Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Lette Ponnier has an article up on a bug I haven’t seen. See: Editing Shape Shoves Your Avatar Into the Floor.
The link text pretty much says it. You edit your appearance and suddenly sink into the ground. If this has bit you or you are just curious, follow the link.
I suspect many of us have visited a region and had our FPS (Frames per Second) rate drop to low single digits. Innula Zenovka is managing a region that has the problem and started looking for help figuring out what was wrong with it. I suppose managers like Innula get handed some real messes to deal with.
Innula says her viewer usually runs at about 30 FPS. But, in the problem region it drops to 2 to 3 FPS. I hate it when that happens.
See the thread: Advice, please, on reading consoles and debugging a laggy sim.
There is some good information and tips in the thread.
One tip is to select an item you think may be using a number of large textures. A simple right click on it will do. Then press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T. This will send a series of notifications. You will get a list of the textures used in the item as a list ordered by each object in a link set. The notifications tell you the size of the texture and which face it is applied to.
You can see the result in the image: Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T Read Out.
Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.
The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.
Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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