Viewer woes

I can't seem to sort out my viewer situation and wondered which one I should switch to next.

I used the default SL viewer uneventfully, but wanted the lighting options in Windlight. I used Windlight successfully for some time, maybe two months. Just in the last week or two Windlight suddenly became completely unstable. I log on, 5 seconds later it freezes. I was doing all the usual recommended things like clearing the cache. Nothing helped.

So I downloaded Emerald. I like Emerald's features. However it does something neither of the other two viewers ever did. I don't know how to describe this succinctly so I'll give a couple of examples. A friend of mine will teleport in and his pants leg prims won't come with him. He sees them, but they take half an hour to show up for me, and in the meantime he looks like a dork to me...there's no fuzzy cloud like something's trying to rez; he just looks like he left his cuffs off. If he changes his skin I don't see the change. I tried to help him with his shape and I would have to wait ten minutes to see a change happen. Everything I do to my own av I see immediately. It's random, too...he put on a jacket with prims and I saw it instantly.

The worst though was that he and I were testing couple's dance balls in a store and about half of them worked and with the other half one or the other of us appeared to be stuck in place for me while he saw both of us dancing in his default SL viewer. I relogged, cleared cache, on and on, and nothing fixed it. The lag meter showed everything working well, my graphics settings were good....there is no reason I can find for this BS.

I am officially sick of this. What's next, snowglobe??

"Windlight" is a code name for an improvement to sky and water rendering that has been incorporated in the main SL viewer for a long time now. You no longer need a special viewer to use the Windlight environment settings.

I would suggest that the problem is not in your viewer, since it worked OK until recently. Check your internet connection speed...if necessary, reboot your router and DSL or cable modem, as well as your computer.

Also, check to see if there is an update to your video card's drivers. Or, if an update was recently installed, roll back to the previous version.

Thank you for the ideas, Lindal. I guess I was completely confused about Windlight.

I've only had Emerald for a few days and it's acted this way the whole time. Still, I can do the checks you recommend.

My Emerald won't save advanced Sky and Water options. It also takes ages to update peoples' textures when they change them. I always see any prims if that is part of the outfit a full minute or two before the textures change.

Everyone seems to have different experiences depending on their system specs but I've personally found that Snowglobe works the best out of all the viewers I've tried (and I've tried most if not all of them). Here are the dl links fyi: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Snowglobe

I'm personally using the latest 1.3.0 test build but you could try that or the 1.2.4. The test build works great on my machine.

The one weird thing I've been experiencing which I might start a separate thread on is, regardless of viewer, sometimes when I open the map, I see a big spike in bandwidth and then it drops down to zero. I don't usually get logged out as it kicks back in about 30secs later but it also kills my dsl overall. It's really weird and I'm wired into my router and my drivers, firmware blah blah are up to date.

It completely sounds like a video card driver problem. Viewers are update quite often, more so than video card drivers, so when then come out, expect that they're coded to the latest drivers for your video card. It's a good practice to check in with your video card manufacturer whenever you're downloading a new viewer to see if your drivers are up to date. Most of the time web browsers, email, and other more graphically simplistic applications can exist on massively outdated video card drivers, Second Life client software (for obvious reasons) cannot.

Oh and another thing AK, with regards to animations. Animations in SL are "client side" meaning it is being played on your end and not necessarily what everyone else is seeing in-world at that moment. Think of it like two people having the same dvd (animation) at home while chatting on the phone. You want to watch and laugh at the movie with your friend in another city. One person might press play right away while another person might be slow at pressing play or get delayed somehow (lag) so you won't be necessarily seeing the same thing on your screens at the same time. The bits and bobs creator explains it quite well here: http://bits-and-bobs-animations.blogspot.com/2007/10/word-about-animations-and-in-synch-or.html

Bottom line is, for whatever reason, he was downloading the animations faster than you were so was seeing you guys dancing while you seemed "stuck" on your end. It's just like how someone with a souped up machine will have all the textures rezzed quickly in a shop while you're still waiting to see one vendor image appear.

Wow, thank you all for the replies. What's odd is that my friend is running a laptop that normally takes twice as long as my computer to rezz anything. So the idea that he's loading the dances faster than I am is strange.

I will check my drivers.

I am choking now because the default SL viewer is completely reloading my inventory from scratch with every login, even though I have the cache size at max. It's always something, I guess, geez.

Also keep in mind AK that a lot of weirdness has happening on the grid this past week, despite everything being potentially fine on your end. If you're not already aware, keep your eye out in these places to see if there are LL issues: http://status.secondlifegrid.net/ and I also like to look here to see if there are any weird blips in concurrency http://etitsup.com/slstats/ Depending on what your system specs are, some computers may be able to better handle grid weirdness better than others.

Despite being written in 2008, a lot of this 4 page article is still applicable when it comes to tweaking your settings to get the best performance out of the system you have. It will also give you a sense of what is in your control and what is left to the mercy of the LL deities. http://www.massively.com/2008/09/29/massivelys-guide-to-reducing-your-second-life-lag/

Familiarizing yourself with the statistics bar menu will also give you an indication if it's more a problem on your end or with LL. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Statistics_Bar_Guide

Hi AK. What video card are you using, and how much RAM does it have?

Sounds like your machine is having a lot of trouble loading textures. This could be causing your problems with animations, if your network is so busy trying to load textures that anims just aren't getting through very quickly. A quick glance at the texture console will tell you: hit ctrl-shift-3. If there are now a lot of lines of text on your screen, that's the issue; each line of text represents a texture in the scene that hasn't yet downloaded. A fully rezzed scene has just the headers for that console, no lines at all. (Hit the same key combo to make it go away).

It really does sound like something may have changed in your networking. You may want to check your actual available bandwidth at http://www.dslreports.com/speedtest?flash=1

In any case, for me SL's regular released client suxxors in many ways. Emerald has great features, but is slow with the textures; actually, Emerald's latest builds have been so buggy that I use their old pre-jiggle 677 build. Snowglobe loads textures best for me; I use the latest released version.

These are such interesting answers....I really appreciate them. Thanks.

I do not have a good video card. I never did get a new one. I have a geforce 7100. I am used to how SL looks with low graphics settings....it's either that or nothing right now. I did not have trouble with animations or prims not loading at all until Emerald. I am going to do the things recommended here and also get snowglobe.

I can empathize AK as I played SL on a craptastic laptop with an INTEGRATED pseudo graphics card for a long time until Santa brought me a new puter a few weeks ago. My new system is super duper and makes SL a whole new experience but I know that getting a new computer or high end gpu is not always an option for everyone. I did get good with fiddling with settings and learning about where the bottlenecks were coming from. Snowglobe helped A LOT on the crappy laptop, making things somewhat tolerable, and even on my higher end system I notice a big difference in rez time using SG versus any other viewer so definitely give it a go.

Oh, and with Emerald did you check to see that your network bandwidth was set to something reasonable in Edit/Preferences? There was an Emerald bug a while back that initialized it to 50 (ack!) on initial install.
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Yes, mine is an integrated graphics card too. Joshooah you must have been a very good boy last year.

And yes, the network bandwith was actually maxxed as the default.

I am using Snowglobe and my face......will......not........rezz. Everything else has rezzed except that. For minutes now. I can see my face but it's not in sharp focus. I am starting to hit my limit on the viewer idiosyncracies today.

Maxing out your bandwidth might not necessarily be a great idea as you may experience packet loss. You can see if you are by pulling up the statistics menu (ctrl shift 1). Ideally you shouldn't be getting any packet loss at all on a consistent basis (0% is ideal). Think of it like tossing balls of data back and forth between you and LL, if you max out your bandwidth and LL starts hurling balls of data at you, you'll miss some (packet loss) and things will go wonky. Adjust your bandwidth so that you get 0% packet loss on a consistent basis to see if that might help.

I have actually experienced that problem with a few of the viewers over the years. Me relogging or TPing away and back or the person doing Edit Appearance were the only things that would make those damn pant prims come back.

Josh, you just solved my problem. Turning down the bandwidth fixed it. One big virtual smooch to you.....thanks!!!

Woot! Yay!

I will have you know! Not only did that fix the problem, but I have two SLs open and I am dancing with my alt so I can test the dances w/o having to beg other people! WOOT WOOT