Pinoy Hideout
I went to a new sim, Pinoy Hideout, earlier today to explore and look around. The sim was designed by the talented Neva Crystall. The owner of the sim is Lovelykitten Resident and there is also a photo contest for those that like to explore and take images.
Even though I have a somewhat decent computer, it took me quite a long time to get it all to rez, and even in these images, you can see that some of the ground textures are not fully rezzed. This happens to me in lots of places.
Then I logged in and went there using SL GO and everything rezzed right away, with no issues. Isn’t it funny that a mobile app works faster than my computer? I don’t know, I must be doing something wrong in my settings.
SL GO has recently started a “Refer-A-Friend” program. Anyone can earn $10 for every referral who converts to a paid SL Go subscriber. This offer is only good for a limited time, until January 7, 2015. I thought I would sign up for this program and share my link with you guys, but then realized that whatever money I earn from this will probably be spent on new shoes for me. So I figured instead of doing that, I’ll share Draxtor Despres’ link. He says the money from this program will be put towards the weekly Drax Files podcast. If you’ve never heard the Drax Files Radio Hour podcast before, click over to the site now and have a listen to some of them. They are very informative and help me keep up to date on all the events in Second Life and throughout the tech world.
Draxtor also did a little ad for SL GO recently which features himself and his son…and a Torley Linden right at the end! It was rather amusing as he played on the stereotype that SLers are all anti-social and don’t go out anywhere. Also, he’s got some serious skills on the skateboard! Click over to check out the ad on youtube, also embedding it below.
Credits:
*Skin: -Glam Affair – Angelica V2 – Jamaica 02 F by Aida Ewing (@ Kustom9)
*Hair: MINA Hair – Natasja (materials) by Mina Nakamura (@ TLC)
*Sweater: Coquet. Laila M – Cream Solid by Tabitha Marquez (@ TLC)
*Jeans: GizzA – Virginia Jeans [DarkBlue] Size XXS by Giz Seorn (flickr)
*Bag: .ANE Messenger Leather Bag BROWN by Anemysk Karu (flickr)
*Umbrella: *BOOM* Rain no rain umbrella. -pitch- by Aranel Ah (blog)
*Necklace: MG – Necklace – Bahia Beauty 1 by Maxi Gossamer (@ Fameshed)
*Shoes: {Livalle} Evoke -Platform Boots- by Lindsey Warwick (coming soon)
*Mesh Hands: Slink Avatar Enhancement Hands – Casual by Siddean Munro
*Pose: Label Motion Noa Pose 5 – by anne Dakun (flickr)
Location: Pinoy Hideout
Hi, Berry. A decent photographic workaround for the issue with partially loaded textures is to momentarily set the Debug Setting parameter “TextureLoadFullRes” to “TRUE” just prior to capture. By default viewers are often a bit too conservative about whether loading all textures at their highest resolution, in order to protect what they think is your graphic card’s memory capacity, and so they load some at half res or even less, and also start discarding (or lowering again) those they think you don’t need to see, at least not at their full quality… in some extreme cases leading to the dreaded “texture trashing” bug (constant blurring & refocusing). By setting “TextureLoadFullRes” to “TRUE”, you’re basically telling your viewer: “I don’t care about memory limits, just friggin’ load all the textures at full res and KEEP them that way no matter what”.
The problem with this trick is that, of course, eventually you may in fact run out of texture memory and get the subsequent crash; it depends much on your hardware but, at least in my experience, this doesn’t happen so often that the trick isn’t worth trying (and if it does happen, the worst that happens is that you crash, so you log in back where you were and settle for what the viewer will load without pressure -which will often be more that before crashing, anyway, since a relog often does that-). Another important consideration is that TextureLoadFullRes = TRUE is something you *really* should activate only a moment before taking the snapshot, to make sure you won’t be forcing the viewer to load things you don’t actually need if you happen to change your mind about the framing/angle/whatever and start moving the camera again, or changing other settings; do all of that first, and only when you’re positive you’re about to “press the trigger”, do activate this setting. It goes without saying that, after you’ve taken the shot, you should revert it to “FALSE” inmediately, to let the viewer kinda “exhale”.
If you’re unsure whether your viewer will be able to thus “hold its breath” (or its textures, as it were) for a particular scene, you can press Ctrl + Alt + 3 to bring up the Texture Console; there you’ll see two upper horizontal meters displaying actually how much texture memory you’re using against your card’s limit (and thus how near you’re from crash): if you see them green or yellow you’re fine… only when they start turning red you should start worrying, though in fact I’ve often seen them going well into red and I didn’t crash -again, that depends on your hardware. This panel will also tell you at its bottom whether some textures are still loading (it often happened to me that I didn’t notice some of them hadn’t until I had taken the pic and finished the shooting, and while they obviously weren’t as important or I would’ve noticed, I’d still prefer they had fully loaded), so if they’re still loading and the upper meters don’t give you cause for concern, it’s worth waiting ‘till they’re done.
Since I happen to use this trick quite a bit and I use Firestorm, I’ve actually added this setting to my customizable Quick Preferences panel (I labelled it “AntiBlur”), making it easier for me to activate it just prior to “clicking”, and then deactivating it as easily once I’m done. If your viewer doesn’t offer this facility, you can always leave the Debug Settings window unobstrusively opened in a corner.
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Love this Berry! Such a stunning photograph. A while ago you kindly gave some of your windlight settings, mainly for studio photographs, I think and I wondered if you ever considered doing another using the advanced phototools ‘thingy’ (I forget what it’s called but love playing with it). Yours hopefully 😉 Meri x
Thank you Landaree for the tip, I did try it and then crashed right away. So I don’t think it’s something I’ll be able to use. Also, like you said, a few people have told me not to use this option since it’s really bad for your graphics card. There was a great post made today regarding all of this as well that I saw being shared, here it is: http://edmerrymansrants.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/buyer-beware
Have some important info in there I think.
Mericat, thank you. I hadn’t thought about it but sure, I can probably do a tutorial on advanced tools. I’ll think about it and see what to cover.