Category Archives: Problem-Fix

Firestorm TTT – Clean Install 2015

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Hopefully by now you know TTT is Firestorm’s Tool Tip Tuesday. This week Jessica walks people through the process of performing a clean install. First step is backing up your Firestorm Viewer ‘s chat logs and settings.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Gc0dBfVGJ0

None of the steps for a clean install are technically difficult for the intermediate computer user. However, if you are not used to working with files and navigating the hard disk, I suspect you will be in over your head. Copy-Paste, Move, and disk navigation using the Windows File Explorer (and Mac equivalent) are required skills. Continue reading →

Avatar Render Cost 2015-07

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Penny Patton writes about reducing her avatar’s render cost. (See: Draw Weight.) Kay Jiersen picked up on the article and wrote an article too. (See: Render weight best practices for Second Life.) Some time ago I wrote: Second Life Performance: Render Muting, which is about the same subject.

Penny Paton's Example of Dense High ARC Mesh

Penny Patton’s Example of Dense High ARC Mesh

Penny is pointing out there is a bit we can do to change our render cost with only a minimal change in appearance. Kay suspects few people are even aware of the Avatar Render Cost (ARC) feature in the viewer and have no clue they need to do anything. I agree with Kay. But, she goes on to recommend changes to Second Life, which is where I disagree.

Kay made field trips to various places in Second Life where she recorded the ARC values of avatars in the regions. Kay points out that only 81 of 190 (42.6%) avatars would render using a setting of 80,000 for Render Muting. That means 109 or 57.3% of the avatars would not render .

The horrible frame rates (FPS) I am getting have me looking at a new computer and a better video card. But, I actually have little hope that will help FPS in regions populated with 30+ avatars.

On an empirical basis Kay found that jewelry is a major culprit in high ARC.  Continue reading →

Texture Thrashing 2015-04

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CmdrCupcake (Sovereign Engineer) has been looking at texture thrashing. He found what is eating texture memory and leads to textures cycling through rendering to full load sharp images then going blurry and apparently reloading and getting sharp again only to repeat.

House Triggering Texture Thrashing in some video cards.

House Triggering Texture Thrashing in some video cards.

While it was not immediately obvious the addition of CHUI and its addition of avatar icons to the chat discussions seems to be the trigger for the current texture thrashing. These images are loaded into the viewer as UI textures. There are a ton of these textures used for chat, group chat, and friends lists. These chat textures consume memory. Continue reading →

Second Life: Crashing Viewer

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Word is getting around that there is a pre-release version of the viewer for those having a problem getting past the VFS step of viewer launch. It seems it is mostly those using Intel HD graphics chips for their video processor that have the problem.

There is a recommended fix: Viewer 3.7.??-296857. This is a version some lindens and others have mentioned at various times.

The latest possible fix is this viewer: 3.7.??-29????.  This version may be better or worse. The link leads to work-in-progress builds that have yet to be passed through QA. Most of the code has been through QA, but not 100%. But, it will be the latest build in this channel. As I write this, the version is: 297042. As new builds are made this link will automatically update.

I suspect most new users are not familiar with these versions. A couple of years age it was common for SL users to be following these pre-release builds. They have been mostly replaced by Release Candidate (RC) Viewers. In other places the pre-release versions would probably be called the nightly builds. They can solve a specific problem. But, they may also have other issues that make them better or worse than the main viewer.

If you are having a problem this version fixes, there is no reason not to try it. But, don’t expect perfection.

 

Second Life: Group Chat Failures

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No one is sure what is going on in any detail. But, we have seen the group chat for the Mad Pea Blood Letters’ hints (Madpeas) go down a couple of times and the Firestorm Support group. Both groups have been able to send notices to their group’s users advising them of the problem.

The restarts for hardware updates may have been contributing to the problem. No changes are being rolled to the chat servers this week because of the hardware update restarts. Whatever changes are being made to day ARE affecting group chat.

The Madpeas group chat was down late yesterday (11/18). It is still down now (11/19) 3± PM SLT.The Firestorm group is back up now.

Grid Status has made note of the issue:

[Posted 12:10 PM PDT, 18 November 2014] We will be performing additional scheduled maintenance on 19 November at approximately 1:00 AM PST. During this time, some residents may experience login issues and residents in-world may be logged off or experience degraded performance. Additionally, during this time Group Chat may fail. Please refrain from rezzing no-copy objects and making L$ transactions during this maintenance. Please check back here for updates. (Reference)

Second Life: DMCA Abuse – Fight Back

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The Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA is pretty well known and abused in Second Life™. In RL it is also commonly known and abused. The law should be over turned and I expect it would be if it ever made it to the Supreme Court. The law makes people prove their innocence, which is upside down in America and most free market economies. The the reason the law continues to stand is the it favors politicians, big business, and the wealthy. Individuals and small business can’t afford to fight at the Supreme Court level.

Image by: Michael Mandiberg @ Flickr

Image by: Michael Mandiberg @ Flickr

The WordPress organization is fighting the censorship that can be imposed by abuse of DMCA. They wrote about it here: Striking Back Against Censorship. Others are in the fight too. One of those is a company named Automattic. They gained fame when fighting  Janet Jackson’s take down demand. (Reference)  Continue reading →

Second Life Bits 2014-44

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Don't Panic 2014

Don’t Panic 2014

Photographer of The Year Award (Second Life)

This is a contest I had not heard about. It seems to be entering its final stage. The latest information is here: Nominated photographers. The original contest information is here: Rules of the competition. The opening for nomination names was October 22. So, voting for your favorite work and enjoying the results is all that is left.

The thyme is interesting: “I will fight till my last dying breath”.

Texture Thrashing

The Firestorm people have updated their Texture Discard page. Texture Discard is an en error message some see when their video card memory is insufficient. As we fill up video memory others of us see texture thrashing, rendered objects completing render to a nice crisp appearance then going blurry and re-rendering in an endless cycle.

I have a video card with 2gb of video ram. I am occasionally running into texture thrashing. The new Firestorm page has suggestions for reducing this problem. One of the steps is to avoid opening inventory and especially to avoid opening two inventory windows.  Continue reading →

Second Life Problem 2014-39

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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-7343 – iCloud 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. Continue reading →