Windlight 79185 flaws

Hi Lindens!

I want to send you my first impressions from WL 79185. I am running it on linux, in case some problems show up there only. But I think most things should be platform independant.

On the pro side:
- I notice a rather good performance, especially on my rather poor second machine. Not as fast as with all performance problems and memory leaks fixed (see below), but a tad faster than the WL before.
- Nice new widgets for sliders and stuff! Looks fresh in my opinion.
- Bad bug solved where alpha objects went opaque when zooming away while atmospheric shaders were off. Thanks... *phew*

On the Cons side:
- The memory leaks which Nicholaz Beresford fixed in his patches since AGES are still present. Viewer gets blown up while running until it pops. Business as usual.. Very sad, tho... When will you be able to include his fixes? It's getting ridiculous....
- You didn't manage to release the sources at the same time of releasing the binaries, so I am neither able to try to implement fixes for all the well-known flaws, nor to compile the viewer myself for adding mor compiler optimisations. I miss about 30% of speed through that.
Please update the wiki page for source download.
- The Debug Settings dialog is not usable in general. All "true/false" values cannot be switched there. Boy, writing XML by hand is sooooo funny.... *blarg*
- the "Release Keys" Button moved to the left. That's not particularily bad, I heared voices saying it's better there. I don't think so, but that's a matter of taste, so my complaint is: When will I be able to hide the release keys button? Fix is again availiable from Nicholaz since ages. I love the freedom of choice!
- The new media (Audio/Video) Buttons look good. But I don't use neither streaming audio nor video in game. If I have that disabled in preferences, why is the button still there? This is predestinated for being hidden when this is deactivated. Saves valuable space on screen.
- One time I has problems with a script driven menu. The menu should show up when I click a button. This time, the menu popped up again and again and again and again, until I detached the causeing HUD. Couldn't reproduce it yet, so don't want to say much about a bug here.

Edit: Adding more things I noticed
- I see a small glowing spot above my head. As far as I can tell it's no object, so it's no attachment that used to be invisible normally or such. It doesn't go red when highlighting transparent and I can't click or interact with it.
Edit2: It now disappeared automagically....
- Voice automagically turned on despite I had it deactivated in all previous windlight viewers. It kept all settings just this one got overridden.
- (category funny) when setting the sun position quickly, noon now is named "midday" LOL

- something that isn't new to windlight but still present: Some objects in distance are not rendered at all. Might give a performance boost, so might be wanted. But when i zoom in there (not moving my avatar), these objects don't show up either. I _have to_ move the avataer near that to see them. Mostly it's small objects, but at the same time other, even smaller, objects aside them render fine. WTF? What's the rule what's being rendered and what isn't?
If it's wanted because it gains a boost I beg you to:
1: Make it optional
2: make the LOD distance depending on camera position, not on avatar position. Every builder has to go MAD because of this.... When camming near something I want to see all of it.

Okay, thanks for listening. Keep going!

Daniel

Agreed. I don't like that the IM and release-keys buttons appear in fixed positions at all, especially since I usually have the communicator window open anyway, and I prefer to have my avatar's HUD in the bottom-left of the screen.
It would be nice if the IM button could be incorporated into the fancy new Communicate button as a little "IM" icon that appears as a button "segment", click that to view IMs. Then hide release keys in a menu and I'm happy, as I've never found the button useful at all.

However, on a positive note, on the Mac viewer I'm experiencing a good 4-5 fps more than I had before.

Yeah I make sometime mistake with that both button.
And someone have problem with teleport ? When I use my LM sometime teleport are really long and need log off.

Opening the World Map seems to be taking upto 15 seconds too, and during that time the screen is frozen.

Hmmmm cannot reproduce on two machines under linux, tho. Must be something more special....

Ok First the good stuff....... hummmmmm

And now the bad.
1. I dont get a user name password prompt, it just logs in
2. All the text in friends, inventory, chat groups is black on dark grey, cant tell whats selected
3. constant crashes.
4. pauses for 2 minutes every other frame. ok an exaggeration but feels that way. 2 minutes pauses are very common
5. settings are not sticky between sessions (when they last long enough to logout rather than crash)
6. Av tends to drift off into a void. can rotate it but not control it.
7. TP often breaks
8. Too many other small things to mention.


And worst of all, I cant downgrade to the previous (almost working) version. Of course its optional, you can use this buggy version or not use anything.

Mac Pro, 6GB RAM 14 Mbps DSL, fed up and frustrated AV owner.

P.S. Get rid of that dam release button.

You sure that glowing dot above your head isn't just normal one that appears when voice is on?

S

That was a good one! I mentioned I found out that it had voice activated. I never had that on before so I didn't know this dot. After I found that with voice, I switched it off and it was gone. Okay, so tha's intended behavior. Thanks!


Your installation seems to be seriously broken. I'd suggest you uninstall SL, delete the whole SL settings directory including the SL cache and start from scratch....

Daniel

That's not a good suggestion to make. At least one of those things - the menus - is a reported bug with the current Mac Windlight client, so uninstalling and reinstalling the version with the problem with do nothing but cause Gabbi to waste a lot of time.

How about this.... STOP F@$!ing up the damn keyboard shortcuts. First a few builds back in the regular viewer, the IM ones to switch IM tabs were changed to ALT and arrows, but now in this Windlight build, there doesn't seem to be any keyboard shortcut at all. Please, fix this already and stop changing it around constantly.

Hmmm so you think it's not worth a try, because one single flaw is know to be not fixable by that? Can you say something about the constant crashes or other named problems?

He could loose a lot of time you say? Perhaps it's a thing of defining "a lot"? Uninstalling, deleting the settings and installing takes not more than 10 minutes. After that he has a virgin SL installation. After logging in and testing if the crashes and such are gone, he can go to preferences and change everything back to his liking. 3 minutes. If he really wants, he can first save and later restore his chatlogs. another 2 minutes.
So he looses about 15 minutes to try if he can get back a working Windlight viewer.

I won't say if that's too much time for a try, because only Gabbi can tell for himself.

Best,
Daniel

I am glad that they fixed some of those annoying bugs from the preivous update.....but I noticed (once again) two spankin' brand new visual fubars. And I was wondering if anyone else has the same issues.

First, its seems that certain over-laps of two textured prims have the seams visible...even through other objects (and my AV). I'll have to check it out further to see if it only happens in certain lighting.

Second, I went out to screw around and shoot tin cans.......what the hell happened to the cross hairs in mouse view...am I missing something? I know it has been a couple of months since I actually was able to use Windlight (due to crash rate), but has the cross hairs been missing for sometime and I just never noticed?

Hmmmm I never missed the crosshair. Not in the previous windlights, nor in the actual one. Checked it in this second...

Edit: One idea, perhaps you played with the debug settings once and have accidentially disabled this?
Menu "Client" -> "Debug Settings". If you don't see the Client Menu, activate the debug menus with CTRL-D
In the list of debug settings, look for "ShowCrosshairs. If it's set to false, then this is the cause.

If you suffer from the same problem as me, that you can't change the value here, you have to edit your settings file (should be settings_windlight.xml). There this option should be included (because it differs from the default). Edit it with any text editor and change it from FALSE to TRUE.

I saw this too. Not sure why it's happening, but I have a theory I'm going to test...

Actually I tried a complete uninstall before complaining here. I looked at reporting the bugs, but I am not sure where, the only link I could find went to a system that had only 4 or 5 comments about this version and they were all marked as fixed. So in the mean time I send in the crash report every time it crashes (15 times last night!)

btw, its She not he

Gabbi