Problem-Fix

Second Life’s New Bake Fail

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Update: 2013-08-26

The Sunshine Project has greatly reduced the number of bake fails users experience. The goal of SSA was to improve the reliability of avatar baking. That goal was met. Remember. It was never believed that the SSA project would solve all avatar baking problems. The process is dependent on many aspects of the viewer, your hardware, your connection to SL (which is NOT the same as your general Internet connection), the state of your inventory, the load on SL inventory systems, and much more.

Odd Bake Fail w/SSA
Odd Bake Fail w/SSA

There was never the possibility of getting all these systems to work perfectly 100% of the time. So, from time to time, we will see bake fail. Way fewer people see tenuous bake fail now.

Problems

The problem where some textures just don’t download also seems to affect the SSA bake. The SSA ovens bakes 3 textures; head, upper body, and lower body. I’ve seen a texture for my upper body refuse to download. The head and lower body rendered quickly. Five minutes later I still had a gray torso. Doing a clothing change solved the problem.

There are reports of people remaining grey even when using the newer viewers. Others usually see them normally. I suspect this happens because the user with the problem has a poor connection to Second Life™, which is very different from having a good general connection to the Internet. 

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Second Life Texture Thrashing

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Second Life™ users have been seeing textures load in blurry and progress toward a new crisp image. That is where things are supposed to stop. But, quit often people are seeing them repeatedly load blurry and re-render to a nice crisp image and then repeat and repeat and repeat…

The video card for some reason is discarding the texture already in memory, and redoing it. Some think the video cache is more than full and just cycling through textures in your field of view.

There are HUD’s that which are known to cause the problem. So, if you are seeing the problem, remove you HUD’s and relog. Then watch to see if it happens again. If not add your HUD’s back 1 by 1. You’ll figure out which HUD triggers the problem, or possibly the sum of a set of HUD’s triggers the problem.

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Second Life JIRA SUN-99

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Since the JIRA is closed to most users browsing the contents it is hard to know what is happening with Second LifeTM bugs. Nor can we easily keep up on bug changes. The SUN-99 problem is hard to explain. So, I’ve tried some of the JIRA’s options to get a copy of the SUN-99 JIRA report.

I have it in a Word Doc file. You can download it here: SUN-99

 

Firestorm Considerations

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The FS Team is working on Materials, Sunshine, and adopting the CHUI to Firestorm. I am sure they would love to see all of those in 4.4.2. But, they aren’t saying what they will be able to do because they haven’t even been able to get all the Lab’s code for these features. The Lab is just not done with it. Things are changing as it is developed. You don’t try to hang pictures in a house before the walls are built.

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1
Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1

The FS Team asked the Lindens if their release of a new viewer requiring a cache clear is loading up the asset server. Monty Linden says the asset system has lots of head room and is not the likely bottle neck. But, the inventory system that tracks what you have in your inventory is near capacity. Consider the inventory an index that deals with permissions and lots of interactions between you and backend systems of SL.

Jessica has explained that people are convinced clearing cache solves every problem and speeds up their viewer. The opposite is true. But, sometimes without a stop watch people cannot get past their subjective impression.

Whatever the case, it looks like the Lab is going to start making plans to look at cache operation. Monty Linden is going to take a look to see how a Firestorm-clear-your-cache release may be affecting the SL servers.

Most of the current inventory problems are with inventory cache, which is not the same as the basic cache. It is possible to clear inventory cache and not clear the basic cache of textures, mesh, and objects. But, it is a clear that has to be done manually.

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SSA Coming Not Too Soon

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No one on the Linden side is saying WHEN we might see SSA (Server Side Appearance baking) roll out. Today at the Server Beta meeting we found one reason it is taking longer than anyone would like. I think the Lindens are ready for SSA to rollout. But, they have to get problems fixed and they have a dandy one.

SSA is in testing on the Preview Grid (ADITI). You can go into Testy Sandbox and Lagland to try it out. But, be warned, read the rest of this article first.

Corrupted Textures
Corrupted Textures

JIRA SUN-74 – Apparent avatar skin and eye texture asset corruption with Server Side Appearance.

This bug is about SSA corrupting textures your avatar is wearing. Skin and eyes are definitely affected. It appears any Mod-OK skin is at risk.

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Second Life Hover

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If you have played with the new avatar Appearance Setting HOVER you may have noticed it is less than ideal. The slider ranges from 0 to 100. At 0 the avatar is lowered 2m. At 50 the avatar is neither lowered nor raised. At 100 the avatar is raised 2m.

Since the sliders are integer settings each setting increment of 1 moves the avatar 4cm (1.6 inches) up or down. If you watch the change from 50 to 49, it looks like it moves more than 4cm to me. (see image below – click to enlarge images)

New Appearance Setting: HOVER
New Appearance Setting: HOVER

I’ve used third party viewers (TPV) to adjust my height and found much better control. But, with the release of SSA (Sever Side Appearance – baking) those adjustments in TPV’s will stop working.

SO… how do we get our height adjusted now? Well, the choice for now is Appearance HOVER. But, what if you only need to adjust 1 or 2 cm?

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