Second Life Problem 2014-39

Every so often some body somewhere in the world changes something and it messes us up here in Second Life™. Well, there have just been updates to iCloud and it has thrown a kink into mesh and snapshot uploads to SL.

See JIRA item BUG-7343iCloud update causes broken mesh upload, “error encoding snapshot” saving snapshots to inventory, “Couldn’t convert the image to jpeg2000” uploading textures and broken UI colours.

This change affects only Windows users that use iCloud or possibly just have it installed. The update has yet to make it to Mac’s. But, it eventually will. Whether it will create a problem or not is yet to learned.

Symptoms are:

  • Uploading a texture fails with the error “Couldn’t convert the image to jpeg2000”
  • Saving snapshot to inventory fails with the error “Error encoding snapshot”
  • Some user interface colors in the viewer turn black.
  • Mesh uploading is broken

A work-around would be to revert back to a previous version of the iCloud software via system restore and then block that update. (Turn off automatic updates after you restore, run Windows Update and deselect that update – sometimes the makers are insistent and try to force updates. You’ll have to Google for how to override that problem with iCloud.)

The problem is present in the current LL Viewer (3.7.16), Firestorm and Catznip.

This is one of those problems that involves Apple, Microsoft, and Linden Lab so it may be some time until we see a fix.

Unrelated

In another problem…

You may know that avatar and some other render problems are often solved by changing one’s active group. Most of the fix comes from the change forcing an avatar update.

Since the Interesting Changes made it to the viewers it seems changing a group tag just after entering a region causes things to stop rendering. A relog is required to correct the problem.

This is a problem in the UDP packet update stream if I understand correctly. While it is apparently in the Linden Fix-It-List, don’t expect this to changes anytime soon.

2 thoughts on “Second Life Problem 2014-39

  1. Linden won’t get to the “change tags- things don’t render ” Bug for a while?

    They must never be in a group and want a group gift or click a group only Lucky Chair or want to access a group only location or want to rez on group only land Etc etc.

    This is not a tiny problem.

    • It isn’t so much they are not working on it as it is the things that need to change are big changes and complex. Most of the render problems are timing issues with when information arrives at the viewer. It is already sent in the correct order from the servers. Your computer, the Internet, and everything outside of the Lab’s control conspire to mess things up. Andrew’s changes to the Interest List made updating the viewer on an SL regions’s changing environment much more efficient and provides faster renders. But, it is now much more sensitive to timing and data loss issues.

      Monty Linden’s project to improve the viewer to server connection while not specifically started to solve this problem is the solution or at least the foundation for what will be needed to fix it.

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