Cool VL Viewer forum

Hi Henri and everyone,

I ran into a strange oddity with some mesh items from J.H. Couture. I was trying on their demos (free, if you want to check -- Nebo/104/121/23) yesterday, and some items (like their lovely knit dress "Brenda" or the "Ava" suit jacket) would attach, briefly be seen all grey and "poof out of existence" when their texture was applied. Beyond that, even -- the parts of my body covered by the alpha layer then gained sort of an invisiprim quality, making alpha textures behind me disappear. This effect stops when the mesh in question is detached.

The same mesh rezzed "on the floor" will look perfectly fine with the same settings, however, so it's not a general mesh issue. Playing with the rendering options can make it appear (e.g. check Disable Textures, then attaching it, then uncheck Disable Textures again).

Things work well without deferred rendering, it seems (at least for me). I know of one other person who observed a similar effect with Cool (Hi Sarah! ) with a pair of boots I wore that cause no issues for me.

Incidentally (and maybe related or not) ... there also seems to be an issue with old-style invisiprims making things disappear that shouldn't when deferred rendering is on. A prime example are MD ballet boots or old, never updated Bax Ankle boots. On these, the invisiprims seem to also hide part of the shoe's own prims. This, however, will happen attached or rezzed. Mind you, it doesn't happen always, but I will invariably see it on the same shoe models.

(Just experimented and found the reason for the latter: invisiprims, when deferred rendering is enabled, also make solid-textured items invisible if the latter are set to full bright -- and the footwear mentioned above is known to actually have full bright set.)

Any clues?

Love,
Lia

I tried those and can't reproduce the bug here... I guess it might be a video driver bug, but without the full details about your settings (please, read the rules of this forum), and in particular precise repro steps (with full graphic settings description), it's hard to do anything else than a wild guess...

Yes, there seem to be some render pass sorting issue between invisible faces and full bright faces... I'll look into that, but can't make any promise (might have to backport more renderer stuff from v3 to cure that bug, but v3 viewers suffer from many crash bugs with many video drivers, so I'm not too much in a hurry to adopt their buggy code...).

As a rule of thumb, let's say that the deferred rendering stuff is not very well tested: I don't use it myself because of the huge slow down it incurs and the not-so-pretty scenes it gives (I find the colors to be poorer with deferred rendering on, and the scene is usually too dark, especially in indoor places... Not to mention the broken old shinies that make chromes look like lead...).

Hi again Henri and everyone,

just adding a little pointer for the fullbright/invisiprim issue. This is actually on the JIRA (and has been for a while ) as https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SH-2504. Seems Marine ran into that one as well; she left a comment just a month or so ago.

Love,
Lia

Hi again everyone,

on the off chance someone's still interested in the original issue of invisible mesh attachments: it's definitely not just an issue with Cool. This also seems to happen with Firestorm, and not just on a single platform (which makes the driver theory somewhat less likely, I presume). At least that's what some empirical tests are leading me to believe.

Love,
Lia

I do not see any such issue here, and the lack of logs and precise repro steps makes it pretty much impossible for me to guess where it could come from... Plus, if it's not specific to the Cool VL Viewer but also happens with LL's viewers, I'll not bother bug-hunting it and will simply wait for LL to fix it.

Again, deferred rendering is just a "bonus" but should in no way be considered as a stable/well tested feature. The *normal* rendering mode for the Cool VL Viewer is *non-deferred*.

Having the same issue here, finally found out where this 'deferred rendering' thing was, and it's off for me… Here is what I'm doing: I got the demo version for the Wellington boots at Gos/162/166/301, took off all my av's clothes and wore the 'medium' version of the alpha layer and the boot itself. It showed up for a fraction of a second as grey, then disappeared; If I drop the boot on the floor, it appears perfectly.

Any clue on a workaround?


For the record, my full system info is below. My graphics settings are set to the recommended ones without any change (which is 'High', if that means anything).

Cool VL Viewer 1.26.2 (5) Nov 12 2011 16:03:27 (Cool VL Viewer)
Release Notes

Built with GCC version 40001

You are at 463813.2, 306860.6, 79.3 in Mostly Beatrice located at sim9769.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.45.103:13000)
Second Life RC LeTigre 11.12.03.246118
Release Notes

CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9550 @ 2.66GHz (2660 MHz)
Memory: 4096 MB
OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.8 Darwin 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Jul 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT OpenGL Engine
OpenGL Version: 2.0 NVIDIA-1.5.48

libcurl Version: libcurl/7.16.4 OpenSSL/0.9.7l zlib/1.2.3
J2C Decoder Version: KDU
Audio Driver Version: FMOD version 3.750000
Qt Webkit Version: 4.7.1
Packets Lost: 345/102168 (0.3%)

This is not the same issue. Please make sure both the Basic Shaders and Hardware skinning are checked in the Preferences -> Graphics panel. Note that this issue has been solved in v1.26.2.9.

It worked. Great! Thank you!

As for the issue I am observing, I have narrowed it down. It's essentially one of the bazillion alpha issues plaguing the "Shining" rendering engine. If the mesh attachment is textured using a texture with an alpha channel, the effect I described earlier can be observed. The very same mesh attachment with a "plain" texture however will always render fine.

And Henri, just to make this perfectly clear, since you seemed to miss that point the last time: I keep posting these things here mainly for documentation purposes, so that others who just happen to use Cool and come here and observe the same issues will know they are (a) not crazy (b) not alone and possibly/ideally (c) make their own efforts to hunt things down. Very few people can make sense of the JIRA or even know it exists.

Just because something is mentioned here because it was observed in Cool obviously doesn't mean that it is something you did or have to fix, especially not if it's something the Lindens should have done right in the first place, let alone if you can't reproduce the issue.

If you don't want me to do that, just say so and I will refrain from doing so in the future.

Love,
Lia

Please, see the rules for this forum: what I want is clearly stated there...