Debug Menu-info?

I have not been able to find any info on what the various Debug Menu items do...can someone point me to an info source.

I want to understand what the options are...I have been using the Client/Render/Surface Patch to find those strange underground objects but what to do the rest of the Debug options offer?


Thanks for any info

Bumping in the hope someone more enlightened will answer...

I've figured out turning off Rendering/SurfacePatch to look for underground objects, /Trees when they're blocking my view, and /Clouds, /Particles, and Features/Flexi to fight lag. A wonderful NCIite recently pointed out that you can use the Admin Options menu item to turn Offer Teleport back on in profiles. And we're told to Character/Rebake Textures to fix avatar problems, but I've never known that to actually help -- at least once, it has made the problem worse.

But that still leaves a whole lot of other menu items mysterious.

Character/Rebake Textures won't fix any problems that you see. It will however fix problems that only other people can see.

The way it works is - your avatar's clothes are made up of lots of different layers, the lowest being your skin. To get the final look of your avatar, these layers are laid on top of each other. However, if every single person who looked at you had to have their client do this then a) SL would slow down, because that's extra work for all their clients, and b) the clothing textures would have to be sent to the clients, who could steal them. So instead what happens is that your own SL client downloads all your clothes, overlays them, then silently uploads the resulting texture to SL, where it is applied to your avatar as the one and only texture of your avatar. Other clients see only this one.

The problem is, sometimes this goes wrong, and SL doesn't send the texture properly to other people. In this case, everything will look fine to you, because your own client is the one that generated the texture and has never needed to download it, but other people will see you with the white "missing texture" skin. Rebake Textures basically tells SL to go through the overlaying+upload process again.

Then what's going on when you log in to find yourself invisible or grey and the client claims it's still downloading your clothing but also claims other people can see you normally?

Well I'm not sure about this, this is how I understand it but I might be wrong - maybe someone who's looked at the source code more than I have could explain/correct..

When you log in, the system downloads your clothes and overlays them again, to allow for the possibility that you might have played SL on a different computer and changed clothes, and thus they would be different from what your computer "remembers" from last time. Your computer has to know in detail what clothes you're wearing because it has to display the Worn indicators and deal with the appearance editor, etc. On the other hand, when other people look at you they only need to see how you look - they only need the overlayed texture. And no matter what computer you played from last time, that texture of your most recent overlayed clothes will still be on the server, so other people can see that.

The Lindens' computers can't know what other people are seeing!

H*ck, I dont' know what I'm seeing half the time! The Linden's computer only knows what it THINKS others are seeing based on what the Lindens HOPE is a perfectly working system!

That said, when you get the message about "YOu're gray and naked, but others can see you normally", just wait it out...the others may or may not see you properly, but that's a separate issue. It'd be more accurate if the message said, "You're online and gray and naked or could be invisible except for your prim hair--but play on! Others may see you in ermine robes...or not! But Have Fun!"

Just wait it out..I've never needed more than 3 or 4 minutes at worst before I become visibly clothed. You can try speeding it up by Editing Appearance and making a minor change. Or swapping an article of clothing.

Then, if OTHERS complain that you don't look right, do the REBAKE jig...

Here are some more descriptions, unfortunately, there is no full description of everything on the debug menu.

http://secondlife.com/app/help/menus/debugmenu.php

http://secondlife.com/app/help/guides/stats.php

This mirror of the on-sabbatical LSL wiki has some perhaps somewhat dated info on the debug menu: http://rpgstats.com/wiki/index.php?title=Debug .

The Client / Consoles / Memory gets me. It makes a translucent gray rectangle appear on the screen. If there's on thing we don't need to see more of in Second Life, it's gray rectangles.

Thanks everyone for your help.