1.21 RC0 is available

I've seen many here complaining for differences in FPS from the production viewer.

Please note LL again gave us that very annoying surprise of resetting the graphics defaults while installing the new Release Candidate viewer. Now that's really a disappointing habit, very hatefully welcomed in recent occasions. Its recurring reappearance was never fully explained by the Lindens.

Anyways it's important to notice that the new "default" settings don't apply to the production viewer running in your same computer. My custom settings were slightly pushing quality against performance, in fact I noticed a slight better FPS on the Release Candidate before I changed defaults. Some of you could have chosen to go for better performance, and this could be the reason for the difference you see in FPS now. I'm not telling any of you just forgot to check for that, but it could be true for some of you

So please if you want to compare the FPS of the Release Candidate against the Production Viewer on the same computer, first check the Graphics settings on the viewer's Edit > Preferences to be the same!

For about a year and a half or more, I always had Open GL enabled. I have a Radeon 9800 Pro that has served me well in many major games. I think it was after the forced update that included Atmospheric Shaders, that I could no longer Enable VBO/Open GL without it bringing my framerate to almost a stop and triangles would be all over the place. I usually couldn't get to the Exit in time before a total freeze so would have to Alt Ctrl Del out.

Today after installing this RC, I was surprised to find that Enable VBO was checked already by default. I flew all around my sim and no freezing or triangles and framerate was good. I enabled Atmospheric Shaders and flew around some more and still no problems. Stayed on a few hours just sitting and reading some things and then clicked on Search and immediately crashed. When I got back on, the triangles were everywhere and really bad! I could barely get my mouse to Preferences to uncheck Enable VBO, but I did, and all the triangles went away. I'm still on old ATI drivers because not one of the newer ones past 7.11 have worked for me without freezing me but I still haven't tried the very newest ones and will in the next couple of days.

I'm just wondering why everything worked fine with VBO and even Atmospheric Shaders enabled....until I came back from the crash. I did send in a crash report from crashing on clicking on Search. With VBO disabled, I don't crash clicking on Search.

Anyway, this is a very nice RC, great new features. It runs smoothly for me as long as I don't Enable VBO. Thank you.

Oh by the way, my card has been working with new ATI drivers on other games, but not on SL. To play other games that require newer drivers, I have to uninstall my 7.11's that I use for SL and install the newest that are out at the time. Then to play SL again, I have to uninstall those and reinstall the 7.11's. But like I said....I haven't tried the very newest. I'm hoping they'll fix that and will try them as soon as I'm able.

Went back to 1.20.14 (92115) Jul 14 2008 15:20:29 (Second Life Release Candidate)

Where With the same graphic settings (actually even better Quality) get about 2.5-5 FPS better than this RC.

As well I did not crash, the texture DL was faster on this new RC0 (almost instant compared to the gray I sit in for a while on this client.)

But my commit charge shows a non stop memory leak... from 900 commit charge to 2700 in about 15 minutes.. as well as a memory usage of well over 1,400,000K and about 87% CPU usage.. this is ion a core duo... maybe I will give a shot at setting the core to one and see if that tweaks it like the old First looks did prior to dual core working.

Also, want to add I am very happy about the release key being moved and the tools tab back like it should be, I like the new default chat colors, (I had mine custom almost the same (but kept mine at the same local chat color

The old clent (as above and below), I am at a steady 560,00 mem usage and 38% CPU usage as well the commit charge is steady at 1300 (climbing from about 750 at start and now steady after 45 min.)
Second Life 1.20.14 (92115) Jul 14 2008 15:20:29 (Second Life Release Candidate)


CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (1862 MHz)
Memory: 3070 MB
OS Version: Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2 (Build 2600) (This should be new as of yesterday and XP SP3)
Graphics Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Graphics Card: GeForce 7900 GS/PCI/SSE2
OpenGL Version: 2.1.2
LLMozLib Version: [LLMediaImplLLMozLib] - 2.01.17761 (Mozilla GRE version 1.8.1.13_0000000000)
Packets Lost: 0/41201 (0.0%)

You might want to vote and comment on this Sophie?

Alexa Linden specifically asked this past week if this was still happening to anyone with the newer viewers from when I first reported that problem!

Just a little suggestion for making life easier for novice scripters, in regards to the new prim click detection features. I sugest an additional detection function to link in with the llDetectedST() that has the same similarities as a HTML image map... something along the lines of

llSetDetectedSTareaEvent(vector coord1, vector coord2)

... maybe a little less bulky than that but you get the jist, essentially something that can be used to set a hit zone area and activate a touch event. This is easier to explain to coding novices. ^ ^

If the prim you are touching is a square or rectangle it's like a simple coordinate system:

bottom left <0.0,0.0>
bottom right <1.0,0.0>
top left <0.0,1.0>
top right <1.0,1.0>

It gets a bit more confusing if you use different shapes. I just use a simple script to test touch coordinates first:

default
{
state_entry()
{

}

touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llOwnerSay((string)llDetectedTouchST(0));
}
}

I do love that you can get rid of unneed prims and link messages. This will have a great effect on making sims less laggy.

you have to put the script in a prim/object and edit it there and the box you looking for is on the lower left conner.

yes but setting the actual buttons using that said function that returns coordinates is a little trickier... I found myself having to resort to multiple lists (arrays).

What I'm thinking of is a function that activates an event with the coordinates (same range as stated by yourself) already in place to create the said rectangular hit zone.

Explaining how to set a hit zone based on returned coordinates of a touch event requires ALSO explaining how to script a coordinate lookup method to check the returned coordinates fit within sets of coordinates listed and then activate the appropriate functions as defined within the program...

...before all we had to explain was the touch event. Come to think of it... would probably be better to have it work like a...

TouchArea(<coord1 x,y>,<coord2 x,y>, i)

...event, if it's possible. It's not as advanced as what LL have given us (no cool sliders or whatnot), but it gets the job done for basic menus.

I've noticed with the beta & rc clients keyboard and mouse input seem to have problems.

In a LSL editor window, the text im typing doesn't show up until I've stopped typing for a second or two.
I'm also getting mouse lag when i try to move the camera around.

(EDIT) Turning off "Enhanced pointer precision" in the mouse control panel helped with mouse lag, but it wasn't a problem with the normal client.

(EDIT) The LSL editor lag seems to be related to large scripts. Sometimes its causing crashes as well.

Anyone else notice this? Im using this on a freshly formatted XP SP3 system.

What happened to the beacon higlightning?

Objects appear gray as if their textures haven't loaded

Pls see

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-8876

If i want to hear anything going on in SL through any of the viewers RC or no i have to have the viewer as the only sound source(no other audio programs running) in order to hear it. I was wonder as part of the work on this RC if you could increase the max volume of the viewer. this wold be greatly welcomed by me as i tend to multi-task and enjoy having my local music playing and when i try to adjust the volume controls to be able to hear SL sounds it is verry dificult because they adjust the whole systems sound and with SL having a low voulme it will nearly get muted or not heard over the other sound from the my system. And yes if your wondering i have all volume controls in the viewer at max and it is still not loud enough. the only sounds that have plenty of volume are the voice and streamed music/media.

VERY slow download of my inventory, crashing 4-5 times a day doing nothing special, walking, turning, simple stuff. And from time-to-time not able to rez out objects from my inventory.

LOVE the terraforming improvements.

some of my gestures are not working in the RC but the work just fine in 1.20. And when i try to redo that gesture(change triger or some thing else minor) i get an upload error

Thank you Crystal. I did go there and will report more findings asap.

Hi Rinoa, try this rather:

//
// Very Keynes - August 2008
//
// returns an interger value corresponding to a key matrix, nubered from left to
// right and from top to bottom, when the prim face is touched, in the format ccr,
// therefor a Hexgrid (3x3) will have the following key codes:
//
//  00  10  20
//  01  11	21
//  02  12	22
//

integer cols = 3; // set to number of columns in matrix
integer rows = 3; // Set to number of rows in matrix

integer keypad(vector loc)
{return 10 * llFloor(loc.x * cols) + (rows - llFloor(loc.y * rows) - 1);}

Lists are bad for sims performance and not needed. Within the touch event (touch_start,say) you just check for touched coordinates, ie.:

vector touchPos = llDetectedTouchST(0);

if((touchPos.y<0.09876)&&touchPos.y>0.65437))
{
if((touchPos.x<0.23424)&&touchPos.x>0.0))
{
perform some stuff....
}
}

You would need the coordinates for the corners of the buttons only and check for a vector that is in between. It worked great for me, no more 15 buttons for a stereo. I found a good texture that shows buttons and then defined the button edges. Anyway, good luck. I didn't find it all that hard.

Less than 24 hours and I already had to revert back to the older version. I was crashing more than 4 times an hour.... Just walking, CRASH... Open inventory.. CRASH... and I am one who NEVER crashes... Hoping that these bug is fixed and this isn't what the future will hold for us....

It has ran good for me untill today. I keep crashing off. I will log in & then crash right back offline. Then it might run ok for a while then crash me off.

for a standard square button you could do like this to make your script a bit more readable

// Haven't been tested
rotation button1 = <0.09876,0.23424,0.65437,0.0>;
rotation button2 = <0.09876,0.23424,0.65437,0.0>;

integer checkTouch(vector p, rotation b)
{
if(p.y < b.x && p.y < b.y && p.x > b.z && p.x > b.s) {
return TRUE;
}
else {
return FALSE;
}
}

touch_start(integer num_detected)
{
vector touchPos = llDetectedTouchST(0);

if(checkTouch(touchPos,button1))
{
doStuff();
}
else if(checkTouch(touchPos,button2))
{
doOtherStuff();
}
}

I'm crashing even more than this. This release is very unstable on my XP Pro SP3 system, 3.3MHz, 4 GB RAM. After crashing 3 times in 10 min while working on tidying up my Inventory (rezzing Objects & Taking them back, putting them in different folders, deleting some), I gave up & went back & downloaded & reinstalled 1.20...

Unfortunately, something has now changed & even that is no longer stable. I'm crashing every 5 min or so, & as you can imagine, it's becoming very frustrating.

I look forward to a stable release that will fix whatever 1.21 borked.

Even better would be someone telling me what I need to do to stabilize the viewer now.



Gia

PS: I also noticed that all my sound scripted objects could barely be heard. I had to go in & bump up the volume significantly. Some appeared not to work at all. When I reinstalled 1.20..., these objects worked just fine again... in the brief time I could stay inworld to observe their functions.

strange... I did that for starters... but it only assessed the first y check and ignored the other boundaries... which is why I resorted to lists.

I'll have another shot at it... thankyou ^ ^

I deleted the wrong shortcut. My fault. Hopefully, I was completely wrong about the 1.21 installation borking 1.20.

Hopefully.

I'm the same. Core 2 Duo Mac.

I haven't installed the 1.21 release, yet I've crashed a number of times today using the 1.20 client, so the RC doesn't have anything to do with the problems with the "stable" release.

Well, mixed review on this RC.

It's nice to have the new touch face/position functions; they will help reduce prim counts on input objects.

The slowdown when visiting places with many textures remains. I still see the fast reduction in frame rate, though crashes due to that problem seem less. Of course, now that a number of asserts now cause crashes, it's a little difficult to attribute the existing texture clogging problem with other crashes.

On the 1.24 server, I am find mono is slower overall. The region script load has increased and even mono compiled scripts are turning out slower. Though a compute bound scripts is vastly more efficient, it looks like mono idles at a higher processor load. This is a net negative, sadly.

All this is written up in various JIRA bugs.