Unimpressed

I decided to pop in to the preview grid since the main grid was having so many problems.

My first login attempt I stood there for a good 5 minuites waiting for my clothes to appear... and eventually logged out. Everything else rezed but I was left grey skinned... Okay, logout and back in to reset it .... where have I seen this before?

On my second attempt, the immediate first thing I noticed was my cigar was going berzerk. I was completely burried in a mass of smoke particles from it as it was emitting somewhere around 40x the number of particles it normally would. Hmm, ok... Ive seen this on the main grid recently too, although not quite THIS bad. Telling it to only emit 1 particle per 10th/second seemed to calm it down although it looks like there is some kind of timing issue here.

A moment later, my head decided to assemble itsself although it looked like the parts came flying in from several directions as it materialized with the individual prims doing flips in mid-space to orient themselves.... with the exception of my left ear which was missing... Well... hmm... close enough I guess... maybe it's listening to Pavarati or something....

I made my way to the sandbox to try my hand with the new building toys. By the time I arrived there my ear had caught up to me from wherever it had gone.

I started by playing with the new lighting feature. Hmm, the ground lights up and can be coloured but the prim itsself dosent seem to be lit nor do prims nearby. Oh, I see, it has to be MIDNIGHT for that to happen.... sort of.... I wonder what happens if I put a box around it.... DARN TEXTURE! STAY ON THE PRIM, NO, THAT WAY

**HISS**

Hmm, Ive seen that bug before but thought it was supposedly fixed. Ok, time to start filling out bug reports. I see packet loss here too, I wonder what the stats say, No I dont need to know the FPS... wait, where did everything in the top section of the stats bar GO? It was there a moment ago.... Oh.. I see... great A bug in a bug tool. Guess I need to fill out a bug report for that too and hope there arent any bugs in the bug report system....

Whats this, a new unmentioned menu on prims? Left click to ... Oh my, interesting. Oh dear, I can see where thats going to go, everyone expects left click to be "touch" and are suddenly going to find themselves sitting on everything, and I sure as heck hope they put in a safety system with that "pay" option, I can see a whole flock of scammers who will be happy to see that.

Ok well, lets try the new flexable prims... Which turn out to NOT be that. I guess I should remember this is second life and "truth in advertising" dosent apply anywhere in it. They arent flexable as in "an object which moves dynamically" as the name would imply but rather can be twisted in new directions is all. I expect though that through scripting one could make them actually "flex" with the new parameters, although that level of math would make it beyond all but about 5% of SL's users. (The average SL user wouldnt know a vector math equation even if it ran them over in the street.) ... I decide it's too early in the morning to try scripting something that heavy

All in all... well... perhaps if so many of the existing bugs that have been around for months werent there in force it might have been more impressive. Or if even the expected increase in frame rate from culling had happend...

Make it so that cars can be driven on streets or people can fly in SL again and I'll be much more impressed, or even just so I dont have to chase down my left ear or make it so i can stop moving when I decide to. That would be much more impressive.

Apparently you did not have your preference adjusted correctly. Try playing around with your settings for local lighting effects and so on in the new grid. You can also set the number of particles displayed in preferences.

The new light prims do light nearby objects, even without a hot-shot graphics card. For shadow effects you do need vertex shading and all that. The new prims are not just twisted, they flop around in the wind and so on. "Floppy" would probably be a more accurate description than flexible. It does take some experimenting to see just how they work.

Turn off vertex shaders. At first all of my body parts acted the same until I upgraded my graphics drivers (not from Dell or similar, but the newest from ATi).

I would expect that a particle emmitter which has been told to emit 1 particle every 0.1 seconds to emit 1 particle every 0.1 seconds regardless of if I have the maximum number of particles set to 1024 or 4096... I dont expect it should emit particles every 0.001 seconds when it has been specifically been given other instructions.




I Admit I didnt really play with them very much, only for a few minuites in fact. I wasnt seeing them even be "floppy" ... They changed shape when I changed the wind parameter, but after that just sat there. The impression I got was that one would have to use llWind in a script and apply that force to the Flex Feature Parameter in a script.

Purr-haps the wind wasnt changing in the sandbox, but ... that would imply a bug in the weather system.






**HISS**

I wish people wouldnt do that, blame the graphics driver for EVERYTHING or assume that no one but themselves could possibly have the correct drivers. The soda I keep nearby in RL isnt loosing it's fizz because of them either. I wouldnt believe you if you told me it was.

The prims rezing so slowly and visibly changeing positions and rotation was **probbably** caused by the bad router that Zero Linden announced the later in the day... which would have caused the parameter packets for that many prims to arrive slowly or maybe even out of order.

Well, initially you had it emitting more than one particle per 0.1 seconds. The preview grid, in most areas, is extremely uncluttered. I've often found that a particle system I've created on the main grid seems to go insane on the preview, simply because of the client-lagged conditions I created the particle system in (ie. the main grid).


Flexprims can be a little finnicky, and the parameters aren't entirely clear as to their functions. Tension is the one that always gets me. Higher tension means a more responsive, more 'violently flexing' flexprim, in most cases. Drag, of course, slows this back down. True enough, a lone flexprim with nothing but the wind acting on it isn't going to behave in a terribly exciting way. Try attaching it to something that moves.

You can definitely do fun things with the force parameters using the scripting functions available, but you're correct, the majority of users probably aren't going to know how to do so.

I imagine the texture-flipping problem you described might've been part of the whole thing with that bad router... I remember the bug on preview, and it did seem fixed to me. But hey, this is SL, where old bugs never die, they just get called 'features'.

Regarding the new lighting system, prims with the light feature enabled emit light, but they themselves do not 'glow'. That would be the 'full bright' texture checkbox. It's a bit of a departure from our current 'prim material light' method.

Needless to say, I'm totally addicted to these new features.

SL wind is dynamic--it changes/varies in velocity and direction. See llWind for more info.

This isn't correct--a lit prim will still "glow" as if "full-bright" is selected.