Question About Graphics

Can anyone help answer a question? The latest viewer worked fine for a while for me but for the past couple of days I've been seeing bright red lines and areas of blue rectangles on my screen in SL. Does anyone have any ideas or experience with this issue? I'd love some suggestions becasue it's really annoying!

Lessa

Try turning off VBO in the preference's graphic settings.

Thanks for the suggestion, Suezanne. I tried but nothing happened. Unfortunately I have a basic account so I don't think I can get much help from LL for this. Maybe if I uninstall and reinstall the viewer?

Different people tend to describe the same problem in very different ways, or someone can describe a problem in a way that makes it look like it's a different problem altogether. For graphics glitches/problems, it's always helpful if everyone else can see what you're seeing on a snapshot .

("How do I insert images in my Second Life Forums posts without using attachments?" - https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=3986 if you don't know how to link one on the forums)

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Would "red and blue smoke/cones" fit your problem? If you walk around, do you see red/blue "smoke" well up from your avie?

If that's the case, make sure "Advanced (or Client) / Show Updates" (it's near the bottom) is unchecked. If it's already unchecked, just leave it be and try to take a snapshot .

(Ctrl-Alt-D to bring up the "debug" menus if you don't currently have a Client/Advanced menu at the top)

/me bets that's it.

The red lines almost sounds like beacons, too. If what Kitty said doesn't solve the problem try ctrl-n, Lessa.

Looking for the answer I gave, I tried a search for rectangles. That didn't produce anything promising, so I converted rectangles to triangles, which led to the VBO comment. I was hurrying so I could be the first to answer. Since I was wrong I guess I lost my points and maybe had some deducted from my score.

If memory serves, one can do a search for "red and blue" or maybe it's "blue shapes" and get led to the "Show Updates" stuff. The advanced search link that appears when you click the forum's Search link gives you more control over your search results, and let's you search for quoted phrases.

A screenshot is good, as Kitty suggested, and it's always good to include some system specs with reports of problems. An easy way to do get some basic system specs without having to copy them by typing is to use Help / About Second Life option in SL. That shows you some system specs and you can highlight and copy them with Control C and paste them into the forums with Control V.

Kitty, thanks for the link but it doesn't seem to work for me. Might be the nasty Vista not wanting to function. I'll try to describe this better.

What I'm seeing are long, red lines along the ground and sometimes randomly in the air. They're not beacons, they're some kind of glitch. On some sims they look almost linear - at first I thought I was seeing some kind of gridlines. But on others they appear in the air or on the ground but broken and not quite straight. Then parts of my screen will appear darker, as if I'm standing behind a slightly opaque blue window. For instance, in my apartment my top half is a different color than my bottom half because of this effect. It's not like an actual window, just an area of discoloration. It's not my screen because I only see this effect in SL.

There's no smoke effect - the lines/discolorations are stationary and don't move even when my AV is moving.

I'm so sorry I can't figure out how to embed a picture. I hope I've explained it with enough detail. It's definitely a weird graphics glitch but I have no idea how to get rid of it!

Oh, Specs,

It's a PC running Vista, quad core processor, 4GB RAM, Nvidia Geforce 7600 graphics card. It's a very robust machine. I've never had any graphics issues before this.

One way to get a screenshot here is to register with Snapzilla, which you can do at slluniverse.com, or slpics.com. Snapzilla is *the* SL picture storage site.

Once registered with Snapzilla you can send a postcard to [email]pics@slpics.com[/email]. Your postcard gets processed by Snapzilla and the subject line and message appear with in a sensible way.

This link, http://forums.secondlife.com/misc.php?do=bbcode, which you can find at the bottom left of the forum displays, gives some information on the vBcode we can use here in the forums to display images and smilies and such.

The User CP link near the top left of the forum display takes you to the foruim's User Control Panel, where you can click on the Edit Options link, which has an option fairly far down the page to let you select the WYSIWYG editor, which enables you to include an image by pasting in the url of the image, without having to remember the vBcode.

For general purpose posting of lots of images on the internet and easily putting them on web sites, for free, I'd recommend Photobucket.com. If you wanted to pay 25 bucks a year then I'd recommend Flickr.com.

Sometimes a video problem like yours is fixed by upgrading to the latest drivers. Other times using an earlier version solves the problem.


You could get a snapshot displayed by sending me a snapshot of the problem at [email]suezanne@gmail.com[/email] and I'll post it here.

Well this is fun - the lines and shaded areas don't show up in the pictures! They are on screen and they appear in the little window that shows the snapshot preview but the photo I end up with looks perfect.

I'm thinking that reinstall is going to be my best option

I really appreciate your offer, Suzeanne. Wish I could have taken you up on it!

You can take a screenshot that probably will show the problem on a normal windows computer by pressing Print Screen, then run Paint, which is in the Accessories folder, and paste in the image. Save the file and then you can email me and include the picture as an attachment.