Weird problem with colors and avatar view going wonky

My dad just became an SL member the other day... which is pretty funny in itself. But he was able to get in and come to one of my band's live shows, which was nice seeing as he lives in a different city.

However, he's having some very odd problems running SL, in spite of having a very nice computer (Intel dual core, 4MB RAM, XP) and graphics card (NVidia 7100GS 512MB). He tried to describe the problems to me over the phone and I didn't believe him, because I'd never seen anything like it. But then he send me snapsnots, and he's right: something's very weird!

The first problem is that his camera view seems to default to something completely different from the default. Instead of the camera appearing 5 feet or so behind his avatar as usual, it's right on top of his head. Which makes it rather hard for him to see anything other than his head. He can fix it temporarily using the camera controls, and he can walk forward or backward with his view being normal, but as soon as he tries to turn left or right he ends up with the camera over his head again. Huh?

Second, after he installed the latest viewer and updated his graphics drivers (not sure which caused the problem, but he thinks it was the driver update), his colors are completely nuts. Everything looks like a very brightly colored mosaic. Kinda cool looking actually, but not something he wants to live with forever.

Anybody ever seen either of these problems before and how do we solve them?

4MB of ram? I'd get some more ram...

Sorry, lol, couldn't help it.

Is it possible for you to upload the screenies to imageshack or something? I'm curious about those weird colors you describe...

Yeah, check it out:

http://www.what-the.com/images/secondlife-postcard1.jpg

And here's a shot of the "normal" view he gets... makes it kinda hard to enjoy SL when all you can see is the top of your own head.

http://www.what-the.com/images/secondlife-postcard2.jpg

wow... not totally sure. after the latest update, he probably needed the graphics driver updates. Make sure he tries many graphics settings, disabling everything possible and work up one by one to see if there is any setting that is causing it (including things on the Advanced page).

as for camera stuck on the head, haven't seen that one before... think i'd try a complete uninstall and reinstall, but not sure where else to go from there...

Make sure he is trying different drivers, like from nvidia directly, and not from the video card maker... as they are probably older...

This is a laptop or onboard vid card?,err im guessing its neither ~.~ pci-e card right.

Is he running multiple monitors?, id suggest uninstall vid card drivers, restart, download one thats below 169 since SL has issues with that one (im running 174 right now to see if they fixed it, 169 make shiney surfaces really annoying sometimes)

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_163.75.html
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_174.74.html <not one id recommend yet, but may work better then 169 ones

Thats a pretty wonky screenshots and id go for drivers issue test if i had that.

The camera bug i know about it , but have no clue why it happen or had it happen, so not much help here.

Thanks Thili, no it's not a laptop, and no multiple monitors. I'll have him try "downgrading" the graphics drivers, as I don't think he was having the issue with the colors before he updated them.

The camera bug is really weird, though.

I'm having the same issue with the colors and the weird mosaic thing since I downloaded the new version.

My computer is rather crappy I admit..but I have never seen anything like this before with all of the other various issues I've had with second life.

*scratches head*

Got the same issue now.
Everything working fine using the 163.75 forceware release, updated to 169.x and every texture is reduced to a colorful mosaic.
Tested with 174.74 beta, and still the same issue.

Reverted to 163.75 and it works again.

If anyone could figure out if it's a setting (like when we had the issues with colored prims showing as white on some GeForce cards running on "Performance" instead of quality), that would be great.. as I've noticed a huge improvement in performances with the beta drivers (of course, in other games since SL is unusable this way =P)


For the record:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
2 gb ram
GeForce 6200 AGP 256mb
whatever else.

Regards!
WoLf

Yeah, my dad installed 163.75 and the mosaic effect went away. Strange.

Now if we can just figure out the freakin camera problem.

I had this problem yesterday, here is the quick fix that worked for me.

Go into Preferences, then Graphics, check Custom which will open up more graphics options.
At the bottom you'll see Avatar Rendering, Uncheck Avatar Imposters .... then all the pixelation avatars will look normal.

I hope this helps

So far i been running this and havnt encounterd the shiney bug yet or other wierd stuff, its a pretty new reinstall tho so dont have any old drivers that might bug it up, i rarly ever crash maybe once every 3 days in SL unless i do thing i know will crash it, like... trying to build

nvidia driver 174.74 winxp 64bit

evga 8800gts 640mb / 1920x1200 window mode
c2d6850, 4gig ram,
Asus P5N32-E SLI nForce 680i SLI S775 *
xf-i something soundcard

*seriously avoid this mb if you plan on running 4gig+ ram it has...issues to say it midly.


-- creative soundcards , still an issue --

I used some creative soundcards over the year with SL, sblive,audigy 2 , audigy 4, xf-i, and all of them dont like SL it seems every area with audio/media stream that changes every now and then to a diffrent url, will still randomly flip SL into a crash,creatives driver pretty rock bottom nowadays anyway /point blame.

Can always get url to streams from debug instead, wich i been doing for years to avoid this crash, no i dont like onboard soundcards ~.~.