What Causes This Rocking in Some Mesh Houses?

[Prokofy Neva]

Some mesh houses I have which I love still have a problem which vexes me -- when you walk through them, your avatar rocks up and down, you seem to jerk forward and the camera goes up out of your control. This is SO annoying.

A possibly related problem with such houses is that while you are sitting there, not even camming around or doing anything, the textures go in and out of focus on you. Annoying!

Anyone who works with a lot of houses (rental agents) knows exactly what I'm talking about.

A house builder told me once that this was a function of how the mesh model is uploaded, and it is some kind of error or some lack of skill in the uploading. This seems odd but I'll take their word for it.

Meanwhile, I'd like to gather more data on this. What causes it? Can it be fixed after the fact?

If you don't know what I'm talking about, IM me and I will show you what I mean in world.

[Whirly Fizzle]

The camera being bumped about in some mesh & sculpty builds is probably the 'push' the simulator applies to your camera to keep it out of objects. I think it's the objects bounding box that pushes the camera, but I'm not 100% sure.

I don't know of any way to stop this without using a TPV.  Most TPVs allow you to turn off that "feature".  On Firestorm the option is "Allow the camera to move without constraints through prims".

The constant blurring & sharpening of textures in certain scenes - "Texture Thrashing" - happens when the viewer has run out of texture memory.
With the love many creators have for slapping 1024 textures on everything from tiny buttons to doorknobs, it's easy to run out of texture memory..
There is no real fix for this apart from to use a TPV that allows you to set a higher value for texture memory, as long as your graphics card has enough available memory.
The LL viewer still limits texture memory to 512 MB.

One thing that may help on the LL viewer is enabling texture compression.
Preferences -> Graphics -> Advanced Settings -> Enable Texture Compression.
Note that the compression is very lossy & you will probably notice textures looking slightly pixelated with this setting enabled.

Someone is likely to suggest that you enable Full Res Textures (TextureLoadFullRes debug setting) to stop texture thrashing.
Don't do it.
While it does "fix" texture thrashing, it will absolutely crucify your viewer performance down to single digits very quickly & on a 32bit viewer you will crash from out of memory very quickly too.

[Chic Aeon]

21 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

The camera being bumped about in some mesh & sculpty builds is probably the 'push' the simulator applies to your camera to keep it out of objects. I think it's the objects bounding box that pushes the camera, but I'm not 100% sure.

I don't know of any way to stop this without using a TPV.  Most TPVs allow you to turn off that "feature".  On Firestorm the option is "Allow the camera to move without constraints through prims".

The constant blurring & sharpening of textures in certain scenes - "Texture Thrashing" - happens when the viewer has run out of texture memory.
With the love many creators have for slapping 1024 textures on everything from tiny buttons to doorknobs, it's easy to run out of texture memory..
There is no real fix for this apart from to use a TPV that allows you to set a higher value for texture memory, as long as your graphics card has enough available memory.
The LL viewer still limits texture memory to 512 MB.

One thing that may help on the LL viewer is enabling texture compression.
Preferences -> Graphics -> Advanced Settings -> Enable Texture Compression.
Note that the compression is very lossy & you will probably notice textures looking slightly pixelated with this setting enabled.

Someone is likely to suggest that you enable Full Res Textures (TextureLoadFullRes debug setting) to stop texture thrashing.
Don't do it.
While it does "fix" texture thrashing, it will absolutely crucify your viewer performance down to single digits very quickly & on a 32bit viewer you will crash from out of memory very quickly too.

Just wanted to say that I am sure many of us are glad you are on the forums since you know MUCH more then most on the intricacies  of viewers and such.

[Prokofy Neva]

@Whirly Fizzle - thank you, that's helpful. I put in my rental regulations that people strive to use only 512 textures, not 1024. But obviously this is hard to police and creators themselves use 1024. I can't really 'afford' to change any of the settings as I don't have the graphics card chops. So I will endure that.

The regular SL viewer has "Disable Camera Constraints" which I have checked. Is that something different than what you are talking about?

I'm not going to use Firestorm viewer -- ever. So if you know of any others that have that turn-off feature let me know. But since I only see this happening in some houses, not all, I guess I will live with it.

But I wonder if I could press further -- IS this in fact a function of how the mesh is uploaded? Why is it on some houses and not others? Putting a prim (and turning it clear) under the floor doesn't change this behaviour.

Edited July 11, 2017 by Prokofy Neva

[Whirly Fizzle]

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

The regular SL viewer has "Disable Camera Constraints" which I have checked. Is that something different than what you are talking about?

That's a different setting.
Disable Camera Constraints just "loosens" the camera so that you can cam further away from your avatar, it doesn't affect the simulator push by objects on the camera.
There is no way to disable that simulator camera push on the camera on the LL viewer unfortunately, not even a debug setting.  It would need a code change to add that feature.

 

6 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

But I wonder if I could press further -- IS this in fact a function of how the mesh is uploaded? Why is it on some houses and not others? Putting a prim (and turning it clear) under the floor doesn't change this behaviour.

I'm not sure what the exact cause of that camera push is.  I think it's the objects bounding box that pushes the camera, but not 100% sure.
This problem is isn't new to mesh though, it happens a lot with sculpty builds too.
I don't know enough about mesh creation to know if it's possible for the creator to change their builds to have a smaller bounding box.

Edited July 11, 2017 by Whirly Fizzle
typo

[Klytyna]

On 11 July 2017 at 4:14 AM, Prokofy Neva said:

Putting a prim (and turning it clear) under the floor doesn't change this behaviour.

That's because your camera isn't normally under the floor when you walk around, but conversely, if you are uszing that downward angle default camera position, walking under a prim bridge can causze your camera to zoom in and out again automatically, or turning around while standing near a wall.

A parcel I know has one of those damn useless 'vote for this sim' stands, rezzed by the edge of the paving, about 8 feet high, and if you are anywhere within about two yards of the bloody thing and turn so it's directly behind you whoops your camera shifts position. This isnt just mesh it's pokey confined 'imersive' builds too, climbing spiral stairs in old old prim castles can do it, depends on the builds, how the prims were tortured, if theres sculpts, etc.