Recent SL issues - crashing, sim lock, and clouded avatars.

[Spurs Seattle]

So, I decided to come back to SL after about a year break. I like to do this from time to time, catch up with friends and see what's new.

The first couple weeks were pretty solid, SL was running well and I was enjoying some of the new mesh content. Been running the Firestorm viewer, as I have for quite some time. Was happy enough to actually throw some L into the program and buy some new toys, something that I haven't done in years.

 

The last few days, there have been some major sudden onset issues. I can't fly aircraft out of a sim - I hit the sim edge, lock up and eventually crash.

When I log in, I am a cloud and it takes quite some time for me to show up. Even doing a force rez to test male or female will not alleviate this problem. In addition, upon login none of my friend's names are displayed - there is the online signal and a blank bar. These sometimes come around, but usually I have to click on each one and open an IM to see who it actually is.

On top of all of this, if I try to TP or move out of a sim when I am in cloud state, the program crashes.

I have reinstalled Firestorm three times, and ran the standard LL client with the same exact issues. Would love to hear if anyone knows why this is happening, and if it's going to be fixed. RIght now I think I am better off going back inactive, not much use being here if you can't do anything.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Sounds a lot like network issues on your end to me.. Packet loss or slow connection maybe? Have you run any ping tests or speed tests to rule out network issues? When in world, open help and then "About firestorm" and see what the packetloss reads when online.Should be at the bottom of the help window and looks like =====>  (Packets Lost: 5/117,633 (0.0%)).

[Mora Eldritch]

Which graphics card do you have?

[Spurs Seattle]

Packet loss is fine. I have the same issue on multiple network locations, including the ones that have run just fine the last couple weeks. Again, this issue showed up three days ago, prior to that I was not having any problems. I know that LL was pushing some update to the sims and I think it is far more likely that the update is causing the sim lock - I have heard several other people with the same issue.

 

Although the graphics cards on the machines I use aren't the best in the world, they are good enough to run SL on low settings, which is where I leave them. In the case of the PC that I tested this issue on, the graphics card is more then suffecient.

 

[Mora Eldritch]

I'm asking about the card because I've had serious issues with my ATI card in the past. Is it ATI?

[Rolig Loon]

I agree with Dilbert. It sounds like most of the trouble you're having can probably be traced to network issues on your end.  Try rebooting your router to clear its RAM and see if that helps. 

Depending on where you have been flying recently, you may have also tripped over a server bug. Mesh objects (such as vehicles) cannot physically cross from a region running Havok 2012.1 into a region running an older version of Havok, due to the upgrade to a newer version of the Havok physics engine. Currently (2012-10-17), RC LeTigre is the only channel with the latest Havok upgrade. 

[Mora Eldritch]

Well anyways, if you have an ATI card try turning off VBOs (Vertex Buffer Objects) in the advanced graphic options and see if you still experience these issues.

[Zara Cavalieri]

I can't stay in SL for more than 30 seconds or so before it bombs out. My internet is decent enough and on my PS3 I can download large files very quickly (though it is in the router DMZ).

My graphics card is ATI Radeon HD 3800 Series. I thought maybe i'm bombing out because of maintencance, but every tme I log in there seem to be other people walking around, so I assume that SL is actually working.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but there was little point in re-creating.

[Terrell61309]

Try a different viewer.

[Mora Eldritch]

If you have an ATI card try turning off VBOs (Vertex Buffer Objects) in advanced graphics options. An example of what I'm talking about: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-13849?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Aall-tabpanel

Having VBOs on with my ATI machine causes it to lag terribly and eventually crash/randomly lock.

[Zara Cavalieri]

I've disabled it and it hasn't crashed yet. I'll report back if it does. Thank you.

[Mora Eldritch]

Cool, hope it fixed it for you.

[Zara Cavalieri]

Now I last for about a minute before it locks up and throws me offline. This is after disabling VBO and dropping the graphics to medium. I don't understand; my PC and internet should be more than good enough for this.

[Qie Niangao]

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Zara Cavalieri wrote:

Now I last for about a minute before it locks up and throws me offline. This is after disabling VBO and dropping the graphics to medium. I don't understand; my PC and internet should be more than good enough for this.

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Right, but ATI has a long history of producing very buggy drivers (especially OpenGL), so it's trial-and-error to find which driver version works best with SL on a specific card. Somebody may be able to suggest which to try for yours. (Given AMD's current financial state, we may not expect many more ATI drivers in future, buggy or not.)

To the OPs problem, it certainly does seem network-related for the most part. I'd just throw out there that some data plans on some ISPs start to throttle bandwidth above a certain amount of usage per billing interval, so that could possibly account for things working fine for a while, then getting dramatically worse.

Also, the "sim lock" thing with vehicles repeatedly getting stuck at sim borders might be due to LeTigre RC sims currently running a different level of Havok, which creates a known problem for crossing borders to non-LeTigre sims specifically for Mesh vehicles.

[Zara Cavalieri]

Well I don't have the latest driver for my graphics card, purely because when I updated last my screen went really funny. I think I have some annoying lines or simething (can't really remember) so I downgraded and it fixed it.

I have version 8.8 and it's currently on 12.6, so i'll try updating now and see what happens. Thanks

[Zara Cavalieri]

I updated my graphics card and I still can't last longer than a minute before my client freezes. I don't know what to do about this now; so I just can't ever use SL?