprims from someone’s earring half a sim away, if you can’t see them anyway), as well as only the textures you can actually see from your viewpoint. And only then will the sim start to run scripts on your behalf. Having more scripts will not lag the sim: the scripts will only runslower. In fact, sometimes it might look they’re not running at all, since most of the time the sim will be happily sending you textures.

So, turning off your AO, entering “sleep mode” on MystiTool, or detaching everything with a script in it will make no difference at all. Granted, if everybody is wearing a thousand scripted attachments, they will notice that their attachments work very, very slowly, or possibly not at all. But they’re not lagging the sim.

Why do people still worry about how many scripts are running on the sim? Well, you can imagine that a slow-running vendor script is a problem: you pay to it, and have no way to know when your item is going to be delivered: either it happens instantly (on a fast sim!), or it can take minutes (on a very crowded shop). So keeping the number of running and active scripts down is important because they might be running too slowly to work at all— and when you’re dealing with shops and money transactions, this is a problem. So, although it’s usual that people host mega-parties to launch their shops (or launch a new line of products in an existing shop), this is actually not such a good idea: people will enjoy the party, but they won’t be able to shop on script-enabled vendors. A good alternative is simply to set prims to sell content (without any scripts) because these won’t get lagged; a clever shopping area designer will make sure that the place where the event takes place is not close to any shop (let them be on neighbouring sims) or that all shops in the neighbourhood don’t use script-based vendors. Not because of the lag; but because they might be simply working too slowly.

Nevertheless, technical reasons are not always acceptable to the majority of the SL users. Having in mind that it’s easier to blame others when things don’t work, than try to understand what is happening “under the hood” (because it’s just magic…), an etiquettehas slowly evolved over the years. Sadly, it’s an etiquette based on superstition andmagic, and not on scientific facts; in spite of that, breaking the etiquette is simply bad manners.

Suppose you invite a Jewish family to your dinner. They will be seriously offended if you don’t offer them kosher food but insist that sliced ham is perfectly reasonable and healthy to eat; it’s just their prejudice and superstition that makes them believe that pork is “impure” or “unhealthy”. In fact, in Palestine 1000 BC, conserving pork meat was hard, and it spoilt too quickly, compared to other types of meat; so it was perfectly reasonable to create a superstitious rule that told them not to eat pork “because God doesn’t want it”. In fact, it was pretty sound advice — for 1000 BC. In the 21st century, of course, we have refrigerators and vets monitoring the health of pig farms, and sterilised procedures to deal with ham manufacture. Thus, a 3000-year-old superstition (which originally was founded on a real problem!) doesn’t make any sense today, does it?

Well, no. But it’s still not polite to offend other people who believe in silly superstitions. Etiquette, or the notion that to live better in a more friendly society we ought to adopt a polite form of addressing others, and tolerating their quirks and superstitions, tell us that we would be very, very rude if we offered non-kosher food to a Jew. So we don’t. We know it’s silly. Even most of them will know it’s silly, too. But none of us violate the social norms that rule our society.

Similarly, in Second Life, a lot of etiquette rules have popped up, many of which making sense in the remote past, but not any more. Turning AO offs will not reduce lag, but people still believe they do. So, even if that’s a stupid superstition, it doesn’t mean we ought to be rude and offend them. We can be politically correct and accept that their erroneous views on how SL runs truly don’t affect us; we can live without our AOs for a few hours and be seen as polite and respectful and tolerant towards others.

Nevertheless, as time goes by, the myths self-perpetuate, and it’s a pity to see that more and more of our social conduct is based upon superstition than on cold, hard facts. Here are some of them.

Lots of prims create lag, so let’s build open-space!

It’s true that the more prims you got on a place, the more textures your SL client has to download, so that means things will take longer to rezz. Most people got that right, because it’s obvious 

What they fail to understand is that nowadays the SL client uses a very aggressivemethod to just download what it needs. This is called occlusion — a big object in front of smaller ones will make the ones behind not visible, so it’s pointless to download textures for them. Similarly, you don’t need much detail to view objects further away, so the SL client doesn’t request much information for it either.

On the server side, a similar process also helps. The sim will keep an interest list on behalf of each avatar. This is mostly what is in the immediate neighbourhood of the avatar (other avatars and their attachments, prims, textures). So only these get sent — and it depends on the setting you have for Draw Distance on your SL client. The lower it is, the smaller the interest list. By matching all three approaches — just sending items on the interest list; just requesting objects you can actually see; not requesting much information from objects a long distance away since you won’t see more than a few pixels anyway — this will mean that the amount of content transfer between the SL client and the sim will be much, much reduced.

So what should a good shop designer do? Avoid open space! If someone drops in a sim with a Draw Distance of 256 m, it means that the interest list for that avatar will cover the whole sim (these days, with more and more advanced graphics cards, this setting is often the default — and most people don’t know, or don’t want, to change it). If there is nothing in front of the avatar, it means there will be no occlusion, and thus the SL client will request everything in sight — contributing to a huge spike in content transfer requests, and oh yes, these will lag the sim.

Now imagine 60 or 100 avatars all jumping to a hugely-packed shop at the same time. All those residents will be downloading an insane amount of content, all at the same time. That definitely lags the sim a lot!

A much better strategy is not to build open space shops. Create partitions and rooms — make them big enough to allow for easy movement around (remember the camera!) but also artificially enhance the optimisation mechanisms built in SL to take advantage of occlusion and interest lists. Thus, if none of the “rooms” in your shop is bigger than 64 m — which is large enough — you can tell people to keep their Draw Distance at that level. They will still rezz everything on sight — and when moving to a different room (or cornering a partition) they will start just to download that content, not “everything else”.

Similarly, partitions and rooms allow for avatars not to be in plain sight of each other all the time. A clever approach, if you own the sim, is to have several entry points and disallow direct teleport. That way, you can set the telehub from the Estate Tools to have multiple landing points, and avatars will pop up at different parts of your shop. This will mean that even a very crowded shop will only have a handful or so of avatars in plain sight of each other, and this will allow each SL client only to actually rezz the avatars it needs to display. You might have seen that a few designers use this approach very cleverly, and their shops, although apparently as densely-packed as others, have far less lag. Now you know the trick 

Remember that for this to work you cannot use alpha’ed textures. Anything with an alpha in it will prevent occlusion to work — even if the texture looks “solid”. To make double-sure, and assuming you do your own shop’s textures, upload them as 24-bit TGA images. Only 32-bit TGA images can have transparency and alpha settings in them (they need extra information to let the SL rendering engine know which parts of it are translucent or transparent). So, a glassy partition looks classy and fashionable, but it also means that it will not only prevent occlusion from happening, but alpha textures take longer to render than the un-alpha’ed ones. So your partitions will actually make lag worse!

There are also a lot of optical illusions that you can use when planning your shop. Items on display will usually have huge textures — 512×512 at least, but often more — since people will wish to see your wares in good, close-up detail. But the rest of the shop is just “decoration” to make a better shopping experience. It’s not as “important” as the items on display, so why don’t you save prims and textures on decoration? The part that people will see most of the time is the ground — so make sure that you can get the best possible texture on it. Walls might simply get less detail, and a very good texturiser will be able to get away with 64×64 textures on walls without making them look weird. Also, use few textures. If you take a look at some of the best designs in SL — mostly by RL architects or interior designers — you will see that their builds will have a lot of prims, but actually just a handful of textures. They will play with subtle tricks of texture alignment and tinting to give the illusion that they have used more textures on the build — but it’s just illusion. That’s why their builds, even if usually far more complex than the average shop, will rezz so quickly.

A lot of problems exist that are typical of SL. For instance, imagine that you have your open space are partitioned correctly with panels — but you have items covering all the walls, from the bottom to the top. What will avatars do? They fly. And once they start flying, they will have a clear line of sight over the panels and partitions — there go all advantages of occlusion! So should you prevent people from flying in your shop? Definitely not — flying is a key element in SL, and you should adapt to it, not prevent residents from using it. So, a good shop should make things easy to find without requiring avatars to fly.

That will also mean better signage. Most amateur shop builders will use a lot of signage, usually on the walls or suspended from the ceiling, so that they don’t cover the items for sale. Well, remember what I told you that most of the time people will be looking at thefloor? (It has to do with the way the standard camera works: most avatars are seen slightly from the top) So the signage, unlike RL shops, should be on the floor, not on walls or ceilings! A further advantage of placing things on the ground is that there seldom is anything behind the floor (which means that once the floor is rezzed, the SL client has nothing further to download from that direction, and finishes much faster), unless, of course, you have a multi-floored build. Nevertheless, the best shops have been placing information on the ground and colour-coding areas to make them easier to navigate.

Avatar Rendering Cost Shows That Hair is Prohibitively Laggy!

Since Linden Lab introduced Avatar Rendering Cost as an option on the Debug menu, people have been shocked at how terrible hair is! This has lead hair designers to despair — the better hair looks, the more likely it’s going to clash with the ARC Nazis, who are always eager to shout angrily “Remove your hair now! You’re lagging the sim!” So this means that as a hair designer you have a difficult trade-off to deal with: either please your customers but displease the ARC Nazis, meaning that common residents will avoid gorgeous designs (or just use it privately at home) because they fear they’ll be lagging the sim…

Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, prim hair usually uses just one or two textures at most, and it often uses the most simplest of prims, because they’re the ones that can get flexified (when flexible sculpties become a standard feature of the Linden viewer, as they already are on some viewers, there will be a new Hair Renaissance!). They still get a very high rating on ARC, because, of course, “lots of prims” will alwaysget a higher rating, specially if they have a lot of alpha textures on each prim’s face (which will be the case for most of the very primmy hair).

But… high ARC does not create sim lag! Seriously! A prim is just a prim, 200 prims on the ground or attached to an avatar’s head take exactly the same time to rezz (actually, prim hair will rezz first, since all attachments have priority when downloading). So what’s the problem with high-ARC prim hair (or shoes)?

To understand this, you will need to know that here is sim lag, and there is client lag. Sim lag happens on SL’s grid and affects everybody on the same sim. Client lag is what you experience on your own computer.

Typical cases of client lag are… an underpowered laptop on wi-fi. Sure, it’s fun to be chatting with your beloved one in bed, but your poor laptop on wi-fi will simply be much more laggier than a desktop computer of half the price with a wired connection to the Internet. There is little you can do about that — it’s just the way technology works. Wireless and wi-fi are bad for SL — they lose packets, and when that happens, information has to be retransmitted. Laptops overheat quickly and easily, and that means that the laptop has to start slowing things down — CPU and graphics card are the first to go, and these two are what you need for ultrafast performance in SL!

The next most common mistake is an unconfigured computer. Although these days almost everybody in the Western world owns and uses a computer daily, they’re still viewed as an appliance — like your toaster in the kitchen — that you just plug in and it works. Sadly, they’re not even close to that, even if every year they get better at predicting what kind of use you’re going to give it. Here goes a typical example. Some of the most recent Vista-based, low-end laptops have a setting to run the CPU at half speed. Why? Vista is more demanding in CPU, and this meant more power consumption, and a battery that runs out quicker. This meant that the computer manufacturers felt that their products would be evaluated against other, non-Vista computers, and people wouldn’t want such short battery life. Thus, they just switch the CPU down to half the performance, and that will make the battery last longer. It will also mean that Vista will be far slower, but since people are used to slow computers anyway, it wouldn’t make any difference at all.

How each manufacturer deals with this is different, but the point is, by just clicking a checkbox or a slider you can suddenly get twice the performance out of your laptop! There goes your SL lag away… But tweaking and experimenting takes time, requiresknowledge, and patience. And usually requires an expert too!

Not all of us are experts, so SL tries to estimate what are the best performance settings for your brand and model of computer. It often guesses wrong. I always tell people to experiment with the settings under Preferences to see if they get a bit more performance out of their computers; sometimes, a trick that makes a huge difference for someone will do nothing for you — and inversely, something that everybody else tells you never to touch will make all the difference! I have a very underpowered MacBook from late 2007, and I was very disappointed with it: it has an Intel card that is not supported by Linden Lab. So I wasn’t much surprised that I just got 1-3 FPS out of it, which pretty much frustrated me.

But one day I gave it a try again, and started tweaking with the parameters. By placing all settings at the lowest setting, suddenly I got it going at 40 FPS! Granted, SL didn’t look nice, but clearly that old, unsupported Intel card was not that bad! After playing a bit with the settings I found out that the only serious limitation was with the shaders (used by Windlight to get you gorgeous sky and water). Well, I could live without water reflections — so long as I got the avatars rendering nicely, with plenty of shiny, and good enough detail on the objects. So, getting rid of water reflections turned a “useless” laptop in a quite performing machine! On a good day, I can easily get 30 FPS out of it, and SL doesn’t look that ugly, either!

So is all client-side lag caused by improper configuration? In most of the cases, yes, but the truth is, some features in SL are really meant for high-end graphics cards. If all you can afford is a US$700 laptop or a US$500 desktop, you will get a “bare bones” graphics card — good for Word and a web browser, but not for much more. You can’t expect a low-end, US$10-50 graphics card, which is what comes with the low-end computers, to be able to render things like state-of-the-art graphics cards that will cost more than your laptop!

Sadly, most people simply cannot afford a state-of-the-art graphics card, and will have to make do with what they have. I’m afraid that what this means is that you’ll always be experiencing some sort of client-side lag. Even if people around you run naked, without script attachments, and paint all walls white… you’ll always lag on a sim with 50-100 avatars on it. Your graphics card is simply not powerful enough to deal with that.

Now you know that all ARC Nazis, by definition, have low-end graphic cards  I can only pity them for that, because they have a perception of the world that is just unique to them, and they yell and get angry with everybody else because they believe that the whole world is conspiring against them to make their computers more laggy. I’m sorry — but, again, this is just superstition, just a magical belief that you can transform your underpowered computer into something powerful, if only everybody else used Linden avatars.

ARC Nazis will always put the blame on someone else. If they manage to get everybody in a place turning into Ruth, and they are still lagging, they will immediately suspect that everybody is secretly running scripted attachments. So they immediately yell to people to drop their attachments, and visually confirm if someone hasn’t done so. When they’re satisfied, they will still lag… and then remember that people also have HUDs. HUDs, unfortunately, you cannot see — so the ARC Nazis, living in their RuthWorld, will still believe people are hiding their HUDs behind their screens just to create lag.

But wait — you’re thinking — I’ve actually made some measurements, and high-ARC avatars, specially a lot of them, really make my computer run slower!

To understand why this is the case, you have to forget about prims for a moment. Graphics cards know little about prims or even avatars — all they know is about polygons(or triangles, depending on the model). You can see how Second Life looks like from the perspective of your graphics card by going to the Advanced menu and looking for the “Wireframe” mode. SL will look funny that way, but you’ll see that everything is actually really made out of small triangles, all the way.

Now you’ll notice one thing: the more complex the prim (i.e. the more it’s twisted!), the more triangles it has. Avatars have a lot of triangles on their own (about 7500 at my last count). A plywood cube will just have 12.

As you can imagine, your graphics card can only render a specific amount of triangles per second. How many? That depends on the brand and model, but you can expect that higher-end cards can actually render thousand times as much as lower-end cards. Now, SL is optimised to try to feed you a stream of 25 or so frames per second (enough to give you the illusion of smooth movement). This means that in a single second, all those triangles you see in a scene in front of you — hundreds of thousands, often millions have to be rendered at least 25 times.

It’s hard to get a list comparing graphics cards — most use “synthetic tests” where the overall performance is measured using a combination of techniques, not just merely polygon rendering — but you can imagine what happens on a low-end graphics card. At some point, there are so many avatars in the same scene that the graphics card cannot simply keep up with the polygons. As a result, the frame rate drops — you get that “slideshow effect” instead of smooth, video-like motion. This is just your graphics card telling you that it has reached its limit. High-end graphics cards will have a way higher limit, and, for them, rendering hundred avatars with 10,000 ARC doesn’t make them sweat. The problem is, most of us don’t have such high-end graphics cards. So what actually happens is that most will experience a huge drop in performance when rendering too many avatars with too many attachments.

The important thing to remember is that this affects you only. You can tweak your Preferences so that avatars render with less polygons (yes, they will be ugly). You can be on a crowded sim with a hundred avatars with 25-30 FPS on a low-end graphics card (I do that every day!). But it means you have to deal with trade-offs. Typical trade-offs are using avatar impostors even at close range (avatar impostors are just a texture, they have no meshes, and thus, no polygons to render); having a very short drawing distance (keeping those avatars out of your field of vision!); turning off all shaders (bye-bye water reflections and gorgeous skies!); and so on. So… this is actually the reverse of what the ARC Nazis want: instead of lowering your settings so that you can get a good performance of your card (but probably an uglier SL!), they demand that everybodylooks ugly in SL so that they can get better performance! But that’s thinking upside down: you should be the one to adapt your computer to what it can actually deliver, not the rest of the world that has to conform to your under-powered or misconfigured computer!

It’s pitiful when you look everywhere for sources of lag that don’t really exist — except on your computer. You can search and search, yell and yell, but the lag in your own computer will not go away. Unless, of course, if you kick everybody out of the sim.

Why?

Time dilation

There is, however, one thing that will definitely lag everybody on the sim. And the answer is actually paradoxically simple: more avatars will lag everybody, but not for the reason described above!

Keep in mind that your goal is to render all those polygons 25 times per second to get smooth performance. Now, to keep with that goal, the sim will need to feed you with data, at least also 25 times per second. But — here’s the catch! — it has not only to tell you where everybody else is in the sim (and what they’re doing, e.g. what they’re saying in chat, what animations their AOs have activated, etc.), but it has also to send you the textures for your SL client to render content.

So if you push up the View Statistics window, you’ll see there is a section called “Simulator”. Under that section there is a subsection called “Time”. This will tell you what the sim is actually trying to do to keep up with all the requests.

For historical reasons, the sim will try to refresh everything in it 45 times per second (not merely 25), which gives it some headroom. This means that each “sim frame” is sent every 22 ms (milliseconds). Ideally, the largest value should be on “Spare Time” – meaning mostly that the sim has plenty of time left to do whatever it needs to be doing. Net time is related to texture download (and other assets) from other sims; Agent Time is for sending data about prims to avatars; and Images Time will tell the amount spent in actually transmitting textures to avatars logged on that sim – so, if anyone in the sim is downloading things, a slice of those 22 ms will be “wasted” on downloads and not on, say, tracking where avatars are (Sim Time – Other). The example on the picture shows a very healthy sim: half a milisecond is spent every frame to track avatars down, deal with textures, and so on. But most of the time, the sim is just idling away. This means — zero lag on the sim.

What happens when suddenly a lot more avatars start entering the sim? Well, first, more time is spent to track them down, and this grows exponentially. That means that to track down 10 avatars, you have to send a hundred times more messages! Tracking a hundred avatars means ten thousand times more messages. If we wished to have a thousand avatars per sim, that would mean a million messages exchanged to keep all avatars in sync — but there is no technology sufficiently fast these days to handle that and still be able to deal with calculating each frame, 45 times per second.

But things get worse very quickly. Sim Time – Other (tracking down avatars) is actually one of the quickest things to do, in the sense that it doesn’t require much time to send updates. Texture data is another story, because a full texture requires several seconds(thousands of “frames”) to download, and while the texture is being transmitted, the sim momentaneously fails to track down where avatars actually are and what they’re doing (from your point of view, this is not very serious, because the SL client interpolates — it tries to figure out where other avatars were the last time, where they were moving to, and what animations they had loaded, so it can pretty much give you a reasonable display of what is happening until they get fresher data).

But now imagine that a hundred avatars are all requesting texture data (because they’ve just arrived to a huge event at the same time). Suddenly, all the sim is doing is sending textures everywhere. But in most cases, the textures might not be loaded on the currentsim (imagine all those attachments and clothes that came from other sims!), so first the sim has to request them all — wasting time and bandwidth. At this point, the sim might simply begin to fail tracking down avatars. These will request new position updates, all at the same time, but the sim might simply not be able to send them all the required data in less than 22 ms. So here is where strange things start to happen: your avatar starts to “walk through treacle” or suddenly hiccuping and appearing a bit ahead or below of what you expected. This is just because the SL client is expecting some data that it never receives.

In the mean time, the sim starts to receive some texture data. Since all hundred avatars require the same textures, now comes the moment where one texture received from a remote server suddenly turns into hundred uploads to as many avatars. So if texture retrieval from a remote sim was already painful, now it’s a hundred times worse.

But it doesn’t stop here. Once you’re missing a lot of positioning information, you cannot feed the physical engine with accurate information on where the avatars are. Like the SL client, the physical engine can work on guesstimates — “well, this avatar was moving northwards a second ago, so it’s safe to assume it’s still going that way”. Sadly, you never know what’s in the path. Other avatars might become obstacles; the path might suddenly end; there is a stair in front of the avatar and so the physical engine has to calculate the new position based on where the “ground” now is.

When the amount of computation by the physical engine is too high, and it cannot deliver an accurate prediction on where the avatars are supposed to be, we enter “slow motion mode”. What you will see is that the value of Time Dilation, which is usually 1.0 (that means: events happen in real time) might suddenly drop. A drop to 0.5 means that the physical engine is now operating at half the speed of real time, i.e. that all actions that avatars start taking twice as long. A very overburdened sim will quickly get worse and worse — when Time Dilation is at 0.10, that means that everything happens ten times as slower, and so on.

What does this slowdown mean? Well, the SL client can compensate for the lag (what literally lag means: things are not happening in real time any more) to a degree. It doesn’t need to update the avatar position so often, for instance, because the sim tells the SL client that it can’t keep up anyway. You’ll see that for relatively high Time Dilation values (until 0.7 or so) you might not even notice the lag: sim and SL client work in tandem to compensate for the lack of available processing power on the sim side. Usually, this should not happen often: it’s designed to deal with “spikes” (when all of a sudden a lot of people drop in the sim, but quickly disperse, each going their own way).

The trouble starts with a very intense and long event (say, an hour or so) where avatars are constantly in pretty much the same spot — which is what actually happens at almost all events  That’s why they lag all the time. The sim cannot keep up with so much information to transmit to all avatars; the physics engine is constantly working to keep up with the amount of information it needs to calculate everything, and never “catches” up. The event is usually laggy from the begin to the end. At the very end, as avatars start to leave, the physics engine finally catches up, the sim finally can track back all avatar positions, and at last, “slow motion” becomes real time again, sometimes all of a sudden.

So how can you prevent this? The short answer is, you cannot. You can’t tell people to stay away from events — which is the only thing that actually creates sim-server lag. The mere act of connecting to a crammed-full sim creates lag. The amount of prims on your 10,000-ARC hair is pretty much irrelevant. Just the tracking down, the physics engine, and the few textures that it’s constantly downloading from other locations and feeding to all avatars in the sim, is more than enough to bring it to its knees. What the Lag & ARC Nazis do not realise is that all this happens independently on what you’re wearing or attaching to yourself.

But doesn’t it help? After all, if you’re not wearing 200-prim-hair, you will have less information to transmit, right? So it will surely help a bit? The short answer is no — the difference is almost impossible to measure. As said, 200-prim hair is usually just two or three textures to download. If your SL client doesn’t ever get them, that’s all right, they’ll just remain grey, but that doesn’t “lag” you. Remember that a sim with Time Dilation of 0.5 is two times slower than real time — and 0.10 is ten times slower. If the overall difference of having everybody wearing 200-prim-hair is 0.01 on time dilation (probably it will be far less), that is hardly important. The sim will not recover from lag even if everybody detach their hair, shoes, and HUDs. Avatars will still be requesting data; the physics engine will still be having a hard time to calculate where avatars are. No, the only way to deal with a sim crammed full of avatars — is to get rid of them. But that’s not an option!

The conclusion?

Etiquette dictates that you ought to conform to other people’s rules when you’re a visitor, and should accept their insane superstitions, just out of politeness, even if they don’t make any rational sense. If the Lag & ARC Nazis request that you detach your things, out of politeness, you should do so. But you should also be aware, if you’re hosting your event, that it makes people angry to impose superstitions on your guests. Blaming your guests for completely the wrong reasons is as rude as ignoring your host’s requests — in fact, I would even claim that some cultures view it as much ruder. As in the example earlier, it would be far more rude for the host to offer not-kosher food to Jewish guests (and insulting them for their superstitions) or blaming them for having to be forced to serve something you dislike just because they have a silly religious rule. In almost all cultures in the world, hospitality is important, and a part of being hospitable is to be nice and welcoming to your guests, and accepting their differences and ideas. Also, in almost all cultures, guests also try to comply with their host’s reasonable demands, if their motivation is a good one. My grandfather, who was a Jew, would not engage in drama if someone would offer him a ham sandwich; he’d just smile, eat a bit not to offend the guest, and later explain that unfortunately his religion forbade him to fully enjoy the sandwich, but still thank the host for the effort in doing a nice sandwich just for him. A polite host would offer their apologies to my grandfather and remember not to use pork ham but stick to chicken ham on sandwiches next time.

Similarly, a polite host in SL would probably request guests not to use high-prim attachments and turn off their HUDs because they believe in the myth that these create lag. Insulting and yelling at your guests is very rude — specially well-informed guests that would kindly point out that this lag myth has no grounds whatsoever. On the other hand, specifically ignoring your host’s request, and wearing the highest-ARC hair you can find, attaching a thousand flexiprims on your scripted skirt, using all kinds of particle effects and sounds on your shoes and bracelets, just to provoke them, is also very, very rude. A good compromise can be met: there are less primmy hairs around which still look good enough; you don’t need to wear earrings if you have a very dense hairstyle (nobody will notice them anyway); and wearing jeans instead of a high-prim skirt is sexy and fashionable too, and a lot of prim shoes just have one sculpty and still look great! You can also turn off your avatar radar on a very crowded place, since it won’t work properly anyway (as explained, scripts will run so slow that the sensors used by the avatar radars will never really find all avatars around you).

What we call “lag” is basically split among two categories: server-side lag, which you can’t avoid in crowded areas, since it comes simply from having a lot of avatars in the same place, which require a lot of time to compute their positions and what they’re doing. Attachments will have little relevance to lower lag. The other category is client-side lag, and that one can be dealt with — both by the event hoster, who can design the environment to take advantage of the so many tricks that the SL client does to keep a good performance, but also by the visitor, who, even with an underpowered graphics card, is always able to tweak their settings to adapt to an avatar-intense event. Sure, that requires that you experiment a bit with the settings, but it’s within your power to effectively turn down your client-side lag if you’re willing to do some tweaking — instead of blaming others!

What will definitely not work is to stick to superstitions and myths, assuming that things work by “magic”, and being rude to your visitors who are better informed and are not willing to get insulted.

Hair: Amber IV – Sunset by Ingmann Creations
Outfit: Erotika by Kunglers
Second Skin by Namssor Daguerre
J’s Tight High Boots

Building In SL

Cache Fix: Fixing A Broken Client Cache With a Sledgehammer (Nietszche would be proud of me!)

When your SL client crashes or the server you are connected to hiccoughs, you can end up with bits of inventory, sounds and textures left in places in the cache where neither you nor your SL client can get to them, and can even break the structure of the cache to such an extent that simply clearing cache doesn't fix it. This can take up space, make your cache much less efficient and even make assets appear to vanish completely.

To repair this, you need to simply delete the cache directory on your computer (directories are sometimes called folders). This is in fact faster than "Clearing Cache" and much more reliable. You need to logout BEFORE you delete the cache directory, and as soon as it has been deleted, you can log back in. Your SL client will see that the cache directory is missing and create a new one.

To delete the directory you need to know where it is. It will always remain in the same place for the same Operating System and User on the same machine, but the location will vary from user to user and machine to machine. To find out where the cache directory is located for you on your computer, simply:

Edit/Preferences/Network as if you were going to clear cache normally.

Look at the location of your disk cache, "Disk Cache Location"

I run under Linux and my cache is in, "/home/hermit/.secondlife/cache", but it will be different on different operating systems and for different users. For a Windows user, it might be, "C:\Documents and Settings\PCNameHere\Application Data\SecondLife\cache" where "PCNameHere" is the name of your computer. On a Macintosh, it is likely in /Users/USERNAME/Library/Caches/SecondLife

Write down the address.

Log out of Second Life.

Now using any handy tool, go to the parent folder and delete the entire cache folder.

So on my computer I go to:

/home/hermit/.secondlife

and delete:

cache

As soon as the cache directory is deleted you can log back in. SL will notice it is missing and create a new one, without any problems.

Notice that this is faster than using the Edit/Preferences/Networking/Clear Cache option.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Emilie's note on howto repair a broken SL Cache v1.06
Canonical Web Page Name: Fixing A Broken Client Cache With a Sledgehammer (Nietszche would be proud of me!)
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/content/fix-a-broken-client-cache-with-a-sledgehammer

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.07 Updated URL to remove Drupal cruft.
1.06 Updated license, removed date, minor grammatical corrections.
1.05 Corrected version number for notecard.
1.04 Added Macintosh information with assistance from Niaht Nakamichi.
1.03 Added note on performance versus conventional cache clearing.
1.02 Minor spelling corrections canonical names and website address added. Order of revision notices changed to most recent first.
1.01 Added sample Windows path with assistance from Lalinda Lovell
1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: Hermit Barber, 2009, 2010, 2011

Licence:

This work by Hermit Barber (SecondLife) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When quoting or citing this work the attribution must include a link to this page which is where the current version will be available, and the copyright notice provided here must be included in full.

Character Sets

Many Here: http://unicode.org/charts/

Inverted and Backwards Translater: http://www.upsidedowntext.com/

Strike-out text: http://adamvarga.com/strike/ (Like this E̶m̶e̶r̶a̶l̶d̶ Phoenix).

Mixed generator: http://graphics.glig.com/generators/unicode_text

Encool text: http://text-symbols.com/encool/

Russify text: http://text-symbols.com/encool/slavic/

From: http://www.bigbaer.com/reference/character_entity_reference.htm They also have a neat thin version to use as a sidebar: http://www.bigbaer.com/sidebars/entities/ 

Character Entity Reference HTML 4

Character entity names & entity reference decimal equivalent

About the character entity html reference list

The Character Entity Reference HTML 4 has been formatted with accessibility and usability considerations. The Entity Reference List is presented using the definition list format. This allows usable small screen rendering on numerous Internet devices including Internet capable cell phones and PDAs. Lists presented using tables may lose their logical relational order to the contained elements when displayed on small screen rendering devices.

HTML 4.01 supports the ISO 8859-1 (Latin-1) character set. The lower part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 0-127) is the original 7-BIT ASCII standard. Most of these characters can be used without a character reference. The higher part of ISO-8859-1 (codes from 160-255) can all be used using character entity names.

Character Entity Reference Browser & Font Support

Note: character entity names are case sensitive.

Special Characters for HTML

CO Controls and Basic Latin

[ " ] quotation mark

[name: "] [number: "]

[ & ] ampersand

[name: &] [number: &]

[ < ] less than

[name: <] [number: <]

[ > ] greater than

[name: >] [number: >]

ISO 8859-1 Symbol Entities

[   ] non-breaking space

[name:  ] [number:  ]

[ ¡ ] inverted exclamation mark

[name: ¡] [number: ¡]

[ ¢ ] cent

[name: ¢ ] [number: ¢]

[ £ ] pound

[name: £] [number: £]

[ ¤ ] currency

[name: ¤] [number: ¤]

[ ¥ ] yen

[name: ¥] [number: ¥]

[ € ] euro sign

[name: €] [number: €]

[ ¦ ] broken vertical bar

[name: ¦] [number: ¦]

[ § ] section

[name: §] [number: §]

[ ¨ ] spacing diaeresis

[name: ¨] [number: ¨]

[ © ] copyright

[name: ©] [number: ©]

[ ª ] feminine ordinal indicator

[name: ª] [number: ª]

[ « ] left angle quotation mark

[name: «] [number: «]

[ ¬ ] negation

[number: ¬] [number: ¬]

[ ] soft hyphen

[name: ­] [number: ­]

[ ® ] registered trademark

[name: ®] [number: ®]

[ ™ ] trademark

[name: ™] [number: ™

[ ¯ ] spacing macron

[name: ¯] [number: ¯]

[ ° ] degree - e.g. 45°

[name: °] [number: °]

[ ± ] plus-or-minus

[name: ±] [number: ±]

[ ² ] superscript 2

[name: ²] [number: ²]

[ ³ ] superscript 3

[name: ³] [number: ³]

[ ´ ] spacing acute

[name: ´] [number: ´]

[ µ ] micro

[name: µ] [number: µ]

[ ¶ ] paragraph

[name: ¶] [number: ¶]

[ · ] middle dot

[name: ·] [number: ·]

[ ¸ ] spacing cedilla

[name: ¸] [number: ¸]

[ ¹ ] superscript 1

[name: ¹] [number: ¹]

[ º ] masculine ordinal indicator

[name: º] [number: º]

[ » ] right angle quotation mark

[name: »] [number: »]

[ ¼ ] fraction 1/4

[name: ¼] [number: ¼]

[ ½ ] fraction 1/2

[name: ½] [number: ½]

[ ¾ ] fraction 3/4

[name: ¾] [number: ¾]

[ ¿ ] inverted question mark

[name: ¿] [number: ¿]

[ × ] multiplication

[name: ×] [number: ×]

[ ÷ ] division

[name: ÷] [number: ÷]

ISO 8859-1 Character Entities

[ À ] capital a, grave accent

[name: À] [number: À]

[ Á ] capital a, acute accent

[name: Á] [number: Á]

[ Â ] capital a, circumflex accent

[name: Â] [number: Â]

[ Ã ] capital a, tilde

[name: Ã] [number: Ã]

[ Ä ] capital a, umlaut mark

[name: Ä] [number: Ä]

[ Å ] capital a, ring

[name: Å] [number: Å]

[ Æ ] capital ae

[name: Æ] [number: Æ]

[ Ç ] capital c, cedilla

[name: Ç] [number: Ç]

[ È ] capital e, grave accent

[name: È] [number: È]

[ É ] capital e, acute accent

[name: É] [number: É]

[ Ê ] capital e, circumflex accent

[name: Ê] [number: Ê]

[ Ë ] capital e, umlaut mark

[name: Ë] [number: Ë]

[ Ì ] capital i, grave accent

[name: Ì] [number: Ì]

[ Í ] capital i, acute accent

[name: Í] [number: Í]

[ Î ] capital i, circumflex accent

[name: Î] [number: Î]

[ Ï ] capital i, umlaut mark

[name: Ï] [number: Ï]

[ Ð ] capital eth, Icelandic

[name: Ð] [number: Ð]

[ Ñ ] capital n, tilde

[name: Ñ] [number: Ñ]

[ Ò ] capital o, grave accent

[name: Ò] [number: Ò]

[ Ó ] capital o, acute accent

[name: Ó] [number: Ó]

[ Ô ] capital o, circumflex accent

[name: Ô] [number: Ô]

[ Õ ] capital o, tilde

[name: Õ] [number: Õ]

[ Ö ] capital o, umlaut mark

[name: Ö] [number: Ö]

[ Ø ] capital o, slash

[name: Ø] [number: Ø]

[ Ù ] capital u, grave accent

[name: Ù] [number: Ù]

[ Ú ] capital u, acute accent

[name: Ú] [number: Ú]

[ Û ] capital u, circumflex accent

[name: Û] [number: Û]

[ Ü ] capital u, umlaut mark

[name: Ü] [number: Ü]

[ Ý ] capital y, acute accent

[name: Ý] [number: Ý]

[ Þ ] capital THORN, Icelandic

[name: Þ] [number: Þ]

[ ß ] small sharp s, German

[name: ß] [number: ß]

[ à ] small a, grave accent

[name: à] [number: à]

[ á ] small a, acute accent

[name: á] [number: á]

[ â ] small a, circumflex accent

[name: â] [number: â]

[ ã ] small a, tilde

[name: ã] [number: ã]

[ ä ] small a, umlaut mark

[name: ä] [number: ä]

[ å ] small a, ring

[name: å] [number: å]

[ æ ] small ae

[name: æ] [number: æ]

[ ç ] small c, cedilla

[name: ç] [number: ç]

[ è ] small e, grave accent

[name: è] [number: è]

[ é ] small e, acute accent

[name: é] [number: é]

[ ê ] small e, circumflex accent

[name: ê] [number: ê]

[ ë ] small e, umlaut mark

[name: ë] [number: ë]

[ ì ] small i, grave accent

[name: ì] [number: ì]

[ í ] small i, acute accent

[name: í] [number: í]

[ î ] small i, circumflex accent

[name: î] [number: î]

[ ï ] small i, umlaut mark

[name: ï] [number: ï]

[ ð ] small eth, Icelandic

[name: ð] [number: ð]

[ ñ ] small n, tilde

[name: ñ] [number: ñ]

[ ò ] small o, grave accent

[name: ò] [number: ò]

[ ó ] small o, acute accent

[name: ó] [number: ó]

[ ô ] small o, circumflex accent

[name: ô] [number: ô]

[ õ ] small o, tilde

[name: õ] [number: õ]

[ ö ] small o, umlaut mark

[name: ö] [number: ö]

[ ø ] small o, slash

[name: ø] [number: ø]

[ ù ] small u, grave accent

[name: ù] [number: ù]

[ ú ] small u, acute accent

[name: ú] [number: ú]

[ û ] small u, circumflex accent

[name: û] [number: û]

[ ü ] small u, umlaut mark

[name: ü] [number: ü]

[ ý ] small y, acute accent

[name: ý] [number: ý]

[ þ ] small thorn, Icelandic

[name: þ] [number: þ]

[ ÿ ] small y, umlaut mark

[name: ÿ] [number: ÿ]

Latin Extended-A

[ Π] latin capital ligature

[name: Œ] [number: Œ]

[ œ ] latin small ligature

[name: œ] [number: œ]

[ Š ] latin capital letter S with caron

[name: Š] [number: Š]

[ š ] latin small letter s with caron

[name: š] [number: š]

[ Ÿ ] latin capital letter Y with diaeresis

[name: Ÿ] [number: Ÿ]

Spacing Modifier Letters

[ ˆ ] modifier letter circumflex accent

[name: ˆ] [number: ˆ]

[ ˜ ] small tilde

[name: &tilde] [number: ˜]

General Punctuation

[ ] en space

[name:  ] [number:  ]

[ ] em space

[name:  ] [number:  ]

[ ] thin space

[name: &thinsp] [number:  ]

[ ‌ ] zero width non-joiner

[name: ‌] [number: &8204;]

[ ‍ ] zero width joiner

[name: ‍] [number: ‍]

[ ‎ ] left-to-right mark

[name: ‎] [number: ‎]

[ ‏ ] right-to-left mark

[name: ‏] [number: ‏]

[ – ] en dash

[name: –] [number: –]

[ — ] em dash

[name: —] [number: —]

[ ‘ ] left single quotation mark

[name: ‘] [number: ‘]

[ ’ ] right single quotation mark

[name: ’] [number: ’]

[ ‚ ] single low-9 quotation mark

[name: ‚] [number: ‚]

[ “ ] left double quotation mark

[name: “] [number: “]

[ ” ] right double quotation mark

[name: ”] [number: ”]

[ „ ] double low-9 quotation mark

[name: „] [number: „]

[ † ] dagger

[name: †] [number: †]

[ ‡ ] double dagger

[name: ‡] [number: ‡]

[ ‰ ] per mille sign

[name: ‰] [number: ‰]

[ ‹ ] single left-pointing angle quotation mark

[name: ‹] [number: ‹]

[ › ] single right-pointing angle quotation mark

[name: ›] [number: ›]

Latin Extended-B

[ ƒ ] latin small f with hook

[name: ƒ] [number: ƒ]

General Punctuation 2

[ • ] bullet = black small circle

[name: •] [number: •]

[ … ] horizontal ellipsis = three dot leader

[name: …] [number: …]

[ ′ ] prime = minutes = feet

[name: ′] [number: ′]

[ ″ ] double prime = seconds = inches

[name: ″] [number: ″]

[ ‾ ] overline = spacing overscore

[name: ‾] [number: ‾]

[ ⁄ ] fraction slash

[name: ⁄] [number: ⁄]

Letterlike Symbols

[ ℘ ] script capital P = power set = Weierstrass p

[name: ℘] [number: ℘]

[ ℑ ] blackletter capital I = imaginary part

[name: ℑ] [number: ℑ]

[ ℜ ] blackletter capital R = real part symbol

[name: ℜ] [number: ℜ]

[ ℵ ] alef symbol = first transfinite cardinal

[name: ℵ] [number: ℵ]

[ ← ] leftwards arrow

[name: ←] [number: ←]

[ ↑ ] upwards arrow

[name: ↑] [number: ↑]

[ → ] rightwards arrow

[name: →] [number: →]

[ ↓ ] downwards arrow

[name: ↓] [number: ℯ]

[ ↔ ] left right arrow

[name: ↔] [number: ↔]

[ ↵ ] downwards arrow with corner leftwards = carriage return

[name: ↵] [number: ↵]

[ ⇐ ] leftwards double arrow

[name: ⇐] [number: ⇐]

[ ⇑ ] upwards double arrow

[name: ⇑] [number: ⇑]

[ ⇒ ] rightwards double arrow

[name: ⇒] [number: ⇒]

[ ⇓ ] downwards double arrow

[name: ⇓] [number: ⇓]

[ ⇔ ] left right double arrow

[name: ⇔] [number: ⇔]

Mathematical Operators

[ ∀ ] for all

[name: ∀] [number: ∀]

[ ∂ ] partial differential

[name: ∂] [number: ∂]

[ ∃ ] there exists

[name: ∃] [number: ∃]

[ ∅ ] empty set = null set = diameter

[name: ∅] [number: ∅]

[ ∇ ] nabla = backward difference

[name: ∇] [number: ∇]

[ ∈ ] element of

[name: ∈] [number: ∈]

[ ∉ ] not an element of

[name: ∉] [number: ∉]

[ ∋ ] contains as member

[name: ∋] [number: ∋]

[ ∏ ] n-ary product = product sign

[name: ∏] [number: ∏]

[ ∑ ] n-ary sumation

[name: ∑] [number: ∑]

[ − ] minus sign

[name: −] [number: −]

[ ∗ ] asterisk operator

[name: ∗] [number: ∗]

[ √ ] square root

[name: √] [number: √]

[ ∝ ] proportional to

[name: ∝] [number: ∝]

[ ∞ ] infinity

[name: ∞] [number: ∞]

[ ∠ ] angle

[name: ∠] [number: ∠]

[ ∧ ] logical and = wedge

[name: ∧] [number: ∧]

[ ∨ ] logical or = vee

[name: ∨] [number: ∨]

[ ∩ ] intersection = cap

[name: ∩] [number: ∩]

[ ∪ ] union = cup

[name: ∪] [number: ∪]

[ ∫ ] integral

[name: ∫] [number: ∫]

[ ∴ ] therefore

[name: ∴] [number: ∴]

[ ∼ ] tilde operator = varies with = similar to

[name: ∼] [number: ∼]

[ ≅ ] approximately equal to

[name: ≅] [number: ≅]

[ ≈ ] almost equal to = asymptotic to

[name: ≈] [number: ≈]

[ ≠ ] not equal to

[name: ≠] [number: ≠]

[ ≡ ] identical to

[name: ≡] [number: ≡]

[ ≤ ] less-than or equal to

[name: ≤] [number: ≤]

[ ≥ ] greater-than or equal to

[name: ≥] [number: ≥]

[ ⊂ ] subset of

[name: ⊂] [number: ⊂]

[ ⊃ ] superset of

[name: ⊃] [number: ⊃]

[ ⊄ ] not a subset of

[name: ⊄] [number: ⊄]

[ ⊆ ] subset of or equal to

[name: ⊆] [number: ⊆]

[ ⊇ ] superset of or equal to

[name: ⊇] [number: ⊇]

[ ⊕ ] circled plus = direct sum

[name: ⊕] [number: ⊕]

[ ⊗ ] circled times = vector product

[name: ⊗] [number: ⊗]

[ ⊥ ] up tack = orthogonal to = perpendicular

[name: ⊥] [number: ⊥]

[ ⋅ ] dot operator

[name: ⋅] [number: ⋅]

Miscellaneous Technical

[ ⌈ ] left ceiling = apl upstile

[name: ⌈] [number: ⌈]

[ ⌉ ] right ceiling

[name: ⌉] [number: ⌉]

[ ⌊ ] left floor = apl downstile

[name: ⌊] [number: ⌊]

[ ⌋ ] right floor

[name: ⌋] [number: ⌋]

[ 〈 ] left-pointing angle bracket = bra

[name: ⟨] [number: 〈]

[ 〉 ] right-pointing angle bracket = ket

[name: ⟩] [number: 〉]

Geometric Shapes

[ ◊ ] lozenge

[name: ◊] [number: ◊]

Expanded Character Entity List: Miscellaneous Symbols

[ ℠ ] Service Mark

[number: &#8480]

[ ℃ ] Celsius

[number: ℃]

[ ℅ ] care of

[number: ℅]

[ ℉ ] Farenheit

[number: ℉]

[ № ] numero symbol - number sign

[number: №]

[ ℗ ] Sound Recording Copyright

[number: ℗]

[ ℞ ] Prescription Take pharmaceutical symbol

[number: ℞]

[ Ω ] Ohm

[number: Ω]

[ ℧ ] Inverted Ohm

[number: ℧]

[ ☀ ] sunshine - sun

[ number: ☀]

[ ☁ ] cloudy - cloud

[ number: ☁]

[ ☂ ] raining - rain

[ number: ☂]

[ ☃ ] snow - snowman

[ number: ☃]

[ ☄ ] comet

[ number: ☄]

[ ★ ] star solid

[ number: ★]

[ ☆ ] star outline

[ number: ☆]

[ ☇ ] lightning

[ number: ☇]

[ ☈ ] thunderstorm

[ number: ☈]

[ ☉ ] sun

[ number: ☉]

[ ☊ ] ascending node

[ number: ☊]

[ ☋ ] descending node

[ number: ☋]

[ ☌ ] conjunction

[ number: ☌]

[ ☍ ] opposition

[ number: ☍]

[ ☎ ] phone number - phone service

[ number: ☎]

[ ☏ ] phone symbol outline

[ number: ☏]

[ ☐ ] check box - ballot box

[ number: ☐]

[ ☑ ] ballot box check mark

[ number: ☑]

[ ☒ ] ballot box with X

[ number: ☒]

[ ☓ ] Saltire - St. Andrew's Cross

[ number: ☓]

[ ☚ ] left-pointing index finger

[number: ☚]

[ ☛ ] right-pointing index finger

[number: ☛]

[ ☜ ] left-pointing index finger

[number: ☜]

[ ☝ ] upwards pointing index finger

[number: ☝]

[ ☞ ] right pointing index finger

[number: ☞]

[ ☟ ] downwards pointing index finger

[number: ☟]

[ ☠ ] skull & crossbones

[number: ☠]

[ ☡ ] caution sign

[ number: ☡]

[ ☢ ] radioactive sign

[number: ☢]

[ ☣ ] biohazard sign

[number: ☣]

[ ☤ ] Caduceus or "Kerykeion"

[number: ☤]

[ ☥ ] Ankh

[number: ☥]

[ ☦ ] Eastern Christian Cross

[number: ☦]

[ ☧ ] Chi Rho Cross

[number: ☧]

[ ☨ ] Patriarchal Cross

[number: ☨]

[ ☩ ] Greek Cross

[number: ☩]

[ ☪ ] Crescent Moon & Star

[ number: ☪]

[ ☫ ] Farsi symbol

[ number: ☫]

[ ☬ ] Adi Shakti

[ number: ☬]

[ ☭ ] hammer & sickle

[ number: ☭]

[ ☮ ] peace sign

[ number: ☮]

[ ☯ ] yin & yang

[ number: ☯]

[ ☰ ] trigram Heaven

[ number: ☰]

[ ☱ ] trigram Lake

[ number: ☱]

[ ☲ ] trigram Fire

[ number: ☲]

[ ☳ ] trigram Thunder

[ number: ☳]

[ ☴ ] trigram Wind

[ number: ☴]

[ ☵ ] trigram Water

[ number: ☵]

[ ☶ ] trigram Mountain

[ number: ☶]

[ ☷ ] trigram Heaven

[ number: ☷]

[ ☸ ] Dharma Wheel

[number: ☸]

[ ☹ ] frowning face

[number: ☹]

[ ☺ ] smiley face

[number: ☺]

[ ☻ ] black smiley face

[number: &#9787;]

[ ☽ ] waxing crescent moon

[number: &#9789;]

[ ☾ ] waning crescent moon

[number: &#9790;]

[ ☿ ] Mercury

[number: ☿]

[ ♀ ] Venus - Female symbol

[number: ♀]

[ ♁ ] Earth symbol

[number: ♁]

[ ♂ ] Mars - Male symbol

[number: ♂]

[ ♃ ] Jupiter

[number: ♃]

[ ♄ ] Saturn

[number: ♄]

[ ♅ ] Uranus

[number: ♅]

[ ♆ ] Neptune

[number: ♆]

[ ♇ ] Pluto

[number: ♇]

[ ♈ ] Aries

[number: ♈]

[ ♉ ] Taurus

[number: ♉]

[ ♊ ] Gemini

[number: ♊]

[ ♋ ] Cancer

[number: ♋]

[ ♌ ] Leo

[number: ♌]

[ ♍ ] Virgo

[number: ♍]

[ ♎ ] Libra

[number: ♎]

[ ♏ ] Scorpio

[number: ♏]

[ ♐ ] Sagitarius

[number: ♐]

[ ♑ ] Capricorn

[number: ♑]

[ ♒ ] Aquarius

[number: ♒]

[ ♓ ] Pisces

[number: ♓]

[ ♔ ] White King

[number: ♔]

[ ♕ ] White Queen

[number: ♕]

[ ♖ ] White Rook

[number: ♖]

[ ♗ ] White Bishop

[number: ♗]

[ ♘ ] White Knight

[number: ♘]

[ ♙ ] White Pawn

[number: ♙]

[ ♚ ] Black King

[number: ♚]

[ ♛ ] Black Queen

[number: ♛]

[ ♜ ] Black Rook

[number: ♜]

[ ♝ ] Black Bishop

[number: ♝]

[ ♞ ] Black Knight

[number: ♞]

[ ♟ ] Black Pawn

[number: ♟]

[ ♠ ] black spade suit

[name: ♠] [number: ♠]

[ ♡ ] red heart suit

[number: ♡]

[ ♢ ] red diamond suit

[number: ♢]

[ ♣ ] black club suit = shamrock

[name: ♣] [number: ♣]

[ ♤ ] red spade suit

[number: ♤]

[ ♥ ] black heart suit = valentine

[name: ♥] [number: ♥]

[ ♦ ] black diamond suit

[name: ♦] [number: ♦]

[ ♧ ] red club suit

[number: ♧]

[ ♨ ] hot springs

[number: ♨]

[ ♩ ] musical quarter note

[number: ♩]

[ ♪ ] musical eighth note

[number: ♪]

[ ♫ ] musical single bar note

[number: ♫]

[ ♬ ] musical double bar note

[number: ♬]

[ ♭ ] flat note

[number: ♭]

[ ♮ ] natural note

[number: ♮]

[ ♯ ] sharp note

[number: ♯]

[ ✁ ] cut above

[number: ✁]

[ ✂ ] cut here

[number: ✂]

[ ✃ ] cut below

[number: ✃]

[ ✄ ] scissors

[number: ✄]

[ ✆ ] public pay phone

[number: ✆]

[ ✇ ] film reel - tape spool

[number: ✇]

[ ✈ ] airport jet airplane

[number: ✈]

[ ✉ ] envelope mail email

[number: ✉]

[ ✌ ] victory sign

[number: ✌]

[ ✍ ] signature - sign here

[number: ✍]

[ ✎ ] pencil diagonal down

[number: ✎]

[ ✏ ] pencil

[number: ✏]

[ ✐ ] pencil diagonal up

[number: Ϩ]

[ ✓ ] check mark

[number: ✓]

[ ✔ ] heavy check mark

[number: ✔]

[ ✕ ] multiplication sign X

[number: 𘚥]

[ ✖ ] heavy multiplication sign X

[number: ✖]

[ ✗ ] ballot X

[number: ✗]

[ ✘ ] heavy ballot X

[number: ✘]

[ ✝ ] Latin Roman Cross

[number: ✝]

[ ✞ ] Latin Cross 3D shadow

[number: ✞]

[ ✟ ] Latin Cross outline

[number: ✟]

[ ✠ ] Maltese Cross

[number: ✠]

[ ✡ ] Star of David

[number: ✡]

[ ❛ ] quotation mark single turned comma

[number: ❛]

[ ❜ ] quotation mark single comma

[number: ❜]

[ ❝ ] quotation mark double turned comma

[number: ❝]

[ ❞ ] quotation mark double comma

[number: ❞]

Greek Letters & Symbols Character Entity Reference

[ Α ] greek capital letter alpha

[name: Α] [number: Α]

[ Β ] greek capital letter beta

[name: Β] [number: Β]

[ Γ ] greek capital letter gamma

[name: Γ] [number: Γ]

[ Δ ] greek capital letter delta

[name: Δ] [number: Δ]

[ Ε ] greek capital letter epsilon

[name: Ε] [number: Ε]

[ Ζ ] greek capital letter zeta

[name: Ζ] [number: Ζ]

[ Η ] greek capital letter eta

[name: Η] [number: Η]

[ Θ ] greek capital letter theta

[name: Θ] [number: Θ]

[ Ι ] greek capital letter iota

[name: Ι] [number: Ι]

[ Κ ] greek capital letter kappa

[name: Κ] [number: Κ]

[ Λ ] greek capital letter lambda

[name: Λ] [number: Λ]

[ Μ ] greek capital letter mu

[name: Μ] [number: Μ]

[ Ν ] greek capital letter nu

[name: Ν] [number: Ν]

[ Ξ ] greek capital letter xi

[name: Ξ] [number: Ξ]

[ Ο ] greek capital letter omicron

[name: Ο] [number: Ο]

[ Π ] greek capital letter pi

[name: Π] [number: Π]

[ Ρ ] greek capital letter rho

[name: Ρ] [number: Ρ]

[ Σ ] greek capital letter sigma

[name: Σ] [number: Σ]

[ Τ ] greek capital letter tau

[name: Τ] [number: Τ]

[ Υ ] greek capital letter upsilon

[name: Υ] [number: Υ]

[ Φ ] greek capital letter phi

[name: Φ] [number: Φ]

[ Χ ] greek capital letter chi

[name: Χ] [number: Χ]

[ Ψ ] greek capital letter psi

[name: Ψ] [number: Ψ]

[ Ω ] greek capital letter omega

[name: Ω] [number: Ω]

[ α ] greek small letter alpha

[name: α] [number: α]

[ β ] greek small letter beta

[name: β] [number: β]

[ γ ] greek small letter gamma

[name: γ] [number: γ]

[ δ ] greek small letter delta

[name: δ] [number: δ]

[ ε ] greek small letter epsilon

[name: ε] [number: ε]

[ ζ ] greek small letter zeta

[name: ζ] [number: ζ]

[ η ] greek small letter eta

[name: η] [number: η]

[ θ ] greek small letter theta

[name: θ] [number: θ]

[ ι ] greek small letter iota

[name: ι] [number: ι]

[ κ ] greek small letter kappa

[name: κ] [number: κ]

[ λ ] greek small letter lambda

[name: λ] [number: λ]

[ μ ] greek small letter mu

[name: μ] [number: μ]

[ ν ] greek small letter nu

[name: ν] [number: ν]

[ ξ ] greek small letter xi

[name: ξ] [number: ξ]

[ ο ] greek small letter omicron

[name: ο] [number: ο]

[ π ] greek small letter pi

[name: π] [number: π]

[ ρ ] greek small letter rho

[name: ρ] [number: ρ]

[ ς ] greek small letter final sigma

[name: ς] [number: ς]

[ σ ] greek small letter sigma

[name: σ] [number: σ]

[ τ ] greek small letter tau

[name: τ] [number: τ]

[ υ ] greek small letter upsilon

[name: υ] [number: υ]

[ φ ] greek small letter phi

[name: φ] [number: φ]

[ χ ] greek small letter chi

[name: χ] [number: χ]

[ ψ ] greek small letter psi

[name: ψ] [number: ψ]

[ ω ] greek small letter omega

[name: ω] [number: ω]

[ ϑ ] greek small letter theta symbol

[name: ϑ] [number: ϑ]

[ ϒ ] greek upsilon with hook symbol

[name: ϒ] [number: ϒ]

[ ϖ ] greek pi symbol

[name: ϖ] [number: ϖ]

Copyright - Copyleft

Canonical Link: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=copyleft

Hermit Barber: I, known as Hermit Barber in Secondlife, assert ownership and copyright of all my materials released with full permissions in Second Life and license it for use anywhere, on any servers, at any time under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License denoted graphically as 

Any other SL creators wishing to make an equivalent assertion at this location are invited to send me a notecard called "Copyleft [Avatar Name]" in world and I will copy the contents to this page, adding the CC or GNU linkage if that is appropriate.

This page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License and people are encouraged to copy it to their sites providing that this line is not changed and the above canonical link is prominently included to ensure that the latest copy remains available..

Emerald Sound Fix: Borked Emerald Sound

From: http://code.google.com/p/greenlifeemeraldviewer/wiki/SoundGraficsVoiceSpeedFix Link broken as at 2010-08-18

This should get you up and running on Windows:

1. Open My Computer and go to "C:\Program Files\Second Life\". 2. Find the following files:

alut.dll, ortp.dll, SLVoice.exe, and vivoxsdk.dll

3. Select each of the files by holding down the ctrl key on your keyboard while clicking each file once. 4. Right click on one of the selected files after selecting them and click copy. 5. Now go to the folder "C:\Program Files\GreenLife Emerald Viewer". 6. Right click on an empty place in that window and click paste. 7. Open emerald and enjoy voice!

Windows Protip: If you have 7-zip (http://www.7-zip.com), you don't have to actually install the official viewer. Just right-click the installer, go to the 7-Zip submenu, and Extract. Then grab the files out of the folder that unpacks.

Mac Users, here's what you do:

1. Locate the Second Life (official Linden) package, (Secondlife.app or similar).

Right-click or ctrl-click it and "Show package contents"

2. Navigate to the Contents/Resources folder and find the following files:

libalut.dylib, libllkdu.dylib, SLVoice, libopenal.dylib, libortp.dylib, and libvivoxsdk.dylib

3. Copy and paste those files into the Contents/Resources folder inside the Emerald .app package. 4. Close it up and you should be good to go.

Last but not least, Linux!

1. Navigate to the folder where the official Linden viewer lives (or extract the tarball and open that folder) 2. Copy the following files from the Second Life bin/ directory to the Emerald bin/ directory:

libllkdu.so and SLVoice

3. Copy the following files from the Second Life lib/ directory to the Emerald lib/ directory:

libkdu.so, libortp.so, and libvivoxsdk.so

4. And that's it.

Exploding Attachments - The turkey strikes again.

Go to Cyclops (A protected lag free Linden sim kaiya's hint infra)

Rez the attachment on the ground.

Take it back into inventory.

Wear it by attaching it explicitly at a location.

Inspiration

[02:27:27]  Angel Magellan: Hi, i've got a problem that isn't strickly concierge but I figure you guys are pretty knowledgable and might know what to do about this issue.
[02:27:50]  Hermit Barber: Only if we knew what the issue is :-P
[02:27:51]  Angel Magellan: I have a person her trying to wear a pet on her shoulder and it's wigging out big time. Bits going off in all directions
[02:27:52]  Loki Clifton: whats the issue
[02:28:05]  Hermit Barber: Snap Loki :-P
[02:28:15]  Angel Magellan: here*
[02:28:38]  Tuvok Dingson: wearing on the wrong attachment point i guess
[02:28:42]  Loki Clifton: 1 of 3 things could be going on
[02:28:51]  Loki Clifton: bad attachment point
[02:28:54]  Angel Magellan: i tried putting it on at the same attachment and it's fine for me
[02:28:56]  Loki Clifton: scripts are broken
[02:29:06]  kaiya Manbi: sim lag, or faulty pet script- take the pet off, and put it back on again, or re log with the pet on
[02:29:10]  Angel Magellan: replaced critter and same thing happening
[02:29:25]  Angel Magellan: k, will try the last item, only thing haven't tried yet
[02:29:34]  Loki Clifton: Sim is having Issues with scripts in mono
[02:29:51]  Hermit Barber: Angel: Sounds like she has worn it in a different browser with weird attachment points. Tell her to rez it on the ground. Take it back into inventory. And try to wear it by attaching it explicitly at a location.
[02:29:58]  kaiya Manbi: tell her to log in at cyclops with the pet on
[02:30:22]  Angel Magellan: ok, why cyclops?
[02:30:38]  kaiya Manbi: its a linden protected sim, with no lag
[02:30:45]  Angel Magellan: k, will do that regards the rezzing ground and rewearing
[02:31:18]  Hermit Barber: And tell us if the problem goes away.
[02:31:23]  Angel Magellan: k, will do
[02:38:18]  Angel Magellan: sadly nothing worked
[02:38:28]  Angel Magellan: it is fine for me, but can't seem to fix her problem
[02:38:38]  kaiya Manbi: what happens if u wear it?
[02:38:40]  Joyus Sohl waves at Angel
[02:38:44]  kaiya Manbi: have u tried that?
[02:38:48]  Joyus Sohl: what problem?  I just signed on
[02:38:55]  Angel Magellan: yes, it sits fine on my shoulder
[02:39:28]  kaiya Manbi: wow, tricky

Fix and Log

Games in SL

Yay! After mysteriously receiving an encyphered notecard from some people, I finally spoke to Kiana Writer who created it and now understand what she is doing. Immersive games in SL. As I have bored those who know me explaining why this is really, really important for SL to grow, I was delighted. Especially when I discover that she has a game about Darwin. Her website is at http://www.madpeagames.com and it looks absolutely fascinating. Expect a review as soon as I can visit and try them. In the meantime, here is her notecard about the activities she is engaged in.

Welcome visitor! :)

If you love games, puzzles, mysteries and hunts, you have come to the right place! There are two sims full of interactive fun for you to enjoy. Here is a little list of what we have going on:

NOW:

We have a HUGE grid-wide DuckHunt happening throughout the whole July! Big Prizes for all duckfinders. More info: http://madpeagames.com/duckhunt/

Bigger games:

1. Devil's Labyrinth

- Find the hidden artifacts and slay the evil creatures before the Devil himself catches you. A truly immersive and scary adventure in a huge dark maze in hell.  Take a boat and be prepared for anything..

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/44/90/36

2. The Kaaos Effect

- An interactive adventure where you get lost in time.. can you find your way back to today by solving puzzles in various eras of time?

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/25/220/42

3. Reaction

- Chemistry 101 at its best. Mix some chemicals, grind bones and break objects to create awesome fireworks.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/171/109/999

4. Mad West

- A big gold hunt with an even bigger prize, Escape the Jail and the most hilarious Bar game that challenges your drinking behaviour..

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea/77/90/24

5. Notes from the Voyage - CURRENTLY WAITING FOR AN UPDATE, YOU CAN EXPLORE BUT NOT COMPLETE THE GAME ATM

- Notes from the Voyage is an educational and fun game about the travels of Charles Darwin.

2009 marked two important landmarks in science; the bicentennial of Charles Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his seminal work, On The Origin of Species. Join the journey to discoveries!

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Elucian%20Omega/175/103/23

Other games:

6. Cassandra's spellbook

- collect ingredients and create spells to find out a secret

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/104/126/70

7. Coin Hunt

- find 16 coins and solve a puzzle with them to get a prize

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/92/185/41

8. Escape the room

- solve logical puzzles to escape the room

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/225/185/40

9. Escape the 70's room

- the same, but easier and retro ;)

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/54/129/35

10. Joe's Box

Starting at the landing point by clicking the box for instructions & HUD. Can you find Joe's mystery box and open it? You will receive cool prizes if you successfully complete the game.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/71/96/34

Small games and attractions - Win MadPoints to buy items from our store and sponsor stores around the grid!

Pea shoot

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/126/170/41

Balloons and darts

http://slurl.com/secondlife/MadPea%202/216/205/41

Who are we and what we do?

We are a small group of people that absolutely love what we do. We are not a big company and we work here for free to entertain you and make a difference in SL. All donations are greatly appreciated!

Our sims are owned and generously sponsored by Dusan Writer and Remedy limited.

www.remedylimited.com

If you would like more information about our games, services or simply send feedback, feel free to IM one of us:

Kiana Writer

SweetDevil Magic

Colin Nilsson

Madcow Cosmos

Most of our products are on sale in our Pea Factory or on Xstreet under Venya Vought's account

https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&MerchantID=183767

More info about MadPoints is found here MadPoints Info or on our website www.madpeagames.com

For general help, we have Helpeas on the island that you can approach as well.

The Helpeas are:

Loth Siamendes

Tichelle Teebrook

Briget Flanagan

We also allow groupchat in our MadPeas group. :)

Thank you for your interest, we hope you have a great time with MadPea games!

For those nuts sending me a cypher called Love4 by Kiana Writer containing:

xlivi ampp epaecw fi e wtigmep tpegi mr qc lievx jsv gevqmri. wli aew xli jmvwx sri als viepmdih xlex izivcxlmrk aew rsx ew mx aew wyttswih xs fi sr xli mwperh. er sap geqi xs liv mr liv wpiit erh wli wea e zmwmsr xlex hmzmhih xli mwperhivw.  jsv e psrk xmqi wli leh xs lmhi erh srpc xiegl e wtigmep kvsyt sj yw als aivi fipmizivw. wli xeyklx qi izivcxlmrk efsyx qekmg erh tsxmsrw. gevqmri lew tewwih eaec e psrk xmqi eks, fyx liv wtmvmx ampp epaecw fi livi xs aevr yw.

without telling me why, if you really want the decyphered text scroll down:

How I solved it.

I put the original text into an editor (I use vi) and changed one letter at a time. If the original hadn't already been in lowercase. I would have made it lowercase. As I swapped letters, I swapped to capitals so as to make it easy to see what was done.. A and I are your best friends as you will not see other letters standing alone in standard English. Then try AN, AS, BE, HE, IF, IS, MY and TO on two letter words. Next address the three letter clusters looking for AND and THE (which are likely to occur quite frequently) along with CAN, FOR, ALL (a good one because the double is easy to spot), HER, HIM, SHE, YOU and WILL (another yummy double though a W isn't as helpful as an A). Here we had a BOX too, so don't let less frequent words fool you.

A 5 letter word at the beginning of a sentence might well start with a "T", which is a very common letter anyway. So I tried that.

Tlivi ampp epaecw fi e wtigmep tpegi mr qc lievT jsv gevqmri. wli aew Tli jmvwT sri als viepmdih TleT izivcTlmrk aew rsT ew mT aew wyttswih Ts fi sr Tli mwperh. er sap geqi Ts liv mr liv wpiit erh wli wea e zmwmsr TleT hmzmhih Tli mwperhivw.  jsv e psrk Tmqi wli leh Ts lmhi erh srpc Tiegl e wtigmep kvsyt sj yw als aivi fipmizivw. wli TeyklT qi izivcTlmrk efsyT qekmg erh tsTmsrw. gevqmri lew tewwih eaec e psrk Tmqi eks, fyT liv wtmvmT ampp epaecw fi livi Ts aevr yw.

A 2 letter word starting with "T" might have "o" behind it. And a 3 letter word starting with "T" is probably "the". So:

THEvE ampp epaecw fE e wtEgmep tpegE mr qc HEevT jOv gevqmrE. wHE aew THE jmvwT OrE aHO vEepmdEh THeT EzEvcTHmrk aew rOT ew mT aew wyttOwEh TO fE Or THE mwperh. er Oap geqE TO HEv mr HEv wpEEt erh wHE wea e zmwmOr THeT hmzmhEh THE mwperhEvw.  jOv e pOrk TmqE wHE Heh TO HmhE erh Orpc TEegH e wtEgmep kvOyt Oj yw aHO aEvE fEpmEzEvw. wHE TeykHT qE EzEvcTHmrk efOyT qekmg erh tOTmOrw. gevqmrE Hew tewwEh eaec e pOrk TmqE ekO, fyT HEv wtmvmT ampp epaecw fE HEvE TO aevr yw.

A 5 letter word "THEvE" is probably "there" and "HEevT" likely "heart":

THERE ampp ApaAcw fE A wtEgmAp tpAgE mr qc HEART jOR gARqmrE. wHE aAw THE jmRwT OrE aHO REApmdEh THAT EzERcTHmrk aAw rOT Aw mT aAw wyttOwEh TO fE Or THE mwpArh. Ar Oap gAqE TO HER mr HER wpEEt Arh wHE wAa A zmwmOr THAT hmzmhEh THE mwpArhERw.  jOR A pOrk TmqE wHE HAh TO HmhE Arh Orpc TEAgH A wtEgmAp kROyt Oj yw aHO aERE fEpmEzERw. wHE TAykHT qE EzERcTHmrk AfOyT qAkmg Arh tOTmOrw. gARqmrE HAw tAwwEh AaAc A pOrk TmqE AkO, fyT HER wtmRmT ampp ApaAcw fE HERE TO aARr yw.

"wHE" is maybe "she", "jOR" perhaps "for", "wAS" likely "has" (which didn't work) or "was" (which did)

THERE Wmpp ApWAcS fE A StEgmAp tpAgE mr qc HEART FOR gARqmrE. SHE WAS THE FmRST OrE WHO REApmdEh THAT EzERcTHmrk WAS rOT AS mT WAS SyttOSEh TO fE Or THE mSpArh. Ar OWp gAqE TO HER mr HER SpEEt Arh SHE SAW A zmSmOr THAT hmzmhEh THE mSpArhERS.  FOR A pOrk TmqE SHE HAh TO HmhE Arh Orpc TEAgH A StEgmAp kROyt OF yS WHO WERE fEpmEzERS. SHE TAykHT qE EzERcTHmrk AfOyT qAkmg Arh tOTmOrS. gARqmrE HAS tASSEh AWAc A pOrk TmqE AkO, fyT HER StmRmT Wmpp ApWAcS fE HERE TO WARr yS.

If "ApWAcS fE" is "always be" then "Wmpp" is probably "will"

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A StEgIAL tLAgE Ir qY HEART FOR gARqIrE. SHE WAS THE FIRST OrE WHO REALIdEh THAT EzERYTHIrk WAS rOT AS IT WAS SyttOSEh TO BE Or THE ISLArh. Ar OWL gAqE TO HER Ir HER SLEEt Arh SHE SAW A zISIOr THAT hIzIhEh THE ISLArhERS.  FOR A LOrk TIqE SHE HAh TO HIhE Arh OrLY TEAgH A StEgIAL kROyt OF yS WHO WERE BELIEzERS. SHE TAykHT qE EzERYTHIrk ABOyT qAkIg Arh tOTIOrS. gARqIrE HAS tASSEh AWAY A LOrk TIqE AkO, ByT HER StIRIT WILL ALWAYS BE HERE TO WARr yS.

Now "StEgIAL" is "special", "Ir" "in", "qY" "my", "OrE" is "one", "REALIdEh" realized and "EzERYTHIrk" must be "everything"

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY HEART FOR CARMINE. SHE WAS THE FIRST ONE WHO REALIZED THAT EVERYTHING WAS NOT AS IT WAS SyPPOSED TO BE ON THE ISLAND. AN OWL CAME TO HER IN HER SLEEP AND SHE SAW A VISION THAT DIVIDED THE ISLANDERS.  FOR A LONG TIME SHE HAD TO HIDE AND ONLY TEACH A SPECIAL GROyP OF yS WHO WERE BELIEVERS. SHE TAyGHT ME EVERYTHING ABOyT MAGIC AND POTIONS. CARMINE HAS PASSED AWAY A LONG TIME AGO, ByT HER SPIRIT WILL ALWAYS BE HERE TO WARN yS.

Now it gets easy. "SyPPOSED" is "supposed" and it was solved:

THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A SPECIAL PLACE IN MY HEART FOR CARMINE. SHE WAS THE FIRST ONE WHO REALIZED THAT EVERYTHING WAS NOT AS IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE ON THE ISLAND. AN OWL CAME TO HER IN HER SLEEP AND SHE SAW A VISION THAT DIVIDED THE ISLANDERS.  FOR A LONG TIME SHE HAD TO HIDE AND ONLY TEACH A SPECIAL GROUP OF US WHO WERE BELIEVERS. SHE TAUGHT ME EVERYTHING ABOUT MAGIC AND POTIONS. CARMINE HAS PASSED AWAY A LONG TIME AGO, BUT HER SPIRIT WILL ALWAYS BE HERE TO WARN US.

Interesting Activities in SL : Virtually Speaking

Interesting Activities in SL : Virtually Speaking

Lag Reduction Techniques in High Lag Environments

Advanced and Admin Menus

For many of the suggestions made in this FAQ, you will need access to the Advanced Menu.

This should be visible on the SL menu bar.

Te enable the Advanced Menu, press and hold down the [Control] [Alt] [Shift] and [D] keys together and then release them.

From the Advanced Menu, the Admin Menu can be enabled by [Advanced] [View Admin Options] or it may be enabled through pressing and holding down the [Control] [Alt] and [V] keys together and then releasing them.

These are useful for far more than just this FAQ :-)

What causes lag?

Many things. Prims, textures, scripts, network delays, overloaded computers. Especially other avatars. Some things about lag are very unintuitive. One person walking around in an outfit with a number of 1024x1024 textures, a fancy hairdo, boots or jewellery or even a sim radar can cause more lag than 10 or even 100 other avatars in default outfits.

What can I do about lag?

What follows addresses many of the things over which you have control. You wont be able to remove all lag, but you can reduce the impact of lag on yourself and everyone else by systematically addressing the causes of lag.

Graphics Lag

Draw Distance

As your view distance increases so the number of things your computer has to keep track of explodes exponentially. This means the server has to keep track of more information for you so as to update you when it changes. Then it has to send you more updates. More textures. More information about what other avatars do. This loads the server (affecting everyone), your connection (affecting you), your computer and your graphics card. For an island simulator with a few users a draw distance of 512m is not going to be a problem for somebody with a good connection and reasonable graphic adapter. On mainland it might mean that you never actuially finish resolving. And at a sale, a fair or a butterfly hunt it would prevent you - or anybody else - from moving.

Draw distance is controlled at [Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics] [Draw Distance]

I recommend the following settings:

Advanced Graphics

Windlight, particles, flexis, terrain. All these things make SL attractive, but they also load your graphics adapter. This affects only you, and to fix this lag you can take two steps. First:

[Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics]

Now drag the [Quality and Performance] slider all the way to the left ([Faster])

Select Custom to see the effect.

Other Avatars

You can suppress both body and face lights as well as attached particles, both of which will reduce the load on your graphics adaptor.

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Attached Lights] and click to deselect (uncheck, no cross next to it).

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Attached Particles] and click to deselect (uncheck, no cross next to it).

I strongly recommend disabling attached lights at all times except at performances where the actors use it, as:

• they are massively laggy
• GL (the rendering system for SL) can only render 8 light sources, so face and body lights can totally change how you view scenes even when they are not as bright as lighthouses
• they look totally cheesy

Avatar Rendering Cost (ARC)

For more information on ARC, refer to the wiki entry.

To see the impact you have on others, and that they have on you, SL provides a rough metric called the Avatar Rendering Cost or ARC. Enable seeing it using:

[Advanced] [Rendering] [Info Displays] [Avatar Rendering Cost]

The ARC metric will appear over the heads of avatars in colors ranging from green (very low ARC), through yellow (high ARC) to red (insane ARC). Unless they are really antisocial, people will generally be much more cooperative in reducing their impact on others if they can see their ARC for themselves. So share this trick, but be aware that viewing ARC also imposes a cost on everyone, as the information has to be sent to you to be able to calculate it. So don't keep it on. Turn it on to evaluate a sim or avatar, and then turn it off again.

To minimize your impact on others and yourself, remove all attachments. Shoes, hair, jewellery, shields, huggers, everything. If you want to be extreme, select:

[Advanced] [Character] [Character Tests] [Test {Your Avatar's Sex}]

This will make you into a Ruth - uglier than sin - and reduce your ARC to 1. An alternative is to wear a bodysuit skin, ie one where clothes are painted onto the skin.

An interesting exercise is to use a non lagged sim to try on skins, hair, shoes and outfits to try to find a look that is not totally sucky but which keeps your ARC down in the 100 to 600 range for use when extreme anti-lag measures are not required (and remembering that even when you have a really hot computer, what you wear affects others and they may not be similarly equipped).

Now minimize the impact on you from other laggy avatars by selecting:

[Edit] [Preferences] [Graphics] [Custom] and make sure under [Avatar Rendering] that [Avatar Imposters] is selected (checked with a tick in the box).

Now mute the laggy avatars. (From the wiki on ARC). They will be replaced by an imposter, with an effective rendering cost of 1. Their original rendering cost will still be displayed. This is particularly useful on machines that get poor framerates, you can mute high cost avatars to help increase your framerate in crowded areas.

Additional Graphic Lag Reduction

You can disable many kinds of rendering from the [Advanced] [Rendering] [Types] menu, but it is probably advisable to keep simple, volume characters and surface enabled.

Scripts

In SL the simulator server runs all the scripts present in the sim. Even when scripts are disabled, some scripts will still be running. Scripted attachments create a lot of lag, particularly in overloaded sims. So as an act of kindness, to yourself and others, take them off when in lagged sims. If you absolutely need to use a script while in a no script sim, fly up to 200m and your scripts will run. If it is a no fly sim, enable the Admin menu and you will be able to fly anyway - but you may annoy bureaucratic minded roleplayers when you do this.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
2009-03-16
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Lag Reduction Techniques
Canonical Web Page Name: Lag Reduction Techniques in High Lag Environments
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/70

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.02 Added muting step to reduce ARC
1.01 Added link to wiki on Avatar Rendering Cost
1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: "Hermit Barber", 2009

Inspired By: "Pannie Paperdoll" Lag Lowering tips (Used with permission).

Licence: Creative Commons v 3.0: For Attribution , Non-Profit , Share-alike

Limits - The Most Useful Page in the Knowledge Base

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Limits

Lost Inventory

Use a Linden supported client (And not the flakey obese ADHD turkey on crack wannabe a browser v2.x viewer either. The fact that after September 30, aside from Jack Linden, hardly any of the Lindens responsible for this catastrophe still have jobs at Linden Lab should be a hint. ). I recommend SnowGlobe, it is slower but surer than the standard client. Please note, this is the only time I recommend a Lab Viewer, and this is because if you are not using an LL supplied viewer, the support staff will blame your problem on your viewer and tell you to use an LL viewer and follow these instructions (more or less) anyway. The rest of the time, I recommend one of the viewers from the third party viewer page at http://viewerdirectory.secondlife.com/ and particularly Emerald available at http://modularsystems.sl/ .

Go to Pooley or Aqua (From Soft Linden http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6213 ) 

Edit/Preferences/General

[x] My Last Location

[x] Show Start Location on Login Screen

Apply

Follow these instructions: Fixing A Broken Client Cache With a Sledgehammer (Nietszche would be proud of me!)

Logout

Log in to Pooley or Aqua (From Soft Linden http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6213 ) 

Search for something in Inventory

Do not leave the sim until your entire inventory has loaded

If your entire inventory does not load, file a trouble ticket stating that you have followed these instructions and giving the name of the sim you did this in.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Emilie's note on howto recover lost inventory items
Canonical Web Page Name: Lost Inventory
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/190

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.10 Added regions to use per http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6213

1.01 Updated Viewer notes. Added Canonical Names, Revision History, Copyright and Licence Terms, Removed obsolete date

1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: Hermit Barber, 2010

Licence:

This work by Hermit Barber (SecondLife) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When quoting or citing this work the attribution must include a link to this page, http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/190 which is where the current version will be available, and the copyright notice provided here must be included in full.

MegaPrims

Megaprims

Best Sources:

1. Goto http://megaprim.sl/
2. Get the 7000 Pac (free here)
3. Get the SALT HUD (free here)
4. Get an Access code for the Primsearch Web Interface (free here)

Emilie's Rules for Safe Megapriming

Make Megaprims non-physical anytime you can (to reduce server physics loads).

Using a megaprim as a floor will reduce lag in comparison to conventional prims. The ratio of reduction is equivalent to the volume ratio, in otherwords, to the cube of the prims used.

Use 512x512 textures or smaller for all prims when possible, especially MegaPrims which can be seen from much further away (to minimize texture load times). While the LL cache logic is broken, use multiple small textures rather than offsets into combined textures. Now that the texture cache is working (and now that HTTP textures are used, caching can be improved dramatically by installing a squid cache if you run Linux or Windows) it makes sense once again to use offsets into one large texture to minimize the total number of textures used.

Don't make anything a toroid if at all possible (this is really important for megaprims as calculating the LOD for the vast number of vertices is a potential issue).

Never intersect a physical megaprim with the ground any more than absolutely necessary.

If the minimap is important to you, keep very large Megaprims over 420m*.

When using really big megaprims, you may need to use a rezzer to rez them at 128x128 before moving them where you need them. This code in a prim will allow you to rez megaprims centered on it by dropping the size megaprim you want into the prim's inventory, and then touching the rezzer.

default
{

touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llRezAtRoot(llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_OBJECT,0),llGetPos(),<0.0,0.0,0.0>,<0.0,0.0,0.0,1.0>,0);
}
}

Prims, megaprim or not are all just prims. There is no difference between "Old" Megaprims and "New" Megaprims or any normal prims other than their size, creators and date of production.

* Or go to the advanced menu debug settings and set the following:

NetMapOtherOwnAboveWater

NetMapOtherOwnBelowWater

to a number close to zero in order not to see other people's stuff on the minimap; you could also set it to around 128 to see these items at 50% transparency for example.

These debug settings are present in Standard, Emerald and Snowglobe viewers. They are not present in Viewer 2.0 and Viewer 2.0 Snowglobe.

Minimap hint from Aquarius Paravane

Men are pinheads

There has been research where people are asked to scale a representation of a human in proportion to their bodies. Women make eyes, thighs and bottoms too big, men do that to the upper torso and arms, but minimize the size of the head and legs. It is theorized that we tend to enlarge in our minds that which is significant to us and minimize that which is less important.

Whatever the reason, huge boobs or chest and a tiny head and legs are, in my experience, a reliable indicator of a female avatar operated by men that haven't studied art (and proportion) or anatomy, and when they make male avatars, they copy the minotaur (showing it is nothing new) and do the same which is why most men in SL look like barrels perched on toothpicks. Women get heads and boobs right because we look at faces a lot and know how uncomfortable a big bust can be, but women untrained in proportion tend to make thighs and bottoms too big.

This usually is a reliable way to determine visually the sex of the creator of an avatar shape. Of course, the creator is not necessarily the operator, and If you can't figure out the difference visually or in chat inside a few minutes (big clue, irrespective of avatar gender, guys tend to want to get into your panties - and find Lolita outfits irresistable) , then it probably doesn't matter very much. Avatars have no DNA.

Inspiration:

You know, I think I will release a tpv that has the microphone always on, and then broadcasts to a search bot people whose avs don't match their gender so they can be banned. I think it would sell pretty well. [I was being snarky, because the only thing that generates more over the top reactions than copybotting]

Messed up avatar? Fix it here.

First, go to Go to Pooley or Aqua (From Soft Linden http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-6213 )

Now continue:

Warning, this really won't be pretty, but I promise it works every time.

Sex is important here. No, not the operators sex, the avatars sex. Are we confused enough already? Go to the appropriate column and follow the instructions.

Now go to http://emilie.hermit.net/content/fix-a-broken-client-cache-with-a-sledgehammer and fix your cache following the instructions there.

Finally find and wear your shape, skin, eyes, hair, clothes and accessories again.

If you are stupid enough to run the "obese ADHD turkey on crack wannabe a browser viewer" sometimes referred to as V2 or the "Vista Viewer" (and as a strong hint as to how bad it is, few people involved in its development are still working for Linden Lab)  rather than a sensible viewer like Phoenix or even SnowGlobe , the above won't work for you. You might find the equivalent of the "Character Menu" in the "Develop Menu" which can apparently be reached through the Ctl-Alt-Q menu.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
2009-02-04
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Messed up avatar? Fix it here v1.80
Canonical Web Page Name: Messed up avatar? Fix it here v1.80
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/content/messed-avatar-fix-it-here

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.80 Added graphic linked version of Creative Commons license and fixed some formating
1.70 Changed URLs to get rid of Drupal cruft and reference to Jack Linden
1.60 Returned to two column format.
1.50 Added instruction to go to Pooley or Aqua first. Changed order of dressing to repair cache first.
1.40 Modified browser recommendation from Emerald to Phoenix and pointed to My SL Clients page.
1.30 Modified comment on Developers and Jack Linden and made link to "Fixing a Broken Cache with a Sledgehammer" linkable.
1.20 Added suggestion to access the character menu from the "Develop" menu using Ctrl-Alt-Q combination ( Thank-you Sylvie Grizot ).
1.10 Added notes on reversion to Male/Female and fixed missing carriage returns.
1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: Hermit Barber, 2009, 2010, 2011

Licence:

This work by Hermit Barber (SecondLife) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When quoting or citing this work the attribution must include a link to this page which is where the current version will be available, and the copyright notice provided here must be included in full.

Multiple Instances

To run more than one copy of an SL browser on a computer, you need to provide the "--multiple" command line flag.

For further instructions see here. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Help:Running_multiple_instances_of_the_Second_Life_client

Optimize Search - 2010 July

This works for http://blogs.secondlife.com/community/technology/blog/2010/07/08/search-todays-release

1) Rename your sim to something using your keywords in capital letters (Requires a Ticket and payment of $100 to LL to change an Estate Name).

2) Put your search tags in the sim covenant (Drop a notecard into the World/"Region/Estate"/[Covenant] field ). Be aware that topic spamming will reduce your ranking.

3) Rename your parcel to something using your keywords in capital letters (World/About Land/[General and Edit the Name field).

4) Put your search tags in the parcel description (World/About Land/[General and Edit the Description field). Be aware that topic spamming will reduce your ranking.

5) Put the items for sale. Put your tags in the description. Check "Show in Search."

6) Consider paying for classified marketing if in a highly competitive field (unless you are competing with LL in which case you will lose).

Added Note (2010-09-06) Don't check more than one maturity tag, check only the most permissive possible option or your items won't show up under search at all.

This work by Hermit Barber is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Region Down

ANYONE may report a region down, not just the sim owner or an Estate Manager. A region is down if it cannot be used normally.

Go to http://www.secondlife.com

Login

Choose 1 Help and 2 Submit a Ticket

Now select:

3 Land & Region

4 Report an off-line Region

5 Provide the Region Name and any optional details (be as complete as possible here, make it easy to asses and deal with)

6 Click Submit

USUALLY off-line regions will be taken care of inside of 15 minutes SOMETIMES it may take longer ("Less than an hour").

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Region Down
Canonical Web Page Name: Region Down
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/755

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: Hermit Barber, 2010

Licence:

This work by Hermit Barber (SecondLife) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When quoting or citing this work the attribution must include a link to this page which is where the current version will be available, and the copyright notice provided here must be included in full.

---

Source: 

[14:56:52]  Maggie Linden: For the record, if you have a region go offline or inaccessible -- please report it via Support case at secondlife.com, using the "Report an Offline Region" type. We monitor those 24 hours a day, even when live support or phones are closed, and response time is typically under an hour. You can certainly call or chat too, but the ticket's the surest way to make sure it's addressed. Plus, any level of resident can file a 'report an offline region' ticket - estate managers, tenants, etc. It doesn't need to be the region owner.

[14:57:14]  Sera Lok: i dddiiiid ":P

[14:57:40]  Sera Lok: shoulda just skipped the Ontynes altogether LOL, and waited

[14:59:07]  Joshe Darkstone: cool, thanks for that clarification maggie, now we know what we can tell folks as the rumors fly :)

[14:59:18]  Sera Lok: TY Maggie, i was just saying how helpful it was when *you* were in Live chat... heh

[14:59:19]  Maggie Linden: And also please feel free to let your tenants know that if they ever have an offline region and can't reach you or your estate manager, they can contact us via the region offline ticket for help too.

Running Under Fedora on a 64 bit Processor (Example uses Fedora 10).

Install Fedora if not already done. Version 10 is very stable. Version 11 is in late Beta and will be released in May 2009. I did not use the Beta as the installer (anaconda) has a problem on my system (which has 5 SATA disks in it).

Install the NVidia drivers and graphics support from "The Unofficial Fedora® FAQ". I strongly recommend also installing the "Windows Fonts" as some versions of SL have barfed if they could not be found as well as all the DVD player and other video support.

Download the Linux Release Candidate from the "Second Life" download site.

Open a terminal window and become root.

$ su -

Goto the /opt directory

$ cd /opt

Move the client software to /opt. Replace the name of the download file appropriately in the following commands. Replace {yourhome} and {yourname} with your login name.

$ mv /home/{yourhome}/Download/SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar.bz2 /opt

Unpack it.

$ bunzip SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar.bz2

Untar it.

$ tar -xvf SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar

Make it owned by by you.

$ chown -R {yourname}:users SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976

Make it executable for all users.

$ chmod -R a+x SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976

Link it to a directory that will stay the same when you update it.

$ ln -s SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976 slrc

Use System/Preferences/Look and Feel/Main Menu to add a menu item linked to the /opt/slrc/secondlife file. The icon is '/opt/slrc/secondlife_icon.png'

Now test it. First revert to your username.

$ exit

Now goto the slrc directory and try to run it.

$ cd /opt/slrc

$ ./secondlife

You will probably get some diagnostics.

If they include:

Running from /opt/SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976
Warning: Did not register secondlife:// handler with KDE: Directory /home/{yourhome}/.kde/share/services does not exist.

Then your computer name is likely not resolveable by DNS.

This isn't critical, but it can often be fixed by the following steps.

Become root again.

$ su -

Get your computer name (it follows the "HOSTNAME=" tag, here "somecomputer.example.com"):

$ cat /etc/sysconfig/network

NETWORKING=yes
HOSTNAME=somecomputer.example.com

Now check the name can be resolved (use the name of your computer):

$ dig somecomputer.example.com

If so it will give you a reply like:

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;somecomputer.example.com.        IN    A

;; ANSWER SECTION:
somecomputer.example.com.    86400    IN    A    aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd
somecomputer.example.com.    86400    IN    A    aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd

Check that the IP address matches your computer.

$ ifconfig

eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr mm.nn.oo.pp.qq.rr
inet addr:aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd ...

If the address (aaa.bbb.ccc.ddd) does not resolve to your computer name (as seen in the A record above), you need to fix it. Most simply by adding it to your hosts file. e.g, insert "127.0.0.1        localhost.localdomain localhost somecomputer.example.com somecomputer" into your hosts file.

$ vi /etc/hosts

And stop being root

$ exit

Now look for a line like this:

bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

To fix it, simply:

$ sudo yum install libGLU.so.1

Of course you need to replace the library name with whichever one is giving you an issue. e.g.

[root@demented slrc]# ./secondlife
Running from /opt/SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976
Warning: Did not register secondlife:// handler with KDE: Directory /root/.kde/share/services does not exist.
bin/do-not-directly-run-secondlife-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
*** Unclean shutdown. ***

Rinse and repeat until SL starts cleanly. It will. Eventually :-)

When the SL client crashes, and it will (possibly frequently), chech to see what libraries it is looking for. e.g.

(<unknown>:22916): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "nodoka",

(<unknown>:22916): Gtk-WARNING **: Unable to locate theme engine in module_path: "nodoka",
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "gnomebreakpad": libgnomebreakpad.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module": libcanberra-gtk-module.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Simply add the modules. e.g. to fix the above:

$ sudo yum install libcanberra-gtk-module.so

$ sudo yum install libgnomebreakpad.so

When updating:

Download the Linux Release Candidate from the "Second Life" download site.

Open a terminal window and become root.

$ su -

Goto the /opt directory

$ cd /opt

Move the client software to /opt. Replace the name of the download file appropriately in the following commands. Replace {yourhome} and {yourname} with your login name.

$ mv /home/{yourhome}/Download/SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar.bz2 /opt

Unpack it.

$ bunzip SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar.bz2

Untar it.

$ tar -xvf SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976.tar

Make it owned by by you.

$ chown -R {yourname}:users SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976

Make it executable for all users.

$ chmod -R a+x SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976

Unlink the previous directory.

$ unlink slrc

Link it to a directory that will stay the same when you update it.

$ ln -s SecondLife-i686-1.22.11.113976 slrc

Use System/Preferences/Look and Feel/Main Menu to add a menu item linked to the /opt/slrc/secondlife file. The icon is '/opt/slrc/secondlife_icon.png'

Now test it. First revert to your username.

$ exit

SL Clients Good, Bad and Worse

A more complete list of viewers and capabilities is being assembled by Tillie Ariantho here: https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AlcKaO7Zo-3UdEx3N1NkWFVNd3lDUG4xdUFQQU9XNFE#gid=0

The LL Third Party Viewer Directory is at: http://viewerdirectory.secondlife.com/

The following are my comments on viewers I have tried, glimpsed or been interested by. Caveat, any of them may explode and take all your money but I class that as less likely than with one of the LL official viewers if only because more eyes are watching them. :

Emerald - LL has banned this viewer. Die hards are using the EmeraldChannel debug setting to bypass the ban. This may not be very sensible given the availability of Phoenix and the announced lack of future upgrades for Emerald. http://emerald.modularsystems.sl/

Diamond - An Emerald Fork. Web Browser currently bust. http://sourceforge.net/projects/diamond-viewer/files/

Phoenix - Yet another Emerald Fork and my prefered one. Maybe the most significant. Jessica Lyon has moved here from Emerald and so has LordGregGreg Back (who was behind Emergence) and the ex-Lindens who had committed to working on Emerald, so this is probably the place to be. But see my note about libllkdu.so (llkdu.dll on Windows) below. http://phoenixviewer.com/ JIRA at http://jira.phoenixviewer.com

Charley.levenque's Ascent. Yet another Emerald Fork. Categorize as interesting. The only viewer with a "demolition button" I know of. http://ascent.balseraph.org/ 

Imprudence - Not Emerald derived. http://imprudenceviewer.org/ 

SnowGlobe: Mainly LL with some OS patches slowly added. Better than a boot to the head. http://bit.ly/SNOW-001

SnowStorm Has loads of developers. Might have a future, but LL is still obsessed with the v2 GUI. "As in Oops! T trod in something GUI." If they fix that it may become interesting. Until then, it is merely a variation on the dreaded Obese A.D.H.D. Turkey on Crack Wannabe a Browser Vista of Viewers aka Viewer 2. http://bit.ly/secondlife-vwr

More about SnowStorm - https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AnxJWUubGIsodFVTa3NnZHJuamJ6NmNNMDNCbWU5MlE&hl=en#gid=9

The Official Viewer - Obese A.D.H.D. Turkey on Crack Wannabe a Viewer Vista of Browsers aka Viewer 2. Don't bother.

PyOGP - Text only. Good platform for bots? http://bit.ly/PyOGP-001

See Also: The Emerald Saga

libllkdu

Initially I had some trouble as the rendering was *completely* different between Emerald and Phoenix. This meant that Phoenix seemed, as delivered, unuseable for me. The good news is that the fix is trivial (thanks Latif Khalifa). The problem shown below is caused by OpenJPEG and is solved by copying libllkdu.so (llkdu.dll on Windows) from any Linden Viewer's /bin directory into the Phoenix /bin directory and restarting Phoenix. With the fix in place there is no visible difference between Emerald and Phoenix.

Test Images taken at http://slurl.com/secondlife/SmarterSpace/63/140/ 23 and http://slurl.com/secondlife/SmarterEarth/35/137/2897

PhoenixViewer-i686-1.5.0.0_beta1   Phoenix Viewer 1.5.0 (0) Sep  3 2010 16:48:26 (Phoenix Viewer Internal) Release Notes   Built with GCC version 40302   CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         920  @ 2.67GHz Memory: 12100 MB OS Version: Linux 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686.PAE #1 SMP Wed Aug 18 11:32:44 UTC 2010 i686 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 NVIDIA 195.36.31   libcurl Version: libcurl/7.20.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3.3 c-ares/1.7.1 J2C Decoder Version: OpenJPEG: 1.3.0, Runtime: 1.3.0 Audio Driver Version: OpenAL, version 1.1 ALSOFT 1.10.622 / OpenAL Community / OpenAL Soft: PulseAudio Software Qt Webkit Version: 4.5.2	Emerald Viewer 1.23.5 (1635) May 23 2010 01:55:36 (Emerald Viewer Release)   Emerald Viewer 1.23.5 (1635) May 23 2010 01:55:36 (Emerald Viewer Release) Release Notes   Built with GCC version 40302   You are at 233763.4, 262793.0, 2897.0 in SmarterEarth located at sim7900.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.36.139:13001) Second Life Server 1.42.0.208314 Release Notes   CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU         920  @ 2.67GHz Memory: 12100 MB OS Version: Linux 2.6.32.19-163.fc12.i686.PAE #1 SMP Wed Aug 18 11:32:44 UTC 2010 i686 Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation Graphics Card: GeForce GTX 295/PCI/SSE2 OpenGL Version: 3.2.0 NVIDIA 195.36.31   libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7c zlib/1.2.3 c-ares/1.4.0 J2C Decoder Version: Emerald Kakadu(v6.3.2) 1.2 Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000 LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.35373 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.18_0000000000) Packets Lost: 458/2121628 (0.0%)

SL Marketing - Hunts

A successful hunt needs 3 things.

1. Great rewards (Things made for the hunt that exemplify your best and most attractive work that you can't just buy off the shelf - though you might offer it to your regulars as a thank-you gift ).
2. A challenge finding the pieces, but a high enough chance of finding them that everyone can win something in exchange for their effort.
3. The ability for cooperating hunters to do better than competing hunters, because a hunt is above all a social occasion.

Hunt organizers need to monitor their attitudes to hunters. It is easy to look down on the hunters, or see arranging hunts as an act of charity, because the hunters are being "given things." This is totally the wrong way to think of a hunt and usually minimizes the value to the organizer of being in a hunt. It is the hunters who are giving vast amounts of their time, their attention, and perhaps some of their money to the organizers, who benefit in sim concurrency, product and store layout awerness, and thus future sales, for a tiny expenditure of their effort and money compared to any other sales related activity in which they can be involved.

To maximize benefit from a hunt:

• Provide sticky activities around the hunt area. Things that will be of clear benefit to hunters if they return repeatedly to your store. Lists with discounts to members are one great example, clearly visible gifts to list members (not group members) are only slightly less effective.
• Speaking of lists, don't expect hunters to give up a group to you. The point of a hunt is that most of the hunters do not know you or your products, a hunt is an introduction. There are 25 groups available and you are one of thousands of places competing for a group slot. The likelihood of getting one is small, the likelihood of them maintaining it longer than it takes to pick up the gifts smaller, and the value of the few adherents you might gain is tiny compared to the number that you lose. Instead of groups, use subscribeomatic, hippo groups, list-managers, etc. to get people to sign-up to hear about your new items. Then send out regular announcements, not so many that people unsubscribe to avoid you, or so scarce that they forget who you are, and each announcement should include gifts for list members who visit your store and a number of product announcements with pictures or better, a link to a well organized web page, so maximizing the likelihood that one of the products in the announcement will appeal enough to the recipient to get them to visit. Because persuading people to be interested enough in your products to visit your store to see them is what drives sales. Study after study proves that nothing else comes even close.
• Provide value to hunters for proving that they know your products and store layout. Layout the hunt so that they need to find an item in each department in the store - preferably with a meta prize for people who find all of the other prizes.
• Minimize lag and confusion by dividing your store into clearly demarcated areas that don't look into or onto one another; but make the meta prize winner noisy enough and have it happen often enough that everyone else visiting the store becomes aware that it is happening and interested in visiting that area to see what is going on. To build stickiness and buiild value from concurrency, provide rewards in that area for being in that area. Lucky chairs, mid night madness, discount vendors, new product announcements, random gifters are all effective tools.
• Remember that avatars look down. Only residents who have been in SL a long time know to look up, and even they look up far less than you would think. Test it for yourself. Now go back and redo your store to take advantage of it. Put signage on the floor, not the walls. Hide prizes near your signage. That is how to make sure that hunters learn about your store, products and layout.
• While catering to people who look down, respect those who do alt cam by making it easy. Space costs little in SL. So have lots of open space and don't put a roof on shopping areas - or if you absolutely have to (why?) make it high enough to cam below it (10 to 20m) looking at your products without needing to change the zoom. Most avatars never do learn about those capabilities, and your aim is to make shopping with you - and finding things - as easy and fun as possible.
• Make your signs big and your vendors thick. If they are thick (buried in a wall is fine, and large (2m square is good) they will be seen as long as they are in draw distance. And you want your vendors to be seen - and to be usable at a distance or at least provide a demo if there are multiple choices.

Special Note to Suppliers: For goodness sake sell things Mod/Copy/No transfer. This allows you to decline to give refunds except for duplicate purchases, and allows people to make a copy before they break it trying to make it fit their shape (In any-case you can provide a replacement service with a redelivery terminal) and allowing them to fit it to their shapes (and most of the people you want as clients - those who spend lots of money on "stuff", do change shape regularly). Note that if you are selling things with scripts in them, they are very likely to be broken by the coming script limits and that will leave you with a lot of annoyed buyers all wanting to talk to you at the same time sometime in the near future. Not sensible. And ignore claims that selling things no mod protects you from having your designs ripped off. It doesn't. The copy bots and clients used by all the rip-off artists ignore the no mod flag anyway. So making your products no mod just makes your products less attractive to those who might otherwise consider them.

SL Mechanima

SL Stats

Raw material for extracting stats: http://secondlife.com/httprequest/homepage.php

signups_updated_slt 2011-01-14 11:55:01 signups_updated_unix 1295034901 signups 21901616 logged60_updated_unix 1288249199 logged60_updated_slt 2010-10-27 23:59:59 logged60 1354041 exchange_rate_updated_slt 2011-01-14 12:08:37 exchange_rate_updated_unix 1295035717 exchange_rate 253.8627 transactions_l$_updated_unix 1294869605 transactions_l$_updated_slt 2011-01-12 14:00:05 transactions_l$_freshness_slt 2011-01-12 14:00:05 transactions_l$_freshness_unix 1294869605 transactions_l$ 354424671 inworld_updated_unix 1295035502 inworld_updated_slt 2011-01-14 12:05:02 inworld 60149 transactions_us$ 1396127 transactions_us$_updated_unix 1295035717 transactions_us$_updated_slt 2011-01-14 12:08:37 transactions_us$_freshness_unix 1294869605 transactions_us$_freshness_slt 2011-01-12 14:00:05

Tateru's Statistics: http://dwellonit.taterunino.net/sl-statistical-charts/

SL Status Page

Your browser does not support iframes. Please click on http://status.secondlifegrid.net to access the SL Status Page.

Page Source:

<iframe src ="http://status.secondlifegrid.net/"" width="100%" height="100%">

<p>Your browser does not support iframes. Please click on <a href="http://status.secondlifegrid.net" title="http://status.secondlifegrid.net">http://status.secondlifegrid.net</a> to access the SL Status Page.</p>

</iframe>

SL and Firewalls

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Firewall_Configuration

Summary (from the above page)

Ports

In addition to the standard ports for DNS lookup and web access, the Second Life Viewer requires the ports listed in the following table.

Notes:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/skins/monobook/bullet.gif); padding: 0px;">
• RTP: Real-time Transport Protocol
• SIP: Session Initiation Protocol

Server IP Addresses

For up-to-date information on IP addresses, see:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/w/skins/monobook/bullet.gif); padding: 0px;">
• What are Second Life's subnets? for Second Life server IP addresses.
• Can I use voice from behind a firewall? for voice server IP addresses.

You can subscribe to these articles to be notified when the article is updated.

You may also use the Second Life Viewer to access virtual worlds hosted by organizations other than Linden Lab. Contact the hosting organization for the IP addresses used.

Seeing Sculpties At a Distance

Don't try to run the Obese ADHD Turkey on Crack Viewer (sometimes known as V2.x)

Show the "Advanced" menu with Ctrl-Alt-D (Opt-Ctrl-D on a Mac)

Select "debug settings" near the bottom.

In the blank space, type RenderVolumeLODFactor (or scroll to it)

Set it to a value between 4 (low end graphics adapter) and 8 (high end graphics adapter)  to get all your sculpts looking great.

Regards

Emilie (In World Hermit Barber)
----------------------------------

Canonical Names

Canonical NoteCard Name: Emilie's note on seeing sculpties v1.00
Canonical Web Page Name: Seeing Sculpties At a Distance
Web Page URL: http://emilie.hermit.net/?q=node/316

----------------------------------

Revision History

1.00 Initial Release Revision

----------------------------------

Copyright: Hermit Barber, 2009, 2010

Licence:

This work by Hermit Barber (SecondLife) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

When quoting or citing this work the attribution must include a link to this page which is where the current version will be available, and the copyright notice provided here must be included in full.

Shared Whiteboard: Need a Shared Whiteboard to explain something?

3. Whiteboard Collaboratively With Google Drawings.

Google Drawings is the newest app added to Google's suite of cloud-based tools. This stand-alone editor in Google Docs lets you create charts, diagrams, designs and other schematics—perfect if you're working on visualizing a project timeline or even mind-mapping an idea.

To access Google Drawings, sign into your account and click "Documents." Then click "Create new" and choose "Drawing" from the drop-down menu to begin your work.

A few other highlights: You can edit your drawings in real time with anyone you choose by selecting "Share" and inviting people. You can also chat with others who are editing your drawing, from within the drawings editor. These two features will be rolled out fully by next month; right now you can opt in to its "preview" by visiting your Docs settings page, choosing the "Editing tab" and clicking "Create new text documents using the latest version of the document editor." Also, the drawings editor supports alignment guides, snap to grid and publishing drawings as images.

Sim Costs - Move || Rename || Transfer

The Horse's Arse Mouth: Linden Lab Official:Estate and Private Region Moving and Renaming

The Linden Crabs don't like people to quote their page, but they don't own the words or numbers so:

Rename: $50 (But see the naming rules - Guidelines for Private Region Naming)
Move: $150

BUT

Transfer: $100 Includes a move and a rename as long as they are on the same ticket

So

When you need to move a sim, and even more, when you need to move and rename it, don't be a horse's arse. Sell your sim to an alt and save $50 or $100 towards your next tier payment

That way it is only the non-profits still in SL who have to pay the full price.

Also:

Private Region Pricing: http://secondlife.com/land/privatepricing.php?lang=en-US

Linden Lab Official:Homestead FAQ (costs and numbers of sims to upgrade): http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Homestead_FAQ

Inspired by: Repeatedly having to give people the price and page reference. It was getting old. And this.

[22:23:00]  Derwood Voom: anyone on that knows what it costs to move a sim and how much to rename it?
[22:23:09]  Melody Regent: 150 move
[22:23:10]  Melody Regent: 50 rename
[22:23:28]  Melody Regent: ask for it in the same ticket and they may waive the rename and do it all for $150
[22:24:30]  Hermit Barber: Or sell it to an alt for $100 :-P
[22:24:44]  Melody Regent: LOL
[22:24:55]  Melody Regent: Hermit is right
[22:25:07]  Hermit Barber: Usually :-P
[22:25:25]  KOXINELL Lane: nice idea indeed !
[22:25:27]  Melody Regent bites her tongue and fiddles with her mouse
[22:25:40]  Henri DeCuir can think of a few times when...
[22:25:48]  Hermit Barber asks for a slice of tongue too:-O
[22:25:49]  Derwood Voom: ok ty !
[22:26:45]  Hermit Barber: Make sure you put the move and rename in the same ticket as the sale :-)
[22:27:42]  Hermit Barber: Melody: My cat is watching your mouse ~@ %MQ
[22:27:53]  MissMissy Moonbeam: o.O
[22:28:53]  Melody Regent: Hey, I wanted to say this tonight, and forgot earlier.  I had two people ask me if they needed to be a premium member to own a private estate. For those that dont know, you do NOT need to be a premium member or have a paid account to own a private estate
[22:29:17]  Hermit Barber: And you better avoid being premium at all costs.
[22:29:38]  Melody Regent slides the can of worms in the middle of the room and slips out
[22:29:42]  Hermit Barber: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2647
[22:29:53]  Henri DeCuir: but wait!
[22:30:01]  Henri DeCuir: if we don't have premium status how will we ever get our linden home?!
[22:30:03]  Kalryk Silverfall: if you order now
[22:30:08]  Derwood Voom: but i cant seell this homestead to anyone that doesnt already own a FULL sim----correct?
[22:30:20]  Hermit Barber: Derwood: Absolutely.
[22:30:21]  Kalryk Silverfall: we'll throw in a box of sand completely free
[22:30:57]  Kalryk Silverfall: correct you have to own a Full sim to be able to purchase a Homie
[22:31:10]  Rival Destiny: lol @ Homie
[22:31:18]  Henri DeCuir: lol, like that new name
[22:31:21]  Kalryk Silverfall: :))
[22:31:35]  Rival Destiny: all warm n fuzzy sounding
[22:31:47]  Hermit Barber: Henri: If you always wanted to live in a project on its way to becoming a slum, there are estate owners who do a much better job without all the risks (see the link) of being premium.
[22:32:16]  Kalryk Silverfall: have a bum in a box I can loan you
[22:33:17]  Hermit Barber: Oops, A SLum(TM).
[22:33:28]  MissMissy Moonbeam: LOL
[22:33:55]  Henri DeCuir: You kids are on fire tonight.
[22:34:21]  Hermit Barber: Or a NITPAKZ (Refer A Nearly Touching SL Love Story )
[22:34:34]  Henri DeCuir: I did enjoy that one

Sim Killers: How to Kill A Sim

Floating Lanterns by Danger Pugilist,

Dragonfly Stone by Kyuubi David,

Butterfly Rock by Legith Fairplay

Animated pets that roam your house or property created by Carrie Tatsu
these pets are improperly made physical animated prims.

Smartwaves 2 created by Mathieu Basiat
these waves are improperly made physical animated prims.

sionChicken egg /sionChicken/sionChicken rev2 ,  created by Sion Zaius
these pets are improperly made physical animated prims.

Fountain of Angels, created by My Cazenove
after this object has been rezzed for a while, the script usages time keeps going up,
till it reaches  a constant 70.856 ms, ( only a maximum of 5 ms is recommended for an entire sim
of objects by Linden Labs) this is a very serious overuse of server resources and
has caused both sim and avatar crashes due to script time.
I have checked this many times to be sure, the scripts are not
properly written, please contact the creator for and ask it to be repaired.

carrie Tatsu's "ZOOBY ULTIMATE BABY" has an extremely high script time when resting of .214

If you purchaced any of these items, I suggest you ask the creator for a refund
or to please fix the physics and/or server overload issue and give you a replacement.

This work s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

Originally a notecard written by Neco Shilling based on discussions held in the Concierge Information Group based on the experience of SIm Owners and used here with Neco Shilling's permission.

Please forward new nominations to Hermit Barber inworld on a notecards titled "Sim Killers: Whatever" and mention whether you wish to be credited.

Previous Item:

Botanical - Monarch Butterfly Temp Rez, created by Kriss Lehmann
these emit improperly made physical animated prims - Kriss has retired this design to be replaced by new ones. I will update them when I have seen them.

Skidz Sand Box Rules and Training Calendar

Skidz Rules

Quick Rules

• DON'T MESS WITH OTHER PEOPLE!
• Skidz Isle is a General (formerly PG) Sim. Absolutely no inappropriate behavior, objects or dress. See http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Maturity#General
• No advertising or selling
• No flooding, spamming, or irritating others
• No huge prims over 100x100x100
• No excessive swearing (chat and/or voice)
• No streaming music or excessive voice over voice
• Respect the space that others are using
• Take oversized builds (over 50x50) above 100m
• Weapons may only be used on others with their consent
• Unattended objects being resource-heavy or annoying are subject to return without warning
• Build only inside the sandbox
• No excessive sounds (gestures, sound effects, etc.)
• Do not hide your name
• The use of clients that have CopyBots built in is not permitted

Skidz Isle Staff

Do you need a manager? Check our Sandbox Manager Board to see who is online to have your situation resolved as soon as possible. Find them just outside our store and in the center of each sim.

Owner

Skidz Tweak

Founder of Skidz Partz and creator of the Skidz Primz, Skidz Tweak uses a majority of his resources to keep Skidz Isle running. Donations to help maintain the sims can be made on either sim. Please DO NOT contact Skidz regarding sandbox issues.

General Manager

Alayna Hutson

Contact for:
• region restart (assessed prior to execution)
• visitor conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)
• staff conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)
• Skidz Partz product questions
• Skidz Isle rentals

Assistant General Manager

Uriel Blackadder

Contact for:
• region restart (assessed prior to execution)
• visitor conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)
• staff conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)

Estate Managers

Hermit Barber

Abel Dreamscape

Sleek Weezles

Contact for:
• region restart (assessed prior to execution)
• visitor conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)

Sandbox Managers

Abel Dreamscape

angel6 Susanti

Barbara Collazo

Chantelle Clarity

Codewarrior Congrejo

Dienna Allandale

Dual Dagger

Eyes Shutt

Hermit Barber

Little Pussycat

Marit Huet

Matto Destiny

Poetry Sorbet

Rooster Neutron

Skidz Tweak

Sleek Weezles

Syem Piek

Tormented Twilight

Tricia Farella

Uriel Blackadder

Vavaah Voom

Contact for:
• visitor conduct issues (please provide name and all evidence)

Return Information

• If you leave the sandbox, your items will be returned after 20 minutes
• If you are in the sandbox, your items will be auto-returned every 300 minutes (five hours)
• Our managers have the authority to return your items based on the below rules
• Exceeding the 1500 prim limit will trigger our return bot and your objects will be returned

NOTE: Skidz Isle Staff do not have he ability to delay the auto-return systems!
DO NOT contact a manager or staff member about delaying or stopping auto-returns!

For more detailed information about the conduct expectations, continue reading.

Consequences

THREE STRIKES

Warnings count against you as strikes. If you are warned three times, you will be banned.

Where the word "excessive" or "excessively" is used, we mean that more than four separate or consecutive issues arise within at most an hour of each other.

The term "griefing" is any action taken against a sim or individual(s) that results in the impairment or disabling of either. Caging, particle spam, object spam, tossing, and trapping are just a few examples of griefing.

You can be BANNED without warning for the following:

• Griefing which results in a region restart
• Griefing a manager
• Sexual harassment, intolerance, racism, etc. (by you or your objects)

Your objects may be RETURNED and you will be WARNED ONLY ONCE for the following:

• Griefing sandbox visitors
• Griefing that requires extensive cleanup
• Using a client known to have a built-in CopyBot; you will be asked to switch clients
• Building disruptively (excessive physical prims, particles, etc., building on others or their work)
• Excessively attacking, threatening, harassing, or disrespecting other sandbox users
• Claiming to be a manager or banning officer
• Concealing your identity using an invisible prim or name-hiding device

You will be WARNED THREE TIMES for the following:

• Threatening or harassing a manager
• Failing to observe the PG status of our Sims (nudity, excessive sexual conduct, etc)
• Dropping out or using explicit objects
• Using excessive prims (1500+) or prims larger than 100x100x100
• Selling (including objects marked as “For Sale,” well as tip jars and direct selling)
• Advertising (including ad objects, openly promoting yourself, your products, or anyone else’s)
• Excessive obscene language (chat and/or voice)
• Voice abuse (including obscene language, use as a personal radio, inappropriate dialog, etc)
• Excessive noise from voice, objects, or gestures
• Attacking, threatening, harassing, or disrespecting other sandbox users

Upon the third time a manager has to speak with you, you will be banned.

Skidz Isle Staff reserve the right to eject or send you to your home location if you are being disruptive or difficult. All warnings and bans are fully documented by our Sandbox Managers and kept on record. Chat logs from the sandbox and any of our groups showing abuse will be used for enforcement purposes.

Our Sandbox Managers have the right and are encouraged to send Abuse Reports as necessary regarding anything found to be an obvious breach of the Second Life Terms of Service (TOS). Skidz Isle Sandbox Managers will send abuse reports regarding CopyBot.

Safety Tips

If someone claims to be a Skidz Isle Sandbox Manager, open their profile and look for the group "Skidz Partz" in their profile. If this group is not present, notify Alayna Hutson or Uriel Blackadder immediately.

Retaliation is frowned upon. It is not acceptable to take matters into your own hands if you are being attacked or harassed. We have a staff of sixteen managers who regularly patrol Skidz Isle and will take care of situations as they arise. If you seek revenge for actions taken against you, you are no better than the person who attacked you, and you will be considered a griefer.

We encourage Skidz Isle Sandbox visitors to use preventative tools to protect themselves. Feel free to use MoveLock, Phantom, and other passive devices. Please do not use aggressive methods to protect yourself such as shields that toss, orbit, or otherwise impair or disable those who come in contact with it. Any so-called "defensive" tools that are interpreted as griefing will be treated as such.

Do not accept scripts or scripted objects from people unless you absolutely trust the individual you receive it from. Do not use or drop suspicious scripts or objects in our sandboxes. Should they cause actions which are interpreted as griefing, you will be banned without notice. Claiming the script was given to you under false pretences will not lift the ban.

"Police" Issues

Those visiting our sandboxes in police or otherwise authoritative uniforms, or wearing a tag with similar status will be subject to scrutiny by our managers. Any actions taken by these authoritative role-players which break our rules will not be tolerated and will result in a warning and the founding officer of the group will be contacted.

Calendar

NB: Week begins on Monday.

Times are shown in SLT (PST).

Dates are shown as YYYY-MM-DD.

This calendar is managed by Alayna Hutson in Second Life.

To embed this calendar in a web page, paste this html: <iframe src="http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?height=600&wkst=2&bgcolor=%23FFFFFF&src=skidz.partz%40gmail.com&color=%232952A3&src=en.usa%23holiday%40group.v.calendar.google.com&color=%23A32929&ctz=America%2FLos_Angeles" style=" border:solid 1px #777 " width="800" height="600" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"> </iframe>

Sorting Inventory

Make sure to set the folders so they are sorted by date with Folders by date and System Folders just treated like any other folders. i.e. as below.

Squidly Goodness

Source: vex.fabulo.us
Credits: Vex Streeter
Dated: 2011-01-17

Tentacular magic for SL (Squidifying your viewer)

You might have seen Tateru Nino’s article Proxying Second Life HTTP Textures with Squid …  And then gotten frustrated for any of a number of reasons.  This mini-article expands on Tateru’s excellent post, adding two big hints: first use the right version of Squid and second how to get it working without fancy firewall rules.  The bottom line is that using these two extra tricks you can get a (much!) larger than 1G texture cache working with existing SL client software and even get it all running on a single machine!

Obviously, this procedure will only really be interesting if you are running a Second Life viewer using HTTP textures – I’ve tested using both Linux and Windows versions of a number of official Viewer 2s as well as Phoenix (and Firestorm).

So hop in your deep sea submarine and follow me below the waves in search of the elusive… Second Life Squid! …

Latest isn’t always greatest!

First off, don’t use Squid 3! I know, I know – why would you want to use a crufty old squid when there is a nice bright and shiny new squid? Well, here’s the thing: first, texture requests are always addressed to the sim where the texture is seen. This is generally a fine thing, but the straightforward approach of caching would mean that the same texture seen on two different sims would be cached twice. For common textures this is a big waste of space and bandwidth.

But wait! it is even worse! Each request is identified by a “cap” UUID that authenticates the requester to the sim – also a fine thing, but it means that if two users see the same texture on the same object, on the same sim, the retrieve request will be different and, so, will be cached separately. Tateru’s article discusses these problems at the end in the “caching caveats” section and Robin Cornelius mentions the StoreURLRewrite fix in the comments (see below for my solution).

However, it turns out that when Squid was rewritten for version 3, the developers didn’t port the very feature we need. Instead, you want to back yourself up to Squid 2.7, which is likely still to be available for whatever OS you’d like.

What if I don’t have a Linux firewall?

Yes, you should always have a firewall protecting your windows machine from the jungle of the Intertubes (and if you don’t please don’t send me email or MS Office documents!) Most people just use commodity routers with integrated firewalls at home. If you had an efficient texture cache, you might also want to consider running such a cache on the same machine as your SL client: yes, it would compete with your client for CPU time, but you also could have as large a cache as you’d like and save your bandwidth for other purposes. Also, such a scheme would allow an SL laptop to get the benefits of a big cache without losing it when it gets moved from network to network.

Obviously you could not use the approach that Tateru suggests – SOCKS5 and explicit setting of HTTP proxy inside your viewer would enable this use but most http-texture enabled viewers have broken settings, only using the proxy setting with the internal browser to look at web pages (and media streams?). But it turns out that there is a simpler way available and you can use it now.

The viewers use a standard opensource library libCurl as its HTTP client. LibCurl has a neat feature that, by default, it looks at various environment variables to configure proxies. While this feature can be disabled, it is perfectly functional in the SL viewers that I’ve tried. This allows you to tell all http use in the viewer to go through whatever proxy you’d like, either on lan machine or localhost, simply by setting the right environment variable.

A 20G local cache for your SL

So here’s my recipe. There are lots of variations possible here, and I’m sure there is a lot of room for improvement, but the bottom line is that this works, today. The scenario that I’m describing is setting up a 20G squid texture cache for use only by viewers running on the same machine. I’ll focus on doing this on Linux (since that’s what I’ve set up), but other OSes are actually pretty similar – I’ll include notes on others along the way.

1. 1. Install Squid 2.7 (NOT 3.anything!).  Don’t do anything fancy here, just get it installed as is.
   2. Make the changes to the configuration file /etc/squid/squid.conf.  I like interspersing the changes into the “right” section wherever possible, In my own file, I’ve marked my additions with “(vex)”. Note that anything after a “#” is a comment and is ignored by squid. Also, order matters! In particular, if the first rule to apply to a URL says “don’t allow” then it will not be allowed, even if a later rule would negate that restriction.
      1. add (or change) the cache_dir line to specify a biggish cache. I promised 20G, so make sure you’ve got that much spare space and then do this:
         

         1	# comment out the default (if it isn't already)- 100M just isn't enough! (vex)

         2	#cache_dir ufs /var/spool/squid 100 16 256

         3	# big cache for textures (vex)

         4	cache_dir aufs /var/spool/squid 20000 16 256

         I’m specifying a cache of 20000 megabytes there, distributed inside 16 top level directories, each with 256 subdirectories inside to hold the actual cache files. Play around if you’d like, but don’t go nuts right away. I’m also using threaded (aufs) cachefile access rather than not, as I like threads

      2. Add the http textures port to the list of safe http ports to use – probably not required because it is already covered in most default configutaion files, but worth making explicit. Add to the acl section:
         

         1	acl Safe_ports port 12046   # Second Life HTTP textures (vex)

      3. If you want to be able to use the cache from any machine on your LAN, you’ll want to be sure that the following lines aren’t commented:
         

         1	acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16  # my standard internal network (vex)

         2	http_access allow localnet #allow access by anyone on my lan (vex)

      4. Set up a transparent proxy service on port 3178 – this is the port we’ll tell the viewer to use:
         

         1

         # (vex)

         2	http_port 3178 transparent

      5. Tell squid how to handle textures! Position is important here – I added this line just before the first refresh_pattern line in the file.
         

         1	# this needs to come before the ? and .  SL Texture cache (vex)

         2	refresh_pattern agni.lindenlab.com  10080 90% 44640 ignore-reload ignore-private ignore-no-cache

         Here we say “any resources that point to agni.lindenlab.com (i.e. main grid textures) can be cached for at least a week (10080 minutes) and up to a month or 90% of their age, regardless of what the server says we should do” [Edit: removed ignore-no-store directive, left over from dancing with Squid 3.x].

      6. Viewers have a mechanism to get partial textures by requesting just the first N bytes. Thats great for the viewer, but we only want to cache the whole texture so we need to get the whole thing every time by setting range_offset_limit to -1:
         

         1

         # (vex)

         2	range_offset_limit -1

      7. Viewers have a mechanism to get partial textures by requesting just the first N bytes. Thats great for the viewer, but we only want to cache the whole texture so we need to get the whole thing every time by setting range_offset_limit to -1:
         

         1	# rewrite rules for SL textures! (vex)

         2	acl store_rewrite_list dstdomain .agni.lindenlab.com

         3	storeurl_access allow store_rewrite_list

         4	storeurl_access deny all

         5	storeurl_rewrite_program /etc/squid/url_rewrite_textures.pl

         This says, invoke the store rewriter on urls that include .agni.lindenlab.com by calling the script in /etc/squid/url_rewrite_textures.pl.

   3. The “store rewriter” is the special sauce that makes it all worthwhile. As Tateru points out, the URLs that the viewer requests don’t lend themselves very well to caching. But with the above recipe (and Squid 2.7!), we can tell squid to rewrite those URLs just for storage purpose! This is an important point – we are not changing the URLs used to request or retrieve anything – what we are doing is telling under which name should content be cached. You can do any transformation you’d like here.
      What I do below is tell it to store any texture resource under the name “http://texture.lindenlab.com.INTERNAL/(texturekey)” I created this as a perl script and put it in /etc/squid with the squid.conf file. Location and name isn’t critical, but it needs to be executable and match the name given at the end of the squid.conf modifications above. Without further ado, here’s my script for /etc/squid/url_rewrite_textures.pl :

       

      01	#!/usr/bin/perl

      02

      $| = 1;

      03	while (<>) {

      04

      chomp;

      05	if (m/http:\/\/.*lindenlab.com:12046\/cap.*\?texture_id=(.*)/) {

      06	print "http://texture.lindenlab.com.INTERNAL/".$1."\n";

      07

      } else {

      08	print $_ . "\n";

      09

      }

      10

      }

   4. initialize the cache:
      

      1	$ sudo squid -z

      All this does is set up your cache directory, mainly by creating all the appropriate directories and starter cache files.

   5. set the environment variable.  For purposes of discussion, I’m going to assume you are using bash or similarly bourne-shellish syntax:
      

      1	$ export http_proxy=http://127.0.0.1:3178

      This, of course, is the incantation that tells libCurl to use 127.0.0.1 (also known as localhost) port 3178 as an http proxy.  ANY application that uses libCurl that executes with that setting will use it.  This might be a problem if Squid used libCurl, but we’re lucky there.  Of course, if you happen to have set up your cache on another machine on your lan instead of your client, you can put your cache machine’s IP address in there.  For instance, at home, I have a setup where my Windows 7 SL machine points at a squid cache that I’ve set up on a little linux box for this pupose:

      1	Computer properties ->

      2	Advanced System Settings ->

      3	(advanced tab) ->

      4	Environment Variables ->

      5	User Variables (new) ->

      6	Variable=http_proxy, Value=http://192.168.1.99:3178

   6. test using the curl command:
      

      1	$ curl http://cnn.com

      did it print the html of the cnn front page? The other thing to do is check the squid logs:

      1	$ sudo tail /var/log/squid/access.log

      Note the last entry – it should mention cnn, indicating that the request actually went went through our cache.

   7. test using SL!  You are probably fine running like this, but you may always set the http_proxy value you in a shell script that runs your viewer (or a bat script if you are on windows).  And of course when the various viewers introduce a working http proxy setting, you can stop using the environment variable and point the viewer at the squid you’ve just set up.
      I like to do a “tail -f /var/log/squid/access.log” to watch the textures getting cached – any line with MISS is a texture getting grabbed from LL… any line with HIT is one that the cache found that didn’t have to go back to the Linden servers. Yay!

Texture Audit

Texture Audit

Intercept all of the textures on the sim by loading one of the following tools on your compter.

Move to the sim of interest.

Set your avatar not to timeout (advanced/character/character tests and disabling away timeout).

Set your avatar to return to the last position (Edit/Preferences/General and enable My Last Postion)

Cleare cache and log out.

Start the client intercept below.

Log back into SL and wait for 15 minutes.

Exit from SL and use a PC tool to evaluate the textures from the sim to identify any textures over 512x512.

Disable the client intercept, return to the sim and replace textures that are at over 512x512 unless absolutely necessary (hardly ever).

Texture Audit Tools: Windows

Download GLIntecept (Windows) here.

From: http://www.opengl.org/sdk/tools/GLIntercept/

GLIntercept

GLIntercept (http://glintercept.nutty.org) is a free and open-source OpenGL function call interceptor providing a replacement wrapper (opengl32.dll) that exports all OpenGL entry points. When an OpenGL call is made, the GLIntercept wrapper processes it before passing the call onto the real OpenGL system.

While there are many tools that provide similar functionality, mostly for logging purposes, GLIntercept provides an extensible plugin interface to allow custom logging or manipulation of the OpenGL state.

Feature List

GLIntercept is a OpenGL function call interceptor that can:

• Save all OpenGL function calls to text or XML format with the option to log individual frames. The XML log types include XSL formatting for viewing in web browsers that support it. (IE6+, FireFox, Mozilla 1.4+).
• Run time shader edit. Display shader usage and edit the shaders at run time. Supports ARB VP/FP/GLSL and NV VP/FP.
• Free camera. Fly around the geometry sent to the graphics card and enable/disable wireframe/backface-culling/view frustum render.
• Save and track textures. (1D,2D,3D,NVRect and p-buffer/FBO bound textures are supported.) Saving can be to TGA,PNG and JPG formats.
• Save and track shaders/programs. ARB VP/FP/GLSL and NV VP/FP are supported.
• Save and track display lists.
• Saving of the OpenGL frame buffer (color/depth/stencil) pre and post render calls. The ability to save the "diff" of pre and post images is also available.
• Track error states (logging them to the debugger output) and breaking on errors.
• Basic thread error checking.
• Function timer log.
• Resource leak tracking for contexts, display lists, shaders and textures.
• OpenGL extension/version override. Add/remove/replace the OpenGL extension and version strings. (Test lower end rendering paths without changing cards)
• Function call stats. Provide a summary of what OpenGL functions are called and how often they are called.

While this tool is designed to aid programmers debug OpenGL applications, it can also be used to grab the textures and models (via the OGLE plugin) used in OpenGL applications. Please respect copyright and authors' wishes if you do this.

Then from http://oreilly.com/pub/h/5235

Snagging Textures with GLIntercept
If you want to grab textures out of Second Life to see how people have made those neat trees, the stunning clothes, or maybe an old texture you lost, GLIntercept is the tool for the job.

Contributed by: andrewburton
[01/26/06 | Discuss (34) | Link to this hack]

If you want to grab textures out of Second Life to see how people have made those neat trees, the stunning clothes, or maybe an old texture you lost, GLIntercept is the tool for the job. GLIntercept is a program that grabs OpenGL information directly from memory. It does a lot more than just capturing textures; with it you can extract prim information, avatars, and textures. This information can be exported into other 3D programs, such as Maya. This hack, however, is just about the images.

To get started, you'll first need to download GLIntercept (http://glintercept.nutty.org/download.html) from its website. They have several versions, but if you're mostly interested in grabbing textures, just grab the latest Binary for Windows.

Once it's downloaded, run the installation program [Ed. As administrator]. A standard installation will put the files on your C: drive, in the C:\Program Files\GLIntercept0_5 directory -- "0_5" will likely vary depending on the version you download. There is no executable GLIntercept program, so don't worry because you can't find an *.exe file.

Next, copy the files opengl32.dll and gliConfig.ini from the GLIntercept directory into your Second Life directory (for example: C:\Program Files\SecondLife). Once those files are copied, run the SecondLife.exe program; use it for a few minutes, then log out.

NOTE: Second Life will operate a good bit slower with GLIntercept. You may want to log in a head of time, get where you want to grab textures, and then log out.

There will be two new files and three new folders in your Second Life Directory. The folder named Images is what you want. Within Images will be several hundred, maybe several thousand, JPG and PNG files. These are all the textures that your Second Life rendered on screen while you were logged in.

NOTE: Second Life images appear to load in stages. To get a full texture, you need to wait until a prim and its texture(s) have fully loaded before moving off or logging out. Otherwise all you may get of a 512x512 texture is a smaller, 128x128 version.

Texture Audit Tools: Linux

About BuGLe

BuGLe is a tool for OpenGL debugging, implemented as a wrapper library that sits between your program and OpenGL. While still in development, it can already do the following:

• Dump a textual log of all GL calls made.
• Take a screenshot or capture a video.
• Call glGetError after each call to check for errors, and wrap glGetError so that this checking is transparent to your program.
• Capture and display statistics (such as frame rate)
• Force a wireframe mode
• Recover a backtrace from segmentation faults inside the driver, even if the driver is compiled without symbols.

In addition, there is a debugger (gldb) that lets you set breakpoints and examine backtraces. It also lets you examine OpenGL state, enable and disable filters, and drop into gdb to see what is going wrong. A GUI version of the debugger (gldb-gui) is currently in development, and a preliminary version is available with the latest releases. It features a texture viewer and a shader viewer.

You can download the source from the project page, or view the documentation online. BuGLe is also available in Gentoo portage and the BSD ports collection.

Requirements

• GCC 3.2 or later (4.0 is broken, but 4.1 works).
• FFmpeg is needed for video capture
• GNU readline is recommended for history editing in gldb
• GTK+ is required for gldb-gui
• GtkGLExt is highly recommended for gldb-gui (without it, the texture display will not work)

Example

Here is an extract from a log, generated from an application I am writing. Note that GLenums are displayed by name, and pointers are followed to the correct number of elements.

stats.fps: 22.671
stats.fragments: 52335
stats.triangles: 99732
trace.call: glXSwapBuffers(0x8117720, 0x01c00021)
trace.call: glXMakeCurrent(0x8117720, 0x01c00021, 0x8444800) = 1
trace.call: glBindBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 1)
trace.call: glMapBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, GL_READ_WRITE) = 0x45c3c000
trace.call: glUnmapBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER) = GL_TRUE
trace.call: glBindBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 0)
trace.call: glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT | GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT)
trace.call: glLoadMatrixd(0xbfffe610 -> { { 0, -0.29661, 1.22295, 0 }, { 1.22295, 0, 0, 0 }, { 0, 1.18644, 0.305739, 0 }, { 0.037888, 1.61781, -1.52576, 1 } })
trace.call: glActiveTextureARB(GL_TEXTURE0)
trace.call: glTexEnvfv(GL_TEXTURE_ENV, GL_TEXTURE_ENV_COLOR, 0xbfffe5d0 -> { 0.778524, 0.778524, 0.569631, 0 })
trace.call: glGetIntegerv(GL_MAX_TEXTURE_UNITS, 0xbfffe688 -> 4)
trace.call: glBindBufferARB(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, 1)
trace.call: glVertexPointer(3, GL_FLOAT, 32, (nil))

Texture Audit Tools: Mac

OpenGL Profiler is the Apple developed, best of class, tool to assist developers in debugging and optimizing their OpenGL usage. The following gives and overview of some of the tools the OpenGL Profiler provides which allow developers to investigate all aspects of an OpenGL client application.

Main Window

The Profiler main panel controls tracing, collection of resources (textures and programs) and statistics. It is also a convenient place to view a client’s frame rate.

See more at: http://developer.apple.com/graphicsimaging/opengl/profiler_image.html

The Obese ADHD Turkey on Crack Viewer

A list of the viewers being lost as the developers leave SL in advance of the new TPV policy taking effect. http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/ And of course, aside from the developers who will no longer be finding and fixing bugs while LL is too busy adding unneeded features, unusable UIs and massive security holes allowing griefers to trivially obtain IP addresses and potentially take over computers, the larger own goal is probably that some will go on to build more viewers for other compatible networks that will not have the constraints built into the viewers for LL and so will be better suited for griefing and ripping when used on SL. And already some of those available on the p2p networks as both binary and source are indistinguishable from the official viewers.

Obese

Fat and Bloated. Like the UI of the Obese ADHD Turkey on Crack Viewer

A.D.H.D.- Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder

What anyone will be who attempts to get any actual work done using the Turkey on Crack viewer after experiencing "Third Party Viewers."

Turkey (n)

a loser; an uncoordinated, inept, clumsy fool OR a tool; a person who is not in with current culture and slang or is just generally uncool.

[ Emilie says : Either of these descriptions, "uncoordinated, inept, clumsy", an "uncool loser"  describes the disastrous ToC viewer, but does not completely capture its full aweinspiring awfulness.  ]

On Crack

Generally someone whose actions would lead one to believe that the person is using crack cocaine due to the stupidity or messed-up-ness of their actions. Used to describe something stupid, messed up or to express frustration with something - if something is mad, bad or just plain wrong, it can be described as "on crack", or, for added emphasis, "so on crack".

[ Emilie says : For that, I turned to this adjectival phrase to try to convey the complete wrongness of the UI. ]

(Above definitions for Turkey and On Crack via http://www.urbandictionary.com )

[ Emilie says : Both terms are dated and corny, to match Linden Lab's inept "Fast, Easy, Fun" slogan (inept because they have been, and are, anything but, and the phrase is echoed everytime something messes up again), as well as having been inspired by users clicking around like demented chickens as the screen bounced and joggled around, under the spell of the malevolent user hostile UI of the Obese A.D.H.D. Turkey on Crack wanna-be-a-browser viewer, sometimes styled as Viewer 2.0 by Linden Labs.  ]

Wannabe a Browser

Tries to hide all the useful stuff behind a browser interface, meaning that everyone needs to know what they want to do, what Linden Lab's has called it, and where it has been hidden before it can be used. A catasrophic modal failure where tasks that were once one click away are hidden, buried or missing completely. I cannot sufficiently emphasise how terrible this user interface is. Try it. Like most experienced users of Second Life (i.e. the one's who have been there for longer than three days hours), you will probably hate it.

What is the concurrency and how does it compare?

Source: http://etitsup.com/slstats/concurrency/

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