Texture troubles

It seems that whenever I am online, my textures keep going mental. There are some textures which turn into a wierd mishmash of rainbow colour. This flickers for a couple of seconds and returns to normal before doing it again. My hair seems to enjoy doing it and so do the wood walls at the hangout.
It doesn't really bother me that much but it is making taking snapshots a nightmare.
Is there any way I can improve this or prevent it from happening. I am not sure whether my graphic settings are wrong or not. I can't tell at the moment because I'm not in world but are there optimum settings for the best effect?
Its only been happening for the past couple of days. I changed my setting for the Greenies Sim and it seems to be since I changed them back.
I don't use windlight.

Sounds ;ike ultra slow rezzing of hi resolution textures. How is your RL internet connection?

Im on 8mb wireless Bband so it should be ok. most of the time im the only one on it and I very rarely browse the net while on SL. It always says i have an excellent connection. The bars in the top right say 0% packet loss most of the time. does that mean anything?
I got quite alarmed last night because at one point the bars said i was only loading 38 of something, but my connection thingie said it was at full strength.

You on a Macintosh?
What version of SL?
What operating system?

From my experience, this is almost always caused by one of two things and sometimes both
- Outdated drivers
- Or you're using Vista (which can still be buggy with certain GPUs).

If you clear cache and it still doesn't clear up, I would look the above.

Is this what it looks like?

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2406

Thats sort of what it looks like.

I've just gone inworld nd cleared my cache and changed settings, it started not just to do rainbow textures but also to use nearby textures in place of grass etc.

Im on windows XP on a hp compaq laptop. SL version: it says 1.14.4(3) on the bottom of my login screen.

How well ventilated is your computer and what type of graphics card do you have? How about your power supply? Weird rainbow graphics issues can be an overload on the graphics card or it could be overheating.

1.14.4(3) is reeeeeeeeeally old. A lot has changed since then. I mean, it's not super ancient, but I would seriously consider updating SL. If you update and find that you hate the new format of the Communication Window, you can update to Nicholaz's viewer which is quite stable and feels exactly like the older stuff. That's at:

http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

This was happening to me last night. My shirt was all rainbow colours. I tried clearing cache and rebaking. No joy.

It corrected itself after about an hour.

I use the Mac client.

Its a laptop so I don't really have much choice about ventilation. Not sure about the type of graphics card until I can check it again. Im pretty sure it has the latest drivers though.


Wierd - I downloaded this onto my laptop a couple of weeks ago from secondlife.com. I've just checked the website and it says 1.18.4.3. I don't know how I managed to get such an old one lol. I'll update it tonight.

Last night it started to try blank black textures instead of my skin lol. The sky was at it as well. Maybe its just the end of the world and only a few people are gifted to be able to see it happen??


No...thought not lol. probably just my comp giving up on me.

I've been getting this on and off since early in the year. It tends to happen for a day or two and then stop for a couple of weeks. It mainly affects me in places with a lot of different textures - texture stores, large clothes shops with many pics of clothes on the walls etc. It nearly always occurs on flat prims placed on other prims - eg the vendor prims on the wall of a shop. The wall will be fine, but the square vendor prims "hanging" on the wall will be flashing rainbows. Any vendor prims not flashing will usually be greyed out and never rez.

I'm almost certain I first saw it after an update, or possibly when one of the early First Look viewers came out, and I think there was some discussion of it on the forums at the time.

I've heard the explanation about it being out of date drivers or a failing graphics card, but I'm dubious that that's the only cause since it has happened to me on three different cards, two of them brand new, and whether I've updated drivers recently doesn't seem to have any effect.
When it first happened I was on XP, but it still happens occassionally on my new vista pc.

My impression is that it is more likely to happen when I've switched on the pc and got straight into SL. Once I've been playing, or the pc has been on, for a while it is less likely to happen, which seems to suggest it's unlikely to be to do with overheating. If it happens in a place, it will not go away, no matter how long I wait, but it will either be there when I TP in, or it won't happen at all.

Doesn't bother me too much because it's fairly rare, and if I TP somewhere else, or just walk outside, things will usually be ok. When I'm having the problem it does seem to be specific to certain places, and if I go there several times in a day I will always have the problem, the next day it will probably be fine. When it's happening though it makes the places it happens completely unusable.

Mornin' Claire

A friend of mine had weird issues a bit like yours with a laptop. She found that keeping it cool solved most of them. SL was litteraly frying her system. I think she used a container of ice cubes initially and then bought a special laptop cooling thingy (can you tell I'm not a tech-head? ). Maybe someone else will chime in with more details.



I´ll put a vote in for trying the Nicholaz viewer Oryx posted about. He has blonde-proof instructions about how to use it and which LL viewer you need for his latest efforts, plus a link to the download in his blog, see below... I tried it for the first time months ago and have never gone back since.

I´m using his BE-s version, which has been the smoothest ride ever. You can find it here along with instructions and such: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/2007/10/release-bleeding-edge-be-s.html. It´s a voice viewer. He also still has a functioning pre-voice viewer on his site (referred to as Old-School or OS), but since he considers the BE-s to be the best one and it has the same look and feel to it as the OS ones, I moved on.



TP please? Don´t wanna miss out

I tried sitting in my fridge with my laptop, but every time I close the door the light goes off and I can't see what I'm typing.

Mine seems to be that the longer I am in, the worse it gets.Or that could just be that I notice it more, because I expect a certain amount of problems when I first load.

You´re supposed to leave the door open

I'll check out the viewer when I get home. I've heard a few people mention it now so its probably a good idea to check it out. now that I think about it, my laptop does get very warm. sometimes you can't touch the bottom its too hot. Its never impacted performance before, but the Second Life uses quite a bit more performance than my usual programs lol. I'll look into ventilation stuff.



hehe, I'll let you know when the time comes. Thought I saw some pictures of the restart of the hangout region last night. They were pretty spooky...


rofl. You must have a big fridge (or you must be tiny), my fridge is a small one so there is no chance of that happening. lol Does your laptop not give out light from the screen?
Have you tried a torch?

Never thought of that lol

"Rainbow Flashing" has been around a little while. I had it bad around v1.14 or 1.15 but it seemed to resolved itself for me for v1.18, although others do still get it.

Because noone else has suggested it on this thread, the normal remedy is given as switching off VBO:

Preferences / Adv Graphics - If "Enable OpenGL VBO" is checked, uncheck it

This certainly worked for me from v1.14 thro' v1.17

See /327/45/199620/1.html for more details and also search the forums for "rainbow flashing" for a number of other threads that discuss it.

Good luck

Force noon ya daft 'aporth!!

Laptops run hot .. and yes, sometimes unbelievably hot. Was it Sobriquet or Alt last night at the hangout who said they had theirs on their lap and were almost getting third degree burns?

The client issue doesn't seen to be very clear cut as to who needs the Nickolaus mods. I think even identical PC specs seem to demand that one user needs the mod, the other not. Textures certainly seem to load and reload and reload again more often for me these days.

Are we forming some kind of Brit Pack here?

A laptop on your lap? That's crazy talk.

I did wonder if he was role-playing

Ouch I've burnt my arm before when carrying it into another room. blisters! You'd think they'd put some kind of health warning on these things lol.

Not exactly a bad thing lol

It's SL, why should we expect the bugs to be the same for all of us? Sometimes think that they have a special department that creates new bugs and new forms of lag for each resident.

The recommendations of the Nicholaz viewer I'd certainly agree with. I still get this issue occassionally, but overall his viewers work more smoothly than the LL ones. The OnRez viewer also seems to be very smooth, but they've mucked with (they'd probably say "simplified" the UI so much I found it hard to use for anything other than just wandering about.

I also think I found that switching off VBO as suggested above helped at times, but when I had this issue earlier this week, nothing helped.

Awww, I can´t play then