Spheres, Round objects rendering as hexagons.

Okay. First, my specs.

433mhz Celeron. Generic Intel mobo
256mb RAM
20gb HD
GeForce2 64mb Ram, latest drivers as far as I can tell,

I had a texture anomoly on myy pants that seemed to carry across computers and sessions, that freaked me out. The fact that others could see it freaked me out. But that's not the problem.

The thing is, spheres and cylinders, and anything round looks like a hexagon.
I can get a post shots if needed. This didn't happen on this machine until the update the other day.

Is this just my old hardware not being up to snuff, or is there a glitch?

I'd be any amount of money your problem is that your computer is too old and way too under-powered for SL. Frankly, it's a miracle you're able to get it to run at all. Here are the minimum specs you need for SL to run properly:



Your processor is only half as fast as the minimum requirement.

First, the texture issue: A little known fact about what you wear in game is that the actual texture on your body is compiled on your computer using the individual textures that it is made from, and that single texture is then reuploaded into SL. Any problems with your drivers, graphics card, memory, or other portions of your computer that would cause a glitch in this process means that the glitch will be visible to everyone.

Second, the hexagon issue: To save on graphics card processing power, SL uses a level of detail system, where it causes objects to shift betweeen high resolution versions of objects (a perfect sphere/circle/whatever) to lower resolution versions (a hexagon) when you move far enough away (for example, that hexagon looks much like a circle from a great distance away). The point at which this conversion starts taking place is determined mostly by your Object Detail preferences setting. Moving it up will increase the distance objects will appear as high-rez objects.

Or... apparently.... because I'm a dumbass who doesn't check things....

The "Object Detail" slider was turn ALL THE WAY OFF. wtf?

Thanks guys.

I was going to add that Burke as I did the same thing..lol..

If object detail really low, circles become hexagons...good to see I was not the only one to do this! lol

Try givin' your object a slight twist. Probably won't work with a sphere, but should do you good on the cylinders and other variants. Just one click on the twist.

If it's a textured prim, this may or may not work well depending on the texture, but it will render round.

I'm still wondering how you're managing to get it to work on a 433 megahertz...

Simcity 3000 won't even run on a 433....

I'm glad you got it worked out, Burke. I'm still amazed that you can run SL on a 433 Celeron though.

If it'll run on a 433 Celeron, maybe I should try running it on my C64

A C64 eh? Well, in actuallity it is in a certain sense. The PC chip is a collection of 64k proccessors similar to a C64 compacted into a small chip, I can't remember now but there is a large number of them. These make a 486 chip, two 486 chips stuck on one CPU makes a Pentium I. Multiple Pentiums make for Pentium II and up.

Some of the worlds most powerful computers are basically Pentium proccessors connected together by the thousands. I remeber reading the first teraflop (monster number crunching computers) was basically 7000+ Pentium Pro CPU's cobbled together. Today they are stinging together Itainium II CPU's by the thousands to create these mind boggling machines that do 50 trillion calculations per second and now they are stringing these monster machines together to create a 250 teraflop mega monster. Imagine what SL would be like with that much power... might actually be able to dance at a club with 50 av's and hit 10 frames a second.

I can dream, can't I?

Who on earth told you that? It's completely false.
Modern CPU architecture is far more complex than a bunch of older CPUs magically banged together into one.
In fact, it's one hell of a lot more complicated than and completely from older CPUs.
CPUs now sport branch prediction, multiple levels of cache, a RISC core, VLIW, and all sorts of things that make them far faster and more efficient, MHz per MHz, than older ones.
There is some degree of parallelism in modern CPUs, and we're certainly moving towards a multicore, multiprocessing world, but the computing industry is definitely not evolving by naive agglomeration of older technology.
Rather, it has been the discovery of new materials and new manufacturing techniques, coupled with (sometimes drastic) architectural redesign and optimization, that has brought us where we are today.
Here's an amplified image of a CPU's innards, semmingly indicating which part does what:
http://ns1.tt-hardware.com/newsite/img/contenu/processeur01.jpg

Yes, and do this much and you start forcing a ton more polygons to be rendered than are really needed, dropping client-side FPS for everyone.

Yes and local lighting will look a little screwed up on your twisted prim too.

I do try to build considerately... but we cannot coddle people who refuse to get w/ the program

And I'm -trying- to make good use of local lighting... but gee whiz... I gotta relog anytime I go to my house or leave cuz so many people have done it badly.