🌺 computer tips for Second life.🌺

 Hello everyone!

I was going to make a blog post about International Women's Day yesterday, but my computer had a complete meltdown, and I ended up having to reinstall the whole thing!

So I ended up spending most of my night and into the morning to get everything I had up and running again.

A few days before this, my Ultra HD 4K computer monitor decided to die, so Needless to say, I was a bit tired and annoyed yesterday.

But I screamed out my frustrations, and I fought my way through it!

I even had two days of 1920x1080 resolution, which is something I never ever want to experience again.

A family friend helped me order a new Ultra HD 4K monitor. You know who you are, and I know you are reading this thank you from the bottom of my heart.

However, that monitor has not yet arrived, but my Superman of a real-life husband fixed my broken Ultra HD 4K monitor!

But he also said that it was good that a new one is coming because the one I'm using is really on its last leg, so I am hoping and praying this monitor will be alive until I can get my hands on the new one.

Two days of 1920x 1080 resolution was a very humbling experience, I must say, because it made me appreciate what I have to be able to see SecondLife as beautiful as it is. I am not bragging in any shape or form; I understand that many people can't afford the high-end stuff that second life actually needs to be visually stunning and work smoothly at the same time.

I am very fortunate to be in second life and use shadows, depth of field, and all the bling second life actually has.

I used the Black dragon as my everyday viewer for 2 years straight for up to 70 hours a week.

Black dragon is considered the daddy of all second-life viewers. Most people use the black dragon as their photography viewer, So when they go to take a picture, they switch to the black dragon viewer. To each their own, but because I am a photographer who takes photos at the moment, I don't want to change to another view word because I want to take a picture. 

I switched back to firestorm because I realized that firestorm had developed into a photography/everyday viewer. I quickly realized that it wasn't second life's fault when it came down to graphics, shadows, ambient occlusion, and all of that; it was down to my computer; my computer simply was not up to par with the stuff you actually need to make second life visually stunning.

I have learned this over the years, but people don't understand that second life is a hefty virtual platform.

I used to struggle so much with the frame rates it was crazy. Most people don't know this, but second life renders over the Internet cable instead of inside the actual computer. Therefore, it's hard to get really high frame rates from what I understand.

So what I finally did after so many years of struggling was buy a new computer first of all. My husband actually built it for me from scratch, but I also did buy a new graphics card and memory, resulting in a 30-40-80 in frame rate with all the bells and whistles on. I never drop below 30 or even 20.

I have also discovered that if you are up in the sky in a skybox, your frame rate will increase automatically because there's not so much that the Internet cable has to render when you are up in the sky.

The really critical point is making sure your graphics card has enough graphic memory to render textures and shadows.

Every new place you go second life has to repeatedly render all of the objects and your surroundings. If it doesn't have enough graphic card memory to do so, it won't be able to generate everything white shadows and everything like that turned on because your frame rate will plummet to the point where you can't even move if you don't have enough graphic card memory.

I am just speaking from my personal experience and the considerable improvement when I upgraded my graphics card and computer.

So don't take my words as gold when it comes to this. I'm speaking purely from my heart, taking bits and pieces of information I have been able to gather throughout my 12 years in second life, but again I could be wrong on some of the stuff I'm saying.

I know that some of you are dying to know my computer specifications, so here we go:

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10850K CPU @ 3.60GHz (3599.99 MHz)

Memory: 32657 MB

Concurrency: 20

OS Version: Microsoft Windows 10 64-bit (Build 19044.1586)

Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060/PCIe/SSE2

Graphics Card Memory: 6144 MB

Windows Graphics Driver Version: 30.0.15.1179

OpenGL Version: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 511.79

Viewer settings

Settings mode: Firestorm

Viewer Skin: AnsaStorm (Bright Blue)

Window size: 3840x2050 px

Font Used: Deja Vu (96 dpi)

Font Size Adjustment: 1.3 pt

UI Scaling: 0.95

Draw distance: 128 m

Bandwidth: 3000 kbit/s

LOD factor: 2

Render quality: High-Ultra (6/7)

Advanced Lighting Model: Yes

Texture memory: 2048 MB (1)

Disk cache: Max size 2048.0 MB (35.4% used)

Built with MSVC version 1916

Packets Lost: 4/142 189 (0,0%)

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I can walk around taking life and enjoy the scenery and take in the beautiful second life the way it deserves to be looked at. Now again, I fully understand that many people can't afford this high-end stuff, and I am not bragging; I am simply giving advice on what has helped me enjoy second life 100% more than I ever did before.