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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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I found the problem... It's a problem which also exists in v2/3 viewers by the way... It relates to the SSE2 skin vectorization (that is disabled by default in LL's viewer, and enabled by default in all Cool VL Viewers). To cure the problem with basic shaders, simply open the debug setting window (Advanced -> Debug settings) and set the VectorizeSkin variable to FALSE. A funny thing to do with viewer 3, is to enable vectorization (set VectorizeEnable to TRUE, then VectorizeSkin to TRUE), then disable the basic shaders... The viewer will stop rendering avatars and even the UI (making it impossible to switch back the settings to FALSE) !... Better making a copy of your settings.xml file before trying this, or you'll have to delete it to be able to use the viewer again... The conclusion is that skin vectorization was broken in mesh viewers and never repaired since... Don't use it. It will be disabled in v1.26.1.1. Note that this also means that's some more FPS lost when compared to the old v1 renderer...
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2011-08-27 20:08:08 |
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Nicolette Lefevre
Joined: 2011-08-27 17:31:05 Posts: 98
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 |  |  |  | Henri Beauchamp wrote: These are all graphic driver issues, some of which might have been worked around in newer renderer (the one in use in v1.26.1.0 is the v2.6-mesh renderer, so v3 may work around more glitches).
I don't have a 2048 pixels wide screen (!) to test the crash issue, but here, everything works like a charm (no crash, no distortion, and the anti-aliasing works just fine). I've got a GTX460-1Gb and I'm running drivers v285.03 under Linux.
Please, also note that you *must* let the application decide of what OpenGL settings it shall use; some drivers allow you to override some settings (anti-aliasing is one of them, but also Anisotropic filtering and "Texture Sharpening" (that last one causes fonts to look blurry when enabled)). Go to your graphic driver control panel, and uncheck all these options, also selecting "Use application settings" (or "Let application decide") everywhere it is available. The same is true with ATI drivers, by the way: their "AI" option is known to cause havoc with OpenGL apps. |  |  |  |  |
I played around with the Nvidia control panel a bit thanks to your suggestion. I already had everything to "application decides" where possible. So I tried forcing anti-alias to enabled instead. And it worked.  Kinda counter-intuitive as anti-alias was enabled in the viewer all the time. But that works now, so I'm not gonna complain.  When running full-screen in 2560x1600 the viewer doesn't crash with deferred rendering like it does when run in a window, but still looks weird. I have attached a screenshot (scaled down to 50% so that it's less than 64kb) of the weird look with shadows enabled. As you can see the image was basically upside-down, but was also warped around in some weird way. And that was in the default camera-view that should simply look over my shoulder.  I tested shadows with Kirsten's S21(9) and with the v3.0.2.239191 beta viewer. Kirsten's looked mostly ok, but had some small rendering errors and the v3 beta viewer had even less errors. I remember that older v2 versions of the official viewer also had severe problems with shadows. So you may be right that it is the v2.6 codebase that is causing my problems. I'm sure you'll work it out at some point. I'm actually impressed that it works so well at this early point.
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2011-08-27 21:58:57 |
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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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If the application fails to set AA and the latter yet works when you force it at the system level, it's a clear sign that something is broken in the drivers... My guess is that the GTX580 is a bit too new to be fully and properly supported (there are always a few months of delay before the drivers get in sync with the newest hardware: Nvidia and ATI are too eager to make people buy their shiny new hardware as soon and as fast as possible to be self-conscious about the driver nightmare it will send their customers into... Bad practice, IMHO !). Yes, you obviously hit a hard coded screen size limit in the rendering pipeline or shaders... Something you could try is to rename the "shaders" sub-directory (in the "app_settings" directory) to "shaders26" then copy the "shaders" sub-directory of viewer 3 in "app_settings", and see how it fares... If anything goes wrong, simply delete the new shaders sub-directory and rename back "shaders26" into "shaders". For now, I'm not too much in a hurry to upgrade the v2.6 render to the v3.0 one... I may do it, later on, but for now v3.0 is known to have issues with many non-Nvidai/ATI chipsets, and looks quite slow when compared to v2.6...
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2011-08-28 10:12:53 |
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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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OK, folks. I got fixes ready for the fast timers and basic shaders issues, and a work around for the random incomplete loading of Meshes. I will publish v1.26.1.1 tomorrow.
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2011-08-28 20:47:12 |
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Holger Gilruth
Joined: 2011-08-29 07:49:23 Posts: 3
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I just want to say thank you very much, even when i hate some usability of the viewer
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2011-08-29 10:28:38 |
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Nicolette Lefevre
Joined: 2011-08-27 17:31:05 Posts: 98
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I tried that with the latest v1.26.1.1. It won't even let me enable shadows then. The checkbox itself is disabled. Looks like LL changed something major with the shaders between v2.6 and v3.0. I'll just have to wait a while for shadows. It's not THAT important for me. Mesh is more important for me, and that seems to work fine now with your workaround. Thanks!
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2011-08-29 18:10:39 |
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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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Yes, they now use different OpenGL extensions, that are alas not available in older OpenGL implementations, meaning v2.8 and later fail to work on some older hardware. That's one of the reason why I chose v2.6 as the renderer to port to the Cool VL Viewer. In your case, the use of the newer extensions might well be the reason why newer viewers do work fine on your (rather uncommon: 2048 wide screen... WOW !) system.
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2011-08-29 18:44:18 |
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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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I found a couple more bugs, one dealing with deferred rendering, during which hover texts and name tags fail to render. Also, I introduced a relatively harmless bug in v1.26.1.1 (causing lots of warnings in the log).
Both bugs have been fixed, and v1.26.1.2 will be released tomorrow.
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2011-08-29 19:55:16 |
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Mondy
Joined: 2010-11-11 06:55:15 Posts: 11
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Here is a vid showing mesh being rendered by Cool VL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbWq2cejI84*huggs* Mondy
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2011-08-30 13:35:46 |
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Henri Beauchamp
Joined: 2009-03-17 18:42:51 Posts: 5912
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OK, folks, I found the bug dealing with partially rezzing meshes and fixed it, making the "Load Meshes At Max LOD" option/workaround useless (well, I'll keep it as an advanced setting nevertheless, because some meshes got really bad low LODs and this option can therefore still be useful for photographers and machimina artists, but it will be disabled by default). Expect a new release very soon.
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2011-09-01 08:17:01 |
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