Intermittent Texture Turning Black

At random points, textures around me will decide that they are supposed to be black.

It's very disconcerting to see half of a person turn a very inhuman matte black when the rest of them is the color of the skin they bought. Funny thing is, it's never more than one texture at a time for me.

With my luck, it's probably my graphics card for which I can't find an update and may not be able to be updated since I'm on an old Aluminum Powerbook.

Ah well. Guess I can lay side bets on which texture is going to turn next.

If you want to experience this new bug (and it is a new bug) in all its glory, go to prefs and change your anisotropic filtering setting.

Oh yes - me an both my siblings have dis problem. All Mac users. Also spoke to Robin Sojourner yesterday, an she's dealing with the same ting on her Mac. Seems purty widespread to me.

What it looks like to me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/marianne-mccann/473569783/

Mari

I'm seeing this too on occasion. I even learned how to force a massive texture jumbling, at least on my laptop... switch from "window" to "full screen", or back again. Much of the world turns black, then random textures get applied to things, and a few minutes later all is back to normal.

I was having fun with it for a while. I got a wicked screen cap of me with black voids where my eyes should be... ZOMBIE AVA!!!

Sadly I didn't click fast enough to get metallic kabuki Ava. But with yet another switch I did manage to texture half the sim with my tie-dye shirt!

I have tried multiple methods of getting this problem to go away or at least happen less often. I haven't had any luck.

It's getting really irritating too.

I'm seeing this as well on my Aluminum PowerBook (Nvidia GeForce FX Go 5200 graphics). Randomly items will turn black or go all test pattern-like and it is very disconcerting to say the least.

And I thought the 1.13 series was a disaster...this is the worst and most widespread mess I've seen since I've been in SL. I just hope they can get a handle on this and soon.

Yup: this is the issue, an sounds very similar to my machine.



I agree: it's amazing how much trouble dis version has been, especially with a lengthy test period an stuff. It's jes a mess.

Mari

imac G5 20" crappy graphics card, and not updateble. thing is, the one thing that fixes this bug, is to downgrade your system software from 10.4 to 10.3.9.....SUX
or, you can open users--->library------>application support----->second life-----> and every single time you want to logg into SL, go into this folder and delete the cache folder, and inside your Avatar named folder (digit_darkes) delete that wierd file called "texture_list_last.xml"

once you do this you can get a whole 20 minutes of flicker free SL. so for me, a clothing and hair maker who mainly depends on Textures, this bug is just wonderful! Instead of taking pictures of my outfits while I wear them, I have to Photomanipulate things in the pictures like my shoes, or belt.

IT SUCKS A$$$$$ BAD

Good luck, because there isnt a solution!
isnt that fantastic!

I'm getting this too. It's always just one texture at once, oddly. Was a little startling while I was talking with someone to see her detailed aqua hair suddenly turn matte black. I get test pattern-type textures popping up where they shouldn't, too.

Tho' I'm on an iBook G4, so I'm probably SOL even if they do fix it someday.

Jira issue MISC-48 is related. If you vote for it there it has more chance of getting fixed quickly. Also add comments to the Issue if you have anything additional which might help.

You will need to log in (using your SL name and passoword) to be able to vote on the JIRA. The vote option is near the bottom of the left-hand navigation pane.

Also, VWR-537 is the specific issue I posted in Jira on this.

Mari

I've been having glitchy/black texturing since 1.13... I sort of forced it into the back of my mind as an "oh they'll fix that soon, nobody can possibly walk around dealing with THIS for very long..."

haha! now it's been what, three weeks? Just tonight I realized that 25% of the textures around me are constantly glitching out / flashing gibberish.

I did some searches in old threads, and I guess last year someone had this issue and found that lowering your graphics card usage from 128 Mb to 64 helped... I did that, and so far no glitching. I'm sure it's hampering my performance in other ways, but my headache is fading.

Also, I have a Mac G5 Quad with 4Gb of RAM, and that thing is / has been totally solid. Also have a friend on a MacBook Pro with 2Gb RAM and he says everything is fine at 256 Mb in the settings... so for some reason 128 is the issue? Seems that way for me, anyway.

*shrugs*

I'm looking to upgrade my iMac very soon and was wondering if there are any particular Mac models that DON'T suffer from this texture flicker? Obviously I don't want to use my hard earned cash and find out I'll still be getting this problem.

I've been bitten by this bug on an aluminum PowerBook G4 and to a much lesser extent on a MacBook Pro. The two have nothing in common other than the Apple logo on the lids and the fact that they're both running OS X 10.4.9.

From what I've read and seen for myself it seems to be older Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 series graphics (used in G5 iMacs, some G4 PowerBooks, first generation Power Mac G5s) that have it the worst. But as I said above I've even had some minor glitches on the MacBook Pro. BTW, I tried turning down the Video RAM pref from 256 to 128 MB and it made no diff on my rig...

Having said all that, I think anything on sale now should be pretty much ok. Thankfully Nvidia put the 5200s out to pasture over a year ago.

turning the video ram down is a TEMP fix for something in your current area that is hogging your frame rate because of a video memory leak. I can find specific places that does this. I'll be going along at 30 FPS then all of a sudden it'll drop down to like 5 FPS. I can change my video memory from 256 down to 128 and POOF it shoots back up to 30FPS... for awhile. I can also just toggle it from 256 to 128 and right back and it keeps working... for awhile. This must be flushing the memory is all i can guess until its clogged back up again. This only happens to me in some areas (that are poorly designed cuz people don't know how to build well performing areas).

as far as newer machines with the bug, I have only noticed a few times that i can get Ground textures in world to be replaced with a screenshot of my desktop randomly when I have my ground textures set to high res. I don't care about ground as i never use it or go anywhere that does, so i leave it on low res anyways.

This doesn't always seem to be the case, however: the location I've been in is largely lag free (an as-of-yet closed island with <3000 prims, no video, and minimal scripts), yet the texture glitch comes up quite frequently there.

Mari

Glad to read this post as I thought my computer was nuts and my graphic card needed an update. I agree that this version of SL is not an improvement by any stretch of the imagination. Not sure if it's any better for PC users but for Mac it's the pits.

is that SL keeps reporting less and less available graphic memory on the iBook G4.

So apparently this is a bug in this version of the client? Good to know that it's not my ibook.

any replies, send to [email]majorjohnsheppard@gmail.com[/email], as I probably won't be back here.