What are these settings for?

hey...
i have been using the new windlight, and up until the latest update i have had no problems with it (aprat for the fact that i cant use the fancy clouds).
since the new update though, after about 20 mins online i get really weird images on my screen, like coloured geometriacal shapes (assuming it is something to do with my graphics card).

there are some things on the graphic settings that i have no idea what they're for.. i am wondering if these have anything to do wiht my 'graphic spikes'...
could someone please tell me what the follwing things are for on the graphic settings?

avatar imposters
hardware skinning
post process quality

also, has anyone else had the same problem as me with the graphics?
(excsues any typos, literally been awake 10 mins and not quite 'with it' yet)

thankyou for any help anyone can give me

Well, last night I put on my favorite outfit, while I was running Windlight. As I attached my skirt, it would be there for 1 sec and then turn invisable... leaving me naked. I could see it in appearance mode and my inventory told me it was attached, it was just invisable.

I contacted New Citizens group and someone told me there is a bug in Windlight. I would have to re-bake (ctrl+Alt+r) to make some clothing visable. Magically that worked.

Anyways, thats my first exposer to a Windlight bug.

JulieAnne

The shapes you saw sound like avatar imposters (like 2D cut outs of distant avatars to reduce lag) Turn off 'avatar imposters' and the fault shoud disappear.


Often I just skip the 'favourite outfit' stage and turn up naked at events LOL! Nobody seems to mind and it usually gets me noticed!

my avatar imposters are off

i am wondering if it is my graphics card.. mabe it isnt good enough to use windlight.. as it seems to be fine on the normal viewer..

Do they look like triangular shaped "smears" across your screen?...around your avatars head? as if the graphics card is not updating completely perhaps?

I know someone that is having those type of problems with WL...no way to fix them as far as I know. And they don't show up all the time either. Try playing with the graphics control sliders in the custom WL settings.

yep that is it.. they only show up when i am facing certain directions too...

my house mate is a bit of a computer freak, he says it looks liek the garaphic card is having trouble reading the graphics quick enough...
hope that doesnt mean i need a new graophics card for windlight...

thats why i was askign what the other settings are for... i know the other ones so i can alter them...

Take a look at this JIRA entry and the pictures to see if this looks like what you are experiencing.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-3258

Also, are you using an ATI, Radeon video card? If it is this bug you are experiencing, it is common among ATI cards but not unknown to decent Nvidia cards either.

I also have had this problem when using Windlight only.

A workaround for this problem is the following:

Edit->Preferences->Graphics->Hardware Options->Uncheck the box that says 'OpenGL Buffer Vertex Objects'

This will most likely stop the strange vertex stretching (which may be related to invisible prims) ,but notice that you will also see a decrease in frames per second/performance. There is nothing else those of us with affected video cards can do other than this or wait for ATI, Nvidia, or SL to come out with drivers or patches that resolves it.

I actually had something happen where I could not see another avatar that was there, as my friend told me it was.. she saw it.. I saw the bubble but no avatar.. was kinda strange cause another avatar was rambling on and on talking to this person I did not see....

Now im concerned about people spying on me... where is the imposter feature and is it relevent to me?

Also I use NVida 8800... and this was not using windlight

This is another bug that I found with WindLight. You should be able to see there tag if they have it available but the character is invisable. If you know the person is there ask them to re-attach an object. I have the most luck with tell someone to un-attach and re-attach there hair. The avatar become visable again.

JulieAnne

Usually for me if I open their profile then close it they pop back, or if they move.. not always though. Sometimes Ill to toa different sim and back =/

Only the first one, av imposters are wonderful in crowded places, they speed everything up by drawing avatars in the background as flat 2D instead of 3D. However their movements will be much slower as well as looking jaggy. My poor lil' laptop doesn't render windlight features either, but I appreciate that one.

I'm sorry I don't know what the others are either, I have post process quality all the way down assuming it would slow things to have it up. I don't think I even saw hardware skinning, but the new texture memory thingy in hardware I turned all the way up, which seemed to help on the first windlight version.

Thats it!!

Thanks Arcangelo

wooot.. that is waht i was seeing.. ty for that

well thats that problem sorted, now i jsut need to work out what the otehr settings are..

my bf has the same thing, but he is not using windlight.. (he has an old laptop and nothing rezzes for hiim so he has stuck with the normal viewer), do u know how to solve this in the regular viewer?

I can't say for 100% sure, but these sound like "Artifacts." When I played City of Heroes, I began experiencing strange squares of color appearing on my screen. When I contacted CoH's tech support, they told me that it was most likely an "artifact" which occurs when your graphics card is having trouble rendering the 3D environment.

Make sure drivers are up to date, double check that your (or your BF's, in this case) CPU temperature is not too hot, and that there isn't a lot of dust in the case. If none of those is the case, then it may be time to invest in a new graphics card.

Your boyfriend's computer has trouble rezzing textures and objects in the regular viewer? Or does he get the vertex stretching in the regular viewer?

Tell him to go to this link if he has an ATI or Nvidia graphics card in his laptop.

http://secondlife.com/community/drivers.php

From there he can find the most recent driver for his laptop's card. If it is not an ATI or Nvidia graphics card, then I need to know the exact make and model of the graphics card to help him find the most updated drivers for it. Keep in mind that laptops generally do not run Second Life as well as a desktop, and some laptop graphics cards are actually chipsets that are not really meant for 3D gaming. (Intels are bad for laptop graphics, but they will work in some instances)

If you want to know how to shut off the OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects in the regular viewer, I can show you how.

Edit -> Preferences -> Adv. Graphics -> Uncheck the box that says Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects