09-25-2006 01:23
This is a humdinger of a problem.

I used to see this very rarely before the recent updates but now I'm seeing it alot, along the lines of constantly, usually within 10 - 15 minutes of logging in.

Basically what occurs is peoples avatars lose their proportions, its apparently at most times restricted to client side on the viewer. When I see it, other people will report not seeing it.

It also only seems to affect random avatars, some remain normal looking, while others randomly become shorter, denser and more dwarfish looking, if they're wearing prim hair, I can usually tell that their head has increased in general size as well because the avatar skin of their head will be poking out of the prims in several places.

I'm not sure if this is somehow related to occlusion or performance enhancing changes in the last few patches or what...but its really affecting my enjoyment of Second Life....it gets a bit unfun when you're randomly surrounded by ugly dwarfs when you know they don't look like that at all.

I have a Pentium 4 2.6ghz computer with a gigabyte of RAM and a Geforce 6600 GT video card and I more or less run SL with all the detail options on and maxed except for anisotropic filtering because I can't really see what that does for the rendering really.

I've never had this problem in as epidemic a proportion as it seems to be occurring now. Usually if someones avatar went weird, other people would see it, or it would be like a once a day thing. Its now getting to where I have to log out at least once an hour and log back in...and unfortunately that doesn't help at all because within 10 - 15 minutes I've got squished avatars again.

I've attempted clearing cache and relogging, I've also attempted uninstalling SL and reinstalling it totally and I've seen no change in the situation.

Has anyone else been having this problem? Is there any way to fix it? Its making SL really bad for me.

EDIT: Oh and I tried live help sunday afternoon and mostly heard crickets and tumbleweeds so I'm stumped.