Texture Thrashing 2015-04

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.

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SL Viewer Updates

Today I logged in to check out a Fab Free sale. There are some great nails on sale at  Nail Me (SLURL).

I had the typical message that an update had been downloaded and the viewer needed to do an install of version 3.7.24 (297623). I decided now was the time. So, I OK’d the update now option. The viewer didn’t log me out. It closed and started the update. But, when I tried to relog I had to wait while the SL system realized I had left, logged me out, and then let me log back in. I would have been really annoyed if I has been in a hurry to get some place.

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Second Life News 2014-51

Servers

The main channel will get a rollout Tuesday. This is a maintenance package that includes:

  • Fixes BUG-7595 Allowed & Blocked experiences persist with parcel owner change after purchase or abandoning.
  • Fixes BUG-7036 Experience based scripts in attached child prims reference their operation by region position instead of root position like non-experience based scripts.
  • BUG-7048 llGetExperienceDetails() returns 4 for state and “operation not permitted” for state message while over mainland parcels that have the experience allowed.
  • BUG-6757 Different error code returned for an Experience that is not permitted to run on a parcel / region OR a user clicked No on the permission request dialog
  • Additional internal Experience Key fixes
  • To find experiences with all unicode names you have to leave the search field blank and page through all results

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Second Life News 2014-50

Server

This Tuesday and Wednesday we will have rollouts to the main and RC channels. The main channel will get a maintenance release running on the RC channels. The main things in this release are:

  • Fixes BUG-7515 Restarting region turns off “block parcel fly over”
  • Fixes BUG-4949 Cannot manage block list with certain object names
  • Fixes BUG-7850 Experience tools: “Script trying to teleport other avatars!” script error appears incorrectly
  • Fixes BUG-6789 Spelling mistake in llGodLikeRezObject
  • Minor server change to help configure the texture and mesh CDN

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Second Life News 2014-49

Servers

There was no roll to the main channel today. No packages were pending in RC.

Blood Letters
Blood Letters

RC Channels

Once again all three channels will get the same package. Wednesday will see a maintenance package roll out to the RC Channels.

  • Fixes BUG-7515 Restarting region turns off “block parcel fly over”
  • Fixes BUG-4949 Cannot manage block list with certain object names
  • Fixes BUG-7850 Experience tools: “Script trying to teleport other avatars!” script error appears incorrectly
  • Fixes BUG-6789 Spelling mistake in llGodLikeRezObject
  • Minor server change to help configure the texture and mesh CDN

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Second Life and LoD

LoD is Level of Detail. It is a term used in 3D modeling to improve performance by reducing the amount of data that has to be rendered. In Second Life™ it seems to be poorly understood and ignored by many. The result is a poorly performing Second Life. This video shows the major problems.

I did not intend to belittle anyone with the video. But, having a ton of poorly rendering mash in a region gave me the extreme example I needed.

Some of Mad Pea’s builds are absolutely gorgeous. But, with a little bit more work they would not have had the LoD failings I was seeing. It may also be that they intended to have the various victims’ business cards be hard to find and they used LoD to make it even harder. I doubt it, but may be… 

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