Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Seems there is a big GOTCHA coming. COF is Current Outfit Folder. It is used by the SSA – Server side Appearance, a service that bakes your avatar appearance. This should end bake fail, blurry avatars.
The COF has been around for a while (early 2012). Long enough for us to know it is often at the heart of inventory problems. What some have not realized is that the folder is also at the heart of login problems. If the COF gets corrupted you often cannot login. You’ll have little clue as to why.
There has been some discussion for a time about how SSA (Server Side Appearance bakeing) has messed up avatar-offset. This is the offset most third party viewers provide that allows you to adjust the distance from your avatar to the ground or a chair when sitting.
Henri Beauchamp and a few others have been asking the Lindens to do something with the problem. It affects lots of pose balls and sit adjusted items in SL. As best I can tell the Lindens see this as a minor problem. So, there has not been a fix, at least not one that works for most people. The worst problems are being fixed, but…
The Firestorm Dev Team has removed the avatar-offset feature from the new 4.4.0 viewer just released. (At least I am told so in FS Support and I can’t find it) Watching the support channel this morning the top two question have to do with ATI users getting black screens (fix) and people asking where the avatar-offset feature was moved to… the answer: OUT.
BUG-204 – Detaching animated object stops sit animation and throws the avi into the air.
Description – Using the same scripts I have used in many other dining sets over almost 5 years, now when I detach a glass or fork containing an eating animation, the sit animation not only stops, but the avi suddenly pops up above the chair, in a seated position.
According to Monty Linden (reference) this and related bugs are being worked on.
Quote: There is work underway on animations and avatars so if anything anomalous is happening; it’s in your best interest to report a bug via Jira. Gather up as much supporting information as you can and follow the outline here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_Tracker
So, if you are seeing problems and have more information, file a JIRA report.
For some months now there has been a problem of some prims not rendering. You can walk into them or on them. But, you cannot see them until you right click on them. With this current server release the problem seems to have gotten worse.
Inara Pey has an article up with more details: Missing” prims: collaboration confirms viewer issue.
She quotes Maestro Linden explaining how to troubleshoot. There are a couple of things in the explanation that will be handy for SL users to know.
If you run the main SL Viewer, Beta Viewer, and/or Dev Viewer, you may run into an additional problem where your cache corrupts. Mesh items can suddenly turn into Vertex Vomit, something sculpties first did. The object looks more like a porcupine than what it is supposed to.
I think I ran into this problem because of using so many viewers. I allowed all the SL Viewers to use the same cache. It looks like that was a mistake. I saw the problem when I changed to the new Mesh Deformer Project Viewer. I doubt that it caused the problem as there could be any number of things that might corrupt the cache. But for now I am making separate caches for the project and development viewers.
Maestro Linden posted in the Deploys thread about a bug they are having trouble reproducing. If you are seeing this behavior file a JIRA with your details and as precise a time for the experience as possible.
The one bug that we’re having trouble reproducing is a bit different:
Aside from not seeing his own avatar move, User-A apparently sees everything else normally (objects appear, other avatars move). We’re not sure why it only affects some users in some locations.
SUN-38 is a bug report in the Second Life™ JIRA. The details of the JIRA item are visible to most SL users, I think. In case not, the title is: As users of kneel/lay/sit animations and tiny/giant avatars, we need a way to change the body size in SSB sims.
The description of the problem is:
In server-side baking regions, it becomes impossible to change your avatar’s apparent size (bounding box X and Y sizes and pelvis to feet length) since the LLAgent::sendAgentSetAppearance() function becomes a NOP.
All TPVs are providing a way to adjust your apparent avatar body size: this is of uttermost importance to adjust the height above the ground for sitting (on ground), kneeling, crouching and laying anims (since those specific anims are sensitive to the pelvis to feet length and changing your shape or shoes affects this length, that, when different from the length the animation was designed for, makes your avatar either float or sink into the ground).
RLV enabled TPVs even provide a way for scripts to adjust automatically this “Z offset” so that any avatar sees the animations played right (see the full story about this feature here: http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=447).
Such a “Z offset” also allows to adjust your avatar’s position for devices you “sit on” and that play a sit animation without letting you adjust its offset (which, again, depends on what shape and shoes your avatar is wearing).
With the appearance of rigged meshes and the tiny or giant avatars, it also became very important to adjust the bounding box (X and Y sizes) for the avatars: a tiny avatar should not bump into obstacles like if its shoulders would be 45cm wide when they are only 15cm, and giant avatars should also have a possibility for their actual shoulder width to be taken into account. Granted, the current (non-SSB) servers do clamp the values sent by the viewers, but at least, there is some possible leeway (and it would be a good occasion to remove that clamping, or at least to allow for a wider range of values).
Being unable to adjust our avatar body size in SSB regions is a MAJOR regression. Please, provide a way to do it !!!
If you only use the SL Viewer, you may not know about the Z-Offset. But, you have seen the reason for it with shoes. When one puts on various shoes they may appear to float above or sink into the floor/ground. This floating/sinking is caused by a combination of how the shoes fit and the size of your avatar.