RSS SL

1. Do you guys still think PBR is worth it?

   Add more maps. Parallax mapping would be lovely thanks. Add subsurface scattering. Add caustics. Probably not what you'd want to hear though, even if you could turn them off for low spec systems.

2. Are the usage of 'bots' legal?

   Sounds like 'bot Wars.

3. Where I can find nice AO?

   I've been meaning to reply but keep getting distracted and figured someone else would beat me to it, seems not .. There are several places that sell good AOs, Vista, Body Language, RVN, to name a few - a product sold as an 'AO' should pretty much be expected to included the basic movements (walking, running, etc), but it's always best to try the animation sets before you settle for one. Breathing animations are quite common these days, and I'd think 'most' AO creators use them by now; but again, demo the animations to make sure, as some may have older AOs for sale which do not have breathing. You can also make your own AO (either in your viewer or in an empty AO HUD), places like Stun, OMY, and Tsuki have lots of standing animations with breathing in them (I think OMY also has some movement animations meant to be used to build your own AO with, but I don't recall seeing any 'complete AO' at any of them). So if you find an AO where you like 3/10 stands it's probably better and cheaper to just pick and choose what you want.

4. Stillman Bazaar needs no copy, transferable items for new residents

   Look up Stillman on your map, you will find it that way. Stillman is the region name. It is just North of the ivory Tower of primitives

5. Ping spiking to 3000+ only when on SL, any ideas?

   Wireless links are affected by the radio waves environment. A degradation in your WiFi link could just be caused by more wireless connections having been established by neighbours, or by a change in their own WiFi equipments (and the more crowded the channels, the more queuing and thus delay happens in routers until they can manage to pass the data through, in a very bursty way, causing ”hiccups”). Also, it must be noted that wireless routers are usually pretty cheaply programmed, with many of them only optimized (via QoS) for TCP, and totally ruining UDP communications (with routers sometimes queuing UDP packets in huge buffers, together with TCP packets, while UDP is supposed to pass through without delay). Since SL is heavily relying on UDP (especially for all ”real time” things, such as getting objects updates, animations updates, avatars movements, etc), it would not be surprising to see SL perform much worst than most other networked applications/games behind such a router, thus a high ”ping” registered by the viewer. My advice is therefore that you bite the bullet and buy a long Ethernet CAT6 cable, so to connect your PC via it directly to your ISP's Internet box/router.