Cool VL Viewer forum

On Virtual Highway we are actively working on instituting and putting in place the new opensim VARs (Variable Sized Regions). They can be set to a number of different SIM sized equivalent regions, but they do not have the SIM crossing problems associated with Mega-regions, because there are no SIM crossings only parcel seperators.
However one problem we do experience is when trying to teleport off the VARs the majority of the time it results in the viewer crashing. Error logs indicate the viewer is not able to clear the data from the VAR when transitioning to another region, be it another VAR or traditional SIM.

Any help or input would be greatly appreciated.

I didn't check in a while, but when I backported the Variable region size support from Singularity, I came across a problem when TPing out VAR regions: sometimes, the regions do not send the region width info to the viewer on teleport, which leads the viewer to make the assumption that the arrival region is just a normal 256m x 256m region, and causes a crash when it's not the case.

The related code is in linden/indra/newview/llviewermessage.cpp, process_teleport_finish() function: look for the _PREHASH_RegionSizeX/Y message fields (if those fields are not transmitted by the region, or contain bogus data, then the viewer will crash). The same problem may also happen on processing an "enable simulator" message sent by a sim, in LLWorld::processEnableSimulator() (linden/indra/newview/llworld.cpp).

Great news, thank you so much. We weren't sure just what it was because some people running a bare bones computer wouldn't crash while others with large core and RAM did, but it wasn't consistent.

Thank you again. Will let you know what happens with ours when we implement the changes.

This could be caused by the fact that on a low-end PCs, the draw distance was probably set smaller than on the high end ones, meaning less (or even no) neighbourhing regions were connected...

I had another look to that "var region" code support (more like a dirty hack, really) and found bugs, one of which is especially dangerous since the last sim to contact the viewer with a "sim enabling" message also sets the regions global width in LLWord, width that is then used in several places, without checking whether it corresponds to the region being dealt with or not !

I fixed that bug (as well as others, such as in the LLWind code) for next releases, but there are still more issues with that hack, such as in the parcel manager, that would probably need some serious auditing and debugging sessions with a joint team of viewer and server coders.

In short, the "var region" support is, in its current state, only guaranteed to work if all regions have the same size on the whole grid (whatever that size)...

That is great information. I'd like to meet up with you in VH one of these mornings, I missed you last 2 days by mere minutes. I'll plan on being in there at 4:00AM game time the rest of this week.

I can't tell whether or when I might come online on your grid (I'm programming the viewer on my sparse free time, when that free time is not devoted to other things).

It'd be great however if you could post here some sim names that use variable regions, because searching for "var region" on your grid yields no result... and OS Grid (my usual testing ground) is down.

I have the authority to offer you and other viewer developers and scriptors, since we know OSGrid is down, the opportunity to come here and use a 4x4 VAR we have setup for test purposes. The 4x4 VAR is called VH Team Works 3 and I will make sure it is available for you to use. If you'd like to try a bigger VAR in the near future I'm sure something can be arranged.
We have been able to fly some military type jets there, but the scripts need a little more tweaking.
VH Team Works 3 VAR will be ready for you to use by the time you read this.

That region is nowhere to be found on Virtual highway. I consequently couldn't test the new code in today's releases.

It must have been shut down. I will make sure it stays up and active for you to use.

I could give it a try today: I could TP without issue from a non-VAR region into "VH Team Works 3" and then from there into another, non-var region (Lost Horizon 2) and back. But on the following attempt to TP out of the VAR region and into yet another non-VAR region (Lost Horizon), the TP timed out and the viewer got disconnected. After reconnecting, I could not TP any more into "VH Team Works 3" (which was probably crashed), all TPs timing out when I tried (but without spurious viewer disconnection).

So, the good news is that my changes in the viewer code did actually fix the crashes that were encountered on TPs from normal to VAR regions and vice versa. The bad news is that the server-side code for VAR regions is still as unstable and unreliable as it used to be...