Problem-Fix – Page 6 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life: How to Fix New Login Problems

2015/04/11 by Nalates Urriah

In general people having a problem logging in or staying logged in have connection problems. But we have a new problem. It seems AISv3 removed the LIMIT on how many items you can have in a folder. Apparently any limit has not been enforced for some time. So, we are starting to see some inventories accumulate enough items to trigger a problem.

As things are now a big flat inventory with thousands of items in a single folder, especially the root folder, is a problem. How fast the computer, network, and region are determines when the problem appears. I don’t know for sure, but logging into an empty region should give one a better chance of getting around the login problem. Hopefully they can stay on long enough to move items into folders.

Second Life: How to Fix CDN Problems

2015/04/01 by Nalates Urriah

Well, this may or may not fix your problem. But, it is a chance to improve things.

System Failure - Survival Horror Game — System Failure – Survival Horror Game by Loverdag, on Flickr

The problem some are seeing is texture and mesh fetching errors, which means regions and/or avatars are failing to render. When that happens things may be odd shaped or never appear and they stay gray. If you look in your Second Life™ log files you’ll find errors like these:

Second Life: RC Troubles

2015/03/31 by Nalates Urriah

The recent RC Server update has brought some problems. You have to have the combination of a viewer without AISv3 updates and be on a RC Channel region; Blue Steel, Magnum, or Tigre. In this case it is any of the three.

The Deploys thread in the forum is getting some chat form those having problems. But, most have yet to figure out whats going wrong. And since it is region specific problem, it is hard to figure out.

Firestorm TTT – Clean Install 2015

2015/03/04 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Avatar Render Cost 2015-07

2015/02/102015/02/09 by Nalates Urriah

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.

Texture Thrashing 2015-04

2015/01/24 by Nalates Urriah

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.

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.