Problem-Fix

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.

Things Failing to Rez Correctly

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:

• User-A TPs into somewhat busy sim
• User-A sees themselves at landing point
• Other users see User-A at the landing point
• User-A walks around
• Other users see User-A move around
• User-A appears to not move on his viewer (although animations play) – this is the bug

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.

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For some time we have known that some people have been having problems logging into Second Life. The error messages when dug out of the log show DNS problems. Now Monty Linden is looking at the problem. He has posted requesting help in the SL Forum. So, help out folks.

First some explanation: DNS stands for Domain Name System. This is an arrangement of servers across the world that turn ‘domain’ names, like SecondLife.com, into IP Addresses. Just like phone books allow you to look up a name and get a phone number. With the number you can make a call. It is the same with computers. They need that IP Address to make a connection.

Generally your ISP provides you the address of a DNS server. From that server you get all other addresses.

Mac users have had an especially hard time with the problem.

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