Tuesday(?) during the hubbub of SL 2.0 a new viewer rolled out as the main SL Viewer. Version 3.7.10-291134 is the current viewer, which I mentioned on Monday. While I thought there were  no release notes posted for this version, it is the sorting order that fooled me. 3.7.10 sorts out way ahead of 3.7.9. So, it did not click with me that this was the SL Share RC Viewer being promoted, which it was.

You access the feature when taking a picture. The FB, Twitter, and Flickr buttons are at the bottom of the Snapshot Panel. (Ctrl-Shift-S)

SL11B

If you were using that RC Viewer, you likely did not see an update of your viewer. That is because it was the rest of us that needed an update, not you. 

Since Tuesday’s roll out I find my viewer is not using the Interest List improvements, at least not like it used to. Stuff near me remains unrezzed while I see far away stuff rendering. I also seem to be getting a lot of texture thrashing (textures come in sharp then fuzzy then sharp…) I’m trying to figure out if it is me, the viewer or the region I’m  in.

Textures that render go fuzzy if I look away and take forever to re-sharpen. I think something reverted. Many textures will just not finish rendering unless I move my cursor over them. If I stand still I can watch the texture under my feet sharpen, go blurry, sharpen, blurry….

Switching over to the Firestorm 4.6.5 64-bit these problems are not there. Nearby stuff renders first and stays full rendered. Textures do render slowly, but it stays rendered.

Watching the Texture Panel (Ctrl-Shift-3) in the two viewers the behavior is very different.

So, for now I think it is the new server software and the SL Viewer in combination that are the problem. The only thing I can change is the viewer. So, this morning I cleaned up my SL Viewer installs, removing 2 old versions and some caches I’ve used with various versions and dumped my current cache that had grown to almost 4gb, the limit I had set. I had been wanting to move it to a separate hard drive for a time now.

The clean install seems to have helped… or something changed with SL over night. But, I am still seeing some texture thrashing. Also, after an hour plus exploring SL11B I am finding that some textures are not finishing rezzing. So, it seems cache size probably was not an issue.

Listening to various groups I hear a number of people are having problem with avatars failing to bake and textures not rendering. So, may be this is server side. Time will tell.

PS: I am finding that relogging after an hour of use reduces the problems.