Fix for Messed-up Appearance Problems

Hi,

I've tracked down the cause of the problems people were having with problems with avatar appearance (e.g. skin matching hair color and having facial hair, shirts rendering weirdly, etc). Since the fix was easy once the problem was found, I made a additional shared library wrapper for Second Life that you can use to fix the problem for yourself until Linden Labs mainlines the fix. All they have to do is add one line of code, which is basically what my fix does at runtime. I've tested this, and it works with the current Linux alpha 1.8.3(9) very nicely. Here's the (tiny) source for the fix, including compilation and usage instructions. This fix only works for the Linux alpha, not for WINE, but it might also work under WINE once LL releases an official version with it included. It's released under the public domain, since it's only a few lines of code and also to avoid any difficulties with LL incorporating it into their official client.

Since attachments are disabled in this forum, you can download it from the site below:

http://techhouse.org/~jimmy/libalphafy.tar.gz

Enjoy!

Best hack ever. I can hardly believe SL wants an 8-bit alpha channel but doesn't ask for it!

I needed this patch to compile:

--- libalphafy/Makefile Sun Feb 12 05:19:21 2006
+++ Makefile    Sun Feb 12 09:43:15 2006
@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 all: libalphafy.so
 
 %.so:  %.o
-       ld -shared -o $@ $< -ldl `sdl-config --libs`
+       gcc -shared -o $@ $< -ldl `sdl-config --libs`
 
 %.o:   %.c
        gcc -fPIC -c $< -D_GNU_SOURCE `sdl-config --cflags`

Fantastic! I was wondering about that, and wanted to get the alpha channel by an entry in .xinitrc, or in .Xresources, or by enabling alpha as default in xorg.conf.

Since SUSE has reinvented the Linux wheel, I am not going to try the patch though. I am no programmer

Don? Are you with us? I think this calls for applause!

Well, I did the patch.

And SL still runs

Now to try my favorite disaster skin again...

--- edit ---

It works!

Don, I hope you are watching

Gentoo amd64 : Had to patch as above to get it to compile, copied the file to the secondlife lib folder, changed my startup line to

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=lib LD_PRELOAD=lib/libalphafy.so bin/secondlife-bin

ERROR: ld.so: object 'lib/libalphafy.so' from LD_PRELOAD cannot be preloaded: ignored

Yay! It works. Thanks tons!!'

(Ubuntu 5.10, NVidia 817

You probably compiled it with as a 64-bit library, but Second Life is a 32-bit program, which can't be mixed with 64-bit code in the same process like this would do. If you have the tools available to compile 32-bit programs, use those to compile libalphafy.so, and then I expect it to work. If not, compile it on a 32-bit machine and transfer it over. Let me know if that still doesn't work.

Doh! Built it on my laptop and it works fine - cheers!

Thanks! this patch worked great for me.

This bug was so annoying! Thanks for figuring this out and making it available-- it works perfectly! I'm a bit of a beginner so I had to read man make to figure out I needed the -f flag. It's funny how you can recognize other Linux SL players by their hair/face color being pegged. I had to go blond to get yellow skin, which was the least horrible looking, but the bushy eyebrows really were too much!

You rock... No longer are we Linux users a mutant race.

This fixes alot of places where the invisibility prim was used for digitalgrade legs (like on some furs). Now, instead of having see-through-everything, just the items wrapped in the invisiblity prim are transparent -- everything else is good!

Does anybody have a binary I could try? Since I'm running the linuxulator, cross compiling is a bit of a pain.

Sure:
http://kcat.strangesoft.net/libalphafy.so
Drop it into your SL dir, and run:
LD_PRELOAD=./libalphafy.so ./secondlife
If it works, you can edit the secondlife script and prepend LD_PRELOAD=./libalphafy.so to the secondlife-bin command line.

OMG it works!!! For the first time, all the clothes adjusters (shirt sleeve length, etc.) work for me, and I'm betting that if I took off my full-opaque custom skin, the normal skin shaders would fiinally work too... I've kind of grown attached to my look by now though.

Compiled without any patching required on Fedora Rawhide.

W00t!

~Orenj~

The sliders seem to work Ok

One side effect I have: on one outfit: every time I go into Appearances, it needs to save my gloves, although I haven't changed anything. At first I was nervous about that, but no visbile damage has occurred

That seems to work! Thanks. SL doesn't complain about not being able to set the alpha channels correctly anymore.

Nice work I can finally wear that Penguin shirt with pride

Thank you! That works under Debian. Finally, I can have proper underpants without having permanently white legs.

and thank you to Jay Lamington for writing the fix!

Worked great on my Gentoo box, thanks!

Thanks for the override, works perfectly on Debian unstable.

I can't seem to get the binary posted above to work on my AMD64 Gentoo box. Maybe I have to bite the bullet and try a cross compilation.

Awsome! Tested and works great!

Sorens,

To force building of an i386 32bit library, you just need to tweak the flags a bit... and you'll need a 32bit libSDL (For Gentoo, emerge emul-linux-x86-sdl). I guess you could link against the one shipped with SecondLife, but to me, this is cleaner.

# libalphafy - A hack to give Second Life on Linux proper alpha channels
# Written February 11, 2006 by Jimmy Kaplowitz <secondlife@pensezbien.org>
# Released under the public domain, although due credit is appreciated

# Added CFLAGS to force 32bit compile on amd64 platform
CFLAGS=-m32 -march=i386 -fPIC
LDFLAGS=-melf_i386 -L/emul/linux/x86/usr/lib

all: libalphafy.so

%.so:   %.o
        ld $(LDFLAGS) -shared -o $@ $< -ldl `sdl-config --libs`

%.o:    %.c
        gcc $(CFLAGS) -c $< -D_GNU_SOURCE `sdl-config --cflags`

tidy:
        rm -f *.o

clean:  tidy
        rm -f *.so

.PHONY: all tidy clean

This is so great! This small patch fixed like everything for me! Resizing clothes now work, I see my avatar finally the way everyone else sees her, and begone, black legs

Great job! This should definitely go into the official distribution.

Is this still needed with 1.8.4.7?

And more importantly once they build this into the client, will this fix interfere with anything?

I just checked, opened 1.8.4.7 without this, and had the same monotone skin & hair thing. So, I'd say, yes, it is still needed.