Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello!

I noticed a weird bug in the 1.32.1 version of the viewer that I can't quite express with words, so I took a picture:

With PBR off, water looks normal:


It doesn't happen in the 1.32.0 series. I noticed it on 1.32.1.8, but I logged in with .7 too and it's there. I don't keep earlier versions, so I can't test more back.

I don't know if it's a known bug, so I just report it.

Also, about the water reflections, I noticed this. Initially, if you have PBR on, they don't show. If you change from the sim's default environment to Midday (PBR), they still don't show. But if you change to Midday (non-PBR), they show and then, if you back to Midday (PBR), they still show. Then, if you change to the parcel's environment, they stop again.

I cannot reproduce this issue here... This might be an OpenGL driver issue...

Can you reproduce this with LL's latest release viewer (which uses the same "featurette" shaders; run it under Wine, so that it uses the same Linux OpenGL driver) ?

As for the reflections, make sure to move your camera after switching the environment settings, so to force a refresh (they are refreshed only every few seconds otherwise); also, for the parcel environment, if the lighting is dark (e.g. at night), they won't be much left to reflect, so it might be normal you do not see them... Finally, make sure to keep the bogus "Screen space reflections" feature off (in the Advanced -> Rendering -> Deferred rendering menu): they cause moires on the water surface.

Indeed, the bug appears at the LL viewer too. (And now that I found your hack for using it with wine, I will in order to test before I report.)

So I guess I'll wait for Mesa to update, because I can't exactly report the bug to LL.
Interestingly, the LL viewer shows reflections of objects and avatars on water with the shared parcel environment (same sim as yesterday), despite the issue.

Or rather find an older version that does not have this bug...
You could (they kind of changed their stance about Linux and are making slow progress towards a Linux official viewer), but it would be best to report the bug to Mesa developers instead, since Mesa is clearly the culprit here...

Water surface reflections never show for me (no reflection at all beside the sky and clouds, be it with LL's viewer or any other PBR viewer), but it might be because of a PBR shader and/or render pipeline issue with NVIDIA drivers...

It is the same for me with PBR enabled. My system is also using an Nvidia card/drivers. WIthout PBR and avatars and objects selected, I do get them.

Well, in theory, the "screen space reflections" feature should allow to see objects, avatars, etc, but it does not work at all (at least for NVIDIA), and also causes moires patterns on water (for all GPUs/drivers).

EE/WL got a much more elaborate (but also much more costly) water reflections rendering code (which also taxes a lot the PC on the CPU side), and PBR was not supposed to provide an equivalent anyway... Yet, I wish PBR would at least provide terrain reflections (which would be close to what we got with "terrain & trees" in the EE renderer)...

I found a temporary workaround. If I turn the shadows off ("no shadows"), then the parasites (I don't know how to call them!) disappear, then I turn shadows to "sun and moon shadows only" and then raise it to "all shadows", the… thingies disappear and don't reappear for the duration of the session.

Interesting...
Maybe some (first time) bogus render target buffer allocation (wrong format ?) in the OpenGL driver.

You should really try and report this bug to Mesa's folks (point them to this thread).

It still leaves a "remainder" behind though, when I zoom out a lot:

Yes, I know I must. Yesterday's update on mesa to 24.0.9 didn't help.

Well, the current version is v24.1.1, but as long as the Mesa developers will not be made aware of this bug, the highest probability is that it will not get fixed (unless it also affects another software and they got a bug report for it)...