Second Life: HUD Bug

Enchanted lady bug
Enchanted lady bug

There is a bug in the new Firestorm 4.7.9 and Second Life 4.0.7. The bug is not much of a problem unless you play in combat games. Whirly Fizzle explains it:

Yep, it’s a bug on Firestorm 4.7.9.

I saw you already found the JIRA issue, but here it is for anyone else having the same problem:http://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/FIRE-19640

Workarounds for this one:

If you are wearing an attachment using llTakeControls, take it off.  That’s the trigger for the bug.

It may not be viable to remove all attachments using llTakeControls though. This bug is mostly annoying combat people who use mouselook a lot & many weapons use llTakeControls in such a way that they will trigger this bug when they exit mouselook.

Switching to the LL viewer is a no go – although it doesn’t have this specific bug, it has a related bug which breaks being able to shoot pretty much all weapons in mouselook when an attachment is worn using llTakeControls or the weapon itself uses llTakeControls – BUG-11602

Best bet honestly is to roll back to 4.7.7 if this bug is annoying you too much. (Reference)

If you are playing a combat game, add your name and information to the JIRA’s.

Project Sansar – August 2016 & January 2017

Jo Yardley covers a recent Ebbe Altberg interview: Ebbe Altberg interview about SL & Sansar which is going public next January. The original is here: Episode 7, Ebbe Altberg, Virtual Reality Snowball Champion.

Jo Yardley - Interview Coverage
Jo Yardley – Interview Coverage

I found two interesting points. In the early testing they ran into problems with users getting dizzy. Recent testing shows they have eliminated that problem. I suspect as people are so different there will still be people that get dizzy or suffer simulator sickness. But, in general people will have a good experience. The author got to visit Sansar and thought very well of the experience.

The other is that there will be a group entering Sansar in August 2016, by invitation, from those that have signed up. Then Sansar will go public in January of 2017.

I suspect I’ll only make it into Sansar in January. But, that is only 5 months or so away.

Listening to the audio I found the interviewer thinks somewhat as I do that for sometime VR is going to be a bit primitive and rough around the edges. Its going to take some time for it all to come to gather.

Nvidia Titan-X Pascal

August 2, 2016 Nvidia released their top of the line video card the Titan-X. There is a previous generation Titan-X. To distinguish between the previous gen and the current generation we have to include the architecture descriptor; Maxwell (previous) or Pascal (new).

How much faster is this Titan-X Pascal than the previous one? Almost twice as fast.

You can see the card is about 30% faster than the GTX1080. 

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Second Life Third Party Dev Meeting 2016 w32

Viewers

The main viewer has updated to version 4.0.7.318301. This was formerly the Maintenance RC Viewer. There are a lot of fixes in this update. Oz Linden points out that work is being done to prevent viewer crashes. This release dropped the crash rate by 4%, which is huge.

One fix in that line is in the image processing. When video memory filled up and there was no way for the viewer to handle the texture… it crashed. Now it will simply skip rendering the texture and color the object gray. 

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Nvidia vs AMD: Serious Problem

In the last 10 minutes or so of the Third Party Developers’ Meeting the problem with AMD video cards problems came up.

It seems especially the R series of video cards (RX480 etc.) have a problem with OpenGL. See: BUG-20057 – Visual Artifacts with ALM enabled on some AMD graphics cards.

AMD Screen Artifact - No Fix
AMD Screen Artifact – No Fix

This bug is dependent on screen size. So, you may be able to escape it by changing your viewer window size or screen resolution.

There is a thread in the AMD forum about the problem. It is way techy. See: OpenGL display artifact on W7100.

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