Have your Alpha Modes changed to "None"?

[Pamela Galli]

No, in fact the other windows with alpha masking are a variation of the one that kep changing.

[arton Rotaru]

Uploading the same texture again won't help, because for the system this would be just another asset. It won't automatically replace texture X with texture Y, when X is corrupted.

[Pamela Galli]

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arton Rotaru wrote:

Uploading the same texture again won't help, because for the system this would be just another asset. It won't automatically replace texture X with texture Y, when X is corrupted.

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Not automatically, but if I replace the old with the new.

[arton Rotaru]

Oh, I see. Though I don't think the texures are coruppted, because if you change the alpha mode to masking again, the object will work as intended again for weeks, month, maybe forever.

 

The repro Obvious found makes sense actually, that it's some kind of race condition.

[Pamela Galli]

The progress orchestrated by our Whirly in the JIRA looks hopeful, now that the testers have given the devs some helpful information.

[Pamela Galli]

I happened to notice the windows in that same house had turned black again. So as I have before, I replaced it. And all was good for a few minutes, then the windows on that one turned black. I replaced it again and they stayed not black for the few minutes I was there. I will check tomorrow and see what it looks like.

Another new thing I noticed related to alpha textures -- I am on FS -- if an alpha texture, like a shadow, is on 0 alpha blending, it will be solid black. If I turn it to, say, 2, then it looks normal.

[Qie Niangao]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

Another new thing I noticed related to alpha textures -- I am on FS -- if an alpha texture, like a shadow, is on 0 alpha blending, it will be solid black. If I turn it to, say, 2, then it looks normal.

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I checked to see if this is some Firestorm innovation, but you mean alpha masking and the "Mask cutoff" setting, right? If so, that's normal; if it really is some alpha blending setting, then I don't know about it (and I'm not finding it in Firestorm).

[Whirly Fizzle]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

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I checked to see if this is some Firestorm innovation...

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Nope, I'm hoping she means alpha masking!

[Pamela Galli]

I mean when I first apply a shadow texture, it is black. When I turn transparency to any number but 0, it looks normal. 

I will try to reproduce it, these were brand new shadow textures.

[arton Rotaru]

This usually happens if you had an alpha texture on a surface, and the Alpha mode has been set to 'None' for some reason. Manually, by script, or maybe by the bug we are encountering. The surface will remember this setting, and won't revert to alpha mode 'blending' on it's own, when applying a new alpha texture.

Setting the transparency > 0 will set the surface to alpha blending, no matter what the Alpha mode is set to. That's expected behaviour.

[ObviousAltIsObvious]

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Pamela Galli wrote:Another new thing I noticed related to alpha textures -- I am on FS -- if an alpha texture, like a shadow, is on 0 alpha blending, it will be solid black. If I turn it to, say, 2, then it looks normal.

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this is possibly the automatic masking (used to be called fast alpha) feature. try toggling the two Automatic Alpha Masks items under Develop>Rendering and see if that makes a difference.

if toggling that setting makes the solid come and go, then the 1% transparency workaround you used is the one most people use to force blending. you can do this on the texture itself, force a tiny bit of transparency on all pixels, to do about the same.

 

[Pamela Galli]

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arton Rotaru wrote:

This usually happens if you had an alpha texture on a surface, and the Alpha mode has been set to 'None' for some reason. Manually, by script, or maybe by the bug we are encountering. The surface will remember this setting, and won't revert to alpha mode 'blending' on it's own, when applying a new alpha texture.

Setting the transparency > 0 will set the surface to alpha blending, no matter what the Alpha mode is set to. That's expected behaviour.

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I think it may be because I put a no alpha texture on it first. 

[arton Rotaru]

This is how this happens for me.

Rezzing a cube.
Dragging an alpha texture, from inventory, onto the top face, or the thumbnail. (Alpha Mode: blending is set. As expected.)
Now setting the alpha mode to None.
Dragging a non-alpha texture texture onto the top face. (Alpha Mode is still none and greyed out. As expected.) This is an optional step.
Now dragging the alpha texture again onto the top face. (Alpha mode stays at None and no transparency is shown.)

However, if I go to the texture thumbnail in the edit floater, and select the same alpha image from the texture picker, the alpha mode is set to blending and transparency is shown. :matte-motes-confused::matte-motes-dead:

[ChinRey]

With bugs like this, who needs griefers?

 

Edit:

Here's a little script snippet I wrote to fix the issue. Just create add it to a linkset and it should change all faces with alpha mode set to none back to alpha masking. Better make a backup of your build first though since the script have no way of knowing what alpha mode each face actually should have, it jsut assumes everything should be masking.

integer x;
integer y;
integer linksize;
list data;

default
{

state_entry(){
linksize=llGetNumberOfPrims( );
for(x=1;x<=linksize;++x){
for(y=0;y<=8;++y){
data=llGetLinkPrimitiveParams(x,[38,y]);
if(data!=[]){
if(llList2Integer(data,0)==0){
llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast(x,[38,y,2,llList2Integer(data,1)]);
llOwnerSay((string) data);
}
}
}
}
llRemoveInventory(llGetScriptName());
}
}

[Aethelwine]

I don't see any progress on this since February, it really is tiresome.

Three times this week I have had to fix problems around various sims I have things out. In one case the window and security menu on a house had had masking mode turned off causing the textured things you click to turn in to solid colours. It took some time and back and forth to work out this issue was the problem, the same as it regularly is for plants and a megaprim screen I have around one level.

Each time I login now I wonder if there will be something new to fix.

[Qie Niangao]

---

Aethelwine wrote:

I don't see any progress on this since February...

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Well, this jira comment by Whirly in late March suggested a viewer fix is in the works. (I can't actually click through to the bitbucket link there, but that's probably to be expected now that it's been a few weeks.)

It's the single strangest SL bug I've encountered. Even though I think I now (somewhat) understand how it happens, it's still really odd: so intermittent, and the effects so weirdly random that one is never quite sure all the freshly contaminated parts have been found and restored.

[Whirly Fizzle]

I think the fix is lurking in viewer-lion somewhere.

The pull request (which was declined) is still visible https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-lion/pull-requests/28/maint-6139-alpha-masked-textures/activity#

I can't actually find the commit though, so not sure what's going on there.

 

[ChinRey]

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Aethelwine wrote (in April):

I don't see any progress on this since February, it really is tiresome.

---

And now it's August and still no progress.

 

Has anybody heard any news at all about this bug?

[Pamela Galli]

No, but I have not seen the bug manifest itself in several months.

[ChinRey]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

No, but I have not seen the bug manifest itself in several months.

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Actually they may have done some sort of quick-hack patchup fixing the common symptoms rather than the actual problem. The case I had recently was a bit sepcial, I was trying to watch a local texture with alpha while a friend with editing rights to my items was standing right next to me. That didn't work of course.

[Qie Niangao]

 Huh. You know, I hadn't seen this for months, and then just in the last week I saw it twice, in two sims on different continents (one on Zindra and the other the Atoll). The spontaneous change to alpha-mode = None had to have been pretty recent in both cases.

[ChinRey]

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Qie Niangao wrote:

 Huh. You know, I hadn't seen this for months, and then just in the last week I saw it twice, in two sims on different continents (one on Zindra and the other the Atoll). The spontaneous change to alpha-mode = None had to have been pretty recent in both cases.

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 Oh kay, so no fix for this one then.

[Pamela Galli]

Still not seeing a recurrence. 

[MarikSilent]

This bug was hitting our rental in january 2017 for the first time.

Many of our objects, most of them are mesh plants, changed their Alpha Mode to none.

(We had panic, that someone uses an exploit or something. <,<''' ) But finally i found this thread about that bug.

 

At the moment, every 2-3 days the Alpha Mode is set to none on several objects on our rental and it is getting annoying. Especially if the objects are no mod and/ or no copy.

[Pamela Galli]

After a few months of my affected house being fine, it went None the other day again.