Cool VL Viewer forum

OK, I must have touched something I shouldn't have: whatever I do that previously displayed a red tracking arrow - teleport, do an area search, tracking someone, etc… - it just no more does it. The destination is indicated with the beam the usual way, but the red arrow is missing, and if I don't actually see the beam, I don't know where to go… I also noticed that on the map, the dot that indicated the destination when I do an 'About landmark' for example was missing: the proper region is shown, the name of the place appears, but not the destination point for the teleport.
I looked in the debug settings but I just couldn't find the setting that I messed up… And I'd prefer not to do a clean reinstall just for that… Any hint?

Thanks!
- Erika -

No log = no clue...

Finally found the time to get the log. Here is what I did: I logged in, waited for some time, then around 17:01 in the log, I did an area search and double-clicked on a random item. The dialog said it was tracking it, but no red arrow in sight. Then at 17:02 in the log, I opened a landmark and displayed it on the map. Again, no red arrow, and no marker for the actual teleport location on the displayed map.
I also tried to relaunch Cool VL Viewer with a brand new set of settings using the trick you gave me in another post (--settings options on the command line). The settings file didn't exist before, so I started with defaults I guess. I tried, and same thing: no red arrow whatever I do, and no indication of the actual teleport destination on the map for a landmark.
I looked a bit at the log, but really couldn't see anything relevant… I hope you'll have more ideas than I did…

Thank you!

It seems to be a Mac-specific bug... I can't reproduce it here (under either Linux or Windows) and alas can't investigate. There's nothing in the log to give a clue about what happens, but I would bet for a Mac graphics driver bug...

Very strange… Apart from that, everything's working fine. I just tested on Singularity too, and it works: I can see the red arrow giving me the direction on an area search, when showing a LM on the map, etc… And I can see the red destination dot appearing on the world map when I'm showing a LM too… Maybe I'll try a complete reinstall to see if it solves the problem after all.

I think I found the problem... It's a linker (ld) bug !

This week, I spent most of my free time migrating my main system to a newer Linux distribution (I was still using Mandriva 2010.2, which I will keep a while still, as a release-viewer build system, and I'm now migrating to Rosa 2012 Marathon which is very similar to Mandriva 2010.2 but will be supported/maintained till 2017 while Mandriva (and not only 2010.2) is now history).

When I compiled the viewer under this new(er) distro, I found two problems. One was with gcc (v4.6.0), which is buggy and causes OpenJPEG to decode textures in a very wonky way (like if they had "seams"); the solution was just to compile gcc 4.6.4 (which I already had compiled for use with my old distro) and update to it on the new distro.

The second issue seems to be the same as yours: The red tracker arrow and the red beacon are not showing ! In fact, they are "there" (and you should still be able to see the black shadow "behind" the invisible red beacon), but drawn with a black transparent colour (LLColor4(0,0,0,0)). I tracked the issue to be a bad initialization of the gTrackColor global variable which is not properly set on viewer startup (it stays at 0 (black with 100% transparency) instead of being initialized to (opaque) red). That variable is initialized in the llui library, in llui.cpp:
The code is perfectly legit, and should work (like it does when compiled under Windows or on Mandriva 2010.2 and older).

Now, the interesting thing is that only the global variables initialized with LLColor4::red got badly set on viewer startup when compiled on Rosa 2012... Replacing the code with:fixes the issue.

From there, only three possible components could be the cause of this issue: cpp (the C pre-processor), gcc/g++ (the compiler), or ld (the linker). Since I was using the same compiler (and its associated pre-processor) in both cases, it could only be the linker, and replacing Rosa's with Mandriva's indeed also solved the issue !

To summarize:

• Bugs are everywhere, and more often in others' code than in mine...
• While one can do educated guesses about where bugs do exist, it's still risky to bet on it (I lost my bet: it was not a MacOS-X graphics driver bug... for once).
• The work around is easy and will be part of next releases.
• If you can see (part of) the beacon when enabling the "Cheesy beacon" feature (in Advanced -> Rendering), but not the red part, then it is highly probable that the binary you are using is affected by the same bug and was compiled on a system with a buggy ld, i.e GNU ld v2.21.53.0.2 (and perhaps others; ld v2.20.51.0.7, on the other hand, works fine in this respect).

The beacon and arrow are now white in 1.26.12.1 on windows, instead of red. Not a huge bug but I thought I should report. The circles in the World Map window are now white too (the one marking the position on the map, and the ones next to Online Friends, Landmarks, and Region Name). The marker in the mini-map is also white, as a V, /\, and as a circle.

I don't see this problem here: the tracker beacon, arrow and circle are red for me under both Linux and Windows. Are you using a custom skin (I tested the three, built-in skins and they are all fine) ? If yes, then you must add the proper colour settings in the colors_base.xml file of the associated skin directory. The settings are (under the "MAP" section comment):

Thanks, that was it!