Cool VL Viewer forum

Hello Henri and all,

I'm using the latest Mac build of Cool VL Viewer (1.26.2(14)) and I'm getting a problem I never experienced to this extent: For a lot of textures, it seems they go into a loading loop, making things start to appear, then getting fuzzy again, then restarting to appear, and getting fuzzy again, and so on. This happens for textures on objects, but on avatars too: Skins and clothing keep oscillating between OK and fuzzy. I did have this problem before, but it rarely happened, and often in laggy places. Now, I'm getting it everywhere and much more often.
I tried to tweak the 'HTTP texture loading' related preferences, like turning it on or off, or increasing or decreasing the number of attempts, but it didn't seem to solve anything.
Any idea of what's going on here? And any idea on how to solve it? I usually can force something to rezz by zooming on it and staying there for some time, but I can't do that for everything I see…

Thanks!
- Erika -

This can happen when memory gets low... Check the memory indicator on the upper right corner of the window, in the status bar: when it becomes yellow, the viewer starts increasing the "texture bias" to lower the memory consumption by textures, which can cause some mid-range located texture to alternatively blur slightly then load back at full resolution.

The only solution is to increase the available memory (up to 4Gb or RAM: the viewer won't be able to use more since it's a 32 bits program).

If you are curious, you may also enable the Texture console (Advanced -> Consoles -> Texture Console) to see how the bias and the textures evolve.

Well, resurrecting this one: the problem with textures had disappeared for some time, but I had to reset all my graphics settings for some silly reason, and now the problem is back. And the thing is, it's not on 'mid-range located textures' as you said, but sometimes on textures on very near objects, and even when the memory consumption is normal.
I did take a few very short videos to show the problem. The first one shows the very floor I'm standing on (you can see me briefly on the right side at the beginning):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/o2g8vem2z38sbuj/CM%20Movie%201.mov
The second one shows a rock that is right in front of me, in a different region (that's my head you see on the video).
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1q9g50n9sja46im/CM%20Movie%202.mov
And to make it clear, the 3rd one, that does show some mid-range located textures (the wall on the left and the tree in the background), but where you can see the memory consumption indicator is definitely green…
https://www.dropbox.com/s/av7m22pk34ft0vh/CM%20Movie%203.mov
(Don't trust the speed of the videos by the way, it seems it got messed up when I uploaded them. The third one is especially far too quick. The actual 'load loop' speed is more the one shown on the first one.)

The problem is, it happens very often - I could even say almost every time after a tp - and it can go like that for several minutes… So I can zoom on the object to force the texture to load, but as I said in my first post, I can't do that all the time and on everything… But if I actually do zoom on all objects, the textures load, and do not go fuzzy again, even after I have 'force loaded' a lot of other ones, which seems strange for a problem related to memory usage…

There must have been something I tweaked that kind of solved the problem, because it did disappear for some time (not that all textures loaded correctly, it just happened far less often). But I have no idea what it was…

This is due to the OS not releasing properly freed memory (it is more sensible on mid-range systems with 3Gb RAM or less)...

First try lowering the Texture Memory (in Preferences -> Graphics -> Hardware Options). Since you reset your settings, the issue comes probably from there (follow the same advices I gave you the first time, and it will return to the behaviour you got after following them...).

You could also try disabling "Advanced" -> "Memory Management" -> "Memory pools usage checks". If it doesn't cure the problem, try unchecking "Advanced" -> "Memory Management" -> "Enable Private Pool" and restart the viewer.

OK. Well, I have 4GB of RAM, but I guess it's more complicated than that…

Well, actually, I didn't follow your advice the first time since I couldn't understand what I was supposed to do. Apart from buying new physical RAM, I don't think I have any way to increase the RAM for Cool VL Viewer. I also tried to display the texture console, but I didn't really understand what it said.
I did try to lower the texture memory now, but it didn't really have any sensible effect. But since the help text for this option says that by lowering it, textures may get blurry, I tried the opposite and made it higher. And it seems things are better indeed, looks like I'm getting less problems now. I'll try to keep it that way, just to see if it's just a side-effect of something else and if the problem comes back.

Looks like my version is too old for these options: I can't see any 'Memory Management' menu in 'Advanced'… The problem is, I'm on a Mac, so I'm stuck with version 1.26.4(20) for now.

Replying to myself: there was indeed something weird in the setting for the texture memory. The help text says it defaults to the amount of memory in the graphics card. But my card has 512MB, and the texture memory was set to 128MB… I did set it to 512MB and the problem really seems to have disappeared: I'm hardly getting the loading loop at all anymore now. It seems it has a little impact on performance, but it's just a bit more lag while textures are loading, nothing serious.