Yeah, I saw all of the warnings in probably every group that I’m in that Second Life was experiencing rezzing issues today. But I logged in and I rezzed fine, so I thought I must be one of the lucky ones. I was really looking forward to visiting Calas Galadhon so I hopped straight over, not even bothering to change clothes!

Since they only opened today, I was expecting it to be very busy. While there were other people there, with 13 sims to wander around it wasn’t difficult to avoid other visitors. And my plan was to brush up on my landscape photography, so I wasn’t worried about errant avatars popping into my shot.

I fired off a few snaps and then I noticed, for the very first time, the dreaded “# textures discarded due to insufficient memory 1” message at the bottom of my screen. I have read about this problem in blogs, on the Firestorm webpage and I’m aware there is even a JIRA for it, but I hadn’t experienced it myself before. I could click on a foggy texture get it to clear up, so I continued to roam, stopping frequently to take more photos.

After about an hour, I decided to take a look at my photos. And I was appalled to see that they ALL had the “textures discarded” message in 8-16 places all over the pictures! I was so disappointed. I pulled two images and spent AGES cloning and correcting the areas where the text was printed. And that’s as far as I got.

I’ll go back again soon. The Calas Galadhon Park is too lovely to have to distort a single pixel of a photo removing unwanted text. It is a place to just enjoy and capture the beauty of the landscape.

You can keep up to date on happenings at Calas Galadhon by joining their in-world group of following their blog.