Talk:Debug Settings

Useful Settings

Most of these descriptions come from User:Torley Linden.

• adminMenu - enable it to become able to open Admin menu from Develop menu

• AutoLogin - Set this to TRUE to skip the login screen and automatically login using the last-entered username & password. Good for convenience, easier than using the shortcut command-line method (and if you don't know what that is, all the more reason to try this out). For privacy reasons, you generally will not want to use this on a shared computer.

• ToolTipDelay - You can effectively disable the tooltips on buttons by setting the ToolTipDelay debug setting to 99999

• RotationStep - One use of this is adding a "secondary rotation snap-to" in the inner circle of when you rotate an object, which is normally a "free" rotate that isn't constrained. Set this to 5.650 if you want rotations to always be limited to the default snap-to without having to move your mouse to the outer circle with guide lines, or make it a bigger number like 45 degrees to help with "building by numbers". I haven't found this that useful, but it's good to keep in mind.

• MaxDragDistance and MaxSelectDistance - Ever make mistakes by dragging or selecting an object too far away and wished you could limit those ranges? These are the controls to do it.

• UISndObjectCreate - Frustrated by the bass-rumbling ROWWWWL that plays when you rez a prim? Just blank this field and future object creation will be pleasantly silent.

• ThrottleBandwidthKPBS - At first, this looks like a way for Second Life to use more bandwidth if you're on a great connection, a so-called "fat pipe", but SL doesn't use most of my bandwidth to begin with if I'm at lower settings like the default max of 1500 Kbps. (via User:Torley_Linden/Debug_Settings)

video quality

• rendertreeLODFactor - for Linden trees

• RenderDynamicLOD - Set it to "FALSE" to reap the benefits. I primarily use this because it makes far-away terrain look more organic and natural. LOD stands for "Level Of Detail". Try going to a place rich in terraformed hills, valleys, and other geographical features and compare.

• RenderFarClip - This is also known as "Draw Distance", but the advantage of setting it here is that you can boost it to extreme numbers like "2048.000" (that's meters, folks!), which will also result a huge performance impact. For laughs, try setting it to something short like "32.000" and you may find an artistic use for the premature clipping. I like setting this real high and moving my camera far above a cityscape to see all the tiny details within. See example.

• RenderUseFarClip - If you set this to "FALSE", performance will decrease because objects past the far clip plane will be drawn. Good to use in combination with a reasonably long draw distance, as it preserves more stuff in the distance. Again, this is worthwhile to experiment with and see what it does for you. I do many of my grand panoramic vistas with this on "FALSE".

• RenderGlowMinLuminance - Lower this to about "0.250" or so to achieve full-scene glow — it looks ethereal and dreamy, like a wedding photo! If highlights get too washed out, go to the Advanced Sky Editor > Lighting tab and lower Gamma to compensate.

• NotifyBoxColor and GroupNotifyBoxColor - Not in love with the blue shade of popup dialogs? You can click the Color swatch for this debug setting to change it. Lowering the Alpha value will make the boxes transparent. Try solid green (RGB of 0, 255, 0) with Alpha = 128 for a sci-fi tinge. And since these are separate values, you can make generic popup dialogs and group Notices different colors!

• NumSessions - How many times have you successfully logged into Second Life? A fun piece of trivia. (This gets reset if you reinstall Second Life and delete your settings file.)

• PieMenuLineWidth - Set it to around "10" for kicks; it'll make the pie menu look like a TIE fighter's front.

• PinTalkViewOpen - Don't like to get into long Instant Message sessions? Ever want to make it so pressing Enter in an IM window automatically closes it and focuses on the inworld chat bar (if it's open). This is the setting for you! Note: this doesn't work quite right on detached IM tabs.

• PlayTypingAnim - Ever want to disable that typing animation and sound that plays every time you start text-chatting? Setting this to FALSE is your answer. Very, very useful — watch the Video Tutorial!

• PrecachingDelay - On a fast network connection? Want to speed up your login time by about 6 seconds? Set this to 0, and it'll show the world sooner; you'll notice the "Precaching..." message will no longer appear on the login progress bar. The downside is you'll see more gray textures and missing attachments upon login, but those would load anyway if you waited around.

• RenderDynamicReflections - Ever wanted to see "real mirrors" in Second Life? This will make shiny objects reflect their environment. Be careful, this is an unsupported graphics feature that will crash some systems, and not work as expected on others. It personally doesn't work well for me.

• RenderFarClip - Instead of using Preferences, this can set your draw distance. What's the advantage? You can make it very near or very far (like 2048 m!). Keep in mind long distances will cause a significant performance drop.

• RenderGlow - "Makes light sources glow." Good for lightsabers, plasma weapons, and other ethereal effects. This will be a standard and supported build parameter as of the WindLight viewer.

• RenderVolumeLODFactor - Increasing this value increases "level of detail" factor far beyond the Objects Mesh Detail slider in Preferences. A good example of how debug settings can help you go to extremes when you need that quality.

• ZoomTime - This has some cinematic usages good for filming machinima with. Set it to 10 seconds, then try to Alt-zoom around. Or go into Mouselook. Higher numbers will make the camera behavior smoother, lower numbers will make it more responsive.

—The preceding unsigned comment was added on 14 April 2011 by Opensource Obscure

Unused Settings

It seems that the following settings have no effect.

• ShowToolBar
• StatsAutoRun
• SnapshotConfigURL ("URL to fetch Snapshot Sharing configuration data from") is set to http://photos.apps.avatarsunited.com/viewer_config (which is useless)

—The preceding unsigned comment was added on 10 April 2011 by Opensource Obscure

Safe Area to Edit?

Since the table is occasionally refreshed I was hoping to find out where the best place would be to add a piece of information.

Specifically, I wanted to clarify the relationship between CacheLocation and NewCacheLocation, with particular emphasis on using this with viewer parameters. Specifically, CacheLocation actually records the current cache location, while NewCacheLocation is used to set a new cache location. Thus, if these values differ, then the contents of CacheLocation are cleared, and caching begins at NewCacheLocation, at which point CacheLocation is updated to match. What this means, is that if you wish to set a custom location using Viewer Parameters then you should set both CacheLocation and NewCacheLocation to the same value, as this will immediately start using the chosen location, without touching the existing cache folder.

Anyway, I'd like to not this somewhere, but I'm not currently certain where the best place would be. Possibly an example under viewer parameters? I may put it there for now in case I forget, but I'd be interested to know, as I feel that the description of CacheLocation and NewCacheLocation should be clarified to better reflect how they interact.
-- Haravikk ^{(talk|contribs)} 09:47, 22 January 2012 (PST)

TextureFetchConcurrency: what does the default value mean?

When your avatar rezes relatively quickly, but everybody else's doesn't, the Firestorm viewer support wiki explains that, in some cases, this might be related to a cheap/slow/outdated/broken router, which might have trouble having too many HTTP connections open through it for fetching textures (and other assets), so it's wiser to set a low setting instead. The suggestion is to change TextureFetchConcurrency to some low value, such as 4, and see if it improves things with rezzing.

I've noticed that the value, by default, is zero, which must mean something like either "unlimited" or "a pre-defined value based on mysteriously obscure statistics we gathered via number-crunching a benchmark run on your own computer, but we're not telling you what it is". Does anyone have an idea what the default actually means?

I'm leaving mine at zero, since I'm using my home NAS as a proxy anyway, and I'm assuming that it knows what it's doing :) (hint: it runs Squid, probably the oldest business-grade HTTP proxy around, which is quite powerful and has a tiny footprint)

— Gwyneth Llewelyn (talk) 13:16, 1 April 2024 (PDT)