Invisible avatars?

I just visited a camping place where some of the avatars (presumably bots) were invisible except for their prim attachments. When I turned on Highlight Transparent, they reappeared as normal, with no highlighting. Can anyone explain this strange behaviour? (of the viewer, that is, not of the bots!).

It is the bots acting funny, 1.23 just reveals what they have been doing all along. Many bot writers didn't bother generating baked avatar textures, instead they left it to everybody else who walked by to suck down the additional bandwidth and do the work locally. Since 1.23 simply gives up if other avatars aren't baked, you will see those bots as permanent clouds, or as random bits of floating hair and attachments if you try to use the old RenderUnloadedAvatar setting.

You will also see some real avatars stuck that way, because the old backup baking system was turned off a little prematurely. The new HTTP texture delivery system coming later in the year should cut down on "real avatar" clouding/Ruthing quite a bit.

advanced menu/debug settings/render unloaded avatar/true.

Sounds right, but why did they reappear instantly (and reversibly) when turning Highlight Transparent on (off)? (The cloud ones stay as clouds).

If highlight transparent worked *and* showed actual baked clothing (not just grey or defaults), that's a bug in the new avatar transparency mask that won't be fully enabled until the next viewer release (and the rendering probably won't be fixed until then either). In that situation (it doesn't affect everyone), what you saw were avatars on the regular viewer or bots that did the right things.

If all that got revealed were grey or default clothes, that's because highlight transparent can tickle enough to force the viewer to fill in some of the missing pieces and they probably are cheesy bots.

Ephraim Kappler roars laughing.

Thank you for that, Viktoria. We have a new phrase for the SL lexicon.