Please fix the SL servers they make random mistakes in the alpha mode for textures after restart for years and years.

[DNArt]

Hi LL every now and than after a sim restart the server messes up the alpha mode of some of the textures. its either set to none or the wrong blending type. since it takes a sim now longer to load all textures assets etc (at leased for me since the move to the cloud)  it means each time after restart i have to wait and wait long to check which group of trees or whatever decals etc are effected if any that is.    a guess would on be  it happens like 8 to 9 times a year to me and of course now 2 weeks in a row    but its a real pain to correct and cost hours on the whole sim to fix and check. specially the decals under other decals etc well you get the picture I'm sure.  Because its such a random mistake i took it for granted as part of the pain from SL but with using more and more decals and knowing others have the same at leased the friends i checked. I take the liberty to ventilate my frustration over this here in the hope some one at LL can pick this up. 

[Alwin Alcott]

36 minutes ago, DNArt said:

. I take the liberty to ventilate my frustration over this here in the hope some one at LL can pick this up. 

it perhaps would if you talked to LL here, but you aren't really... this is a user forum, Lindens rarely come here for support issues.

Quote

at leased for me since the move to the cloud

what moved to the cloud?... SL not, just plans to do that in the future.

[animats]

If you turn on viewer logging in Firestorm and watch the error messages go by, there's a surprising number of HTTP 404 Not Found errors, 503 Forbidden errors, and gateway errors. Each of those indicates some asset the sim told the viewer to fetch, but fetching it failed. In-world, each of those errors means a texture that didn't appear, or a prim that had to fall back to a lower level of detail, or an object that didn't appear at all. Those ought to be rare events, but they're not.

[DNArt]

@animats the changes stay very consistent over any number of logins once they happen after the restart. so yeah i always keep some textures that are missing random but this really is some sort of server issue it seems  .

 

@Alwin  i meant CDN Alwin. 

With  CDN a lot of that data is now pivoted away from the simulator host, as it is now supplied by the CDN’s servers. The frees-up capacity on the simulator host for handling other tasks (an example being that of region crossings), leading to additional performance improvements across the grid. 

Highwinds, a CDN provider Linden Lab initially selected for this project, has 25 data centres around the world and a dedicated network from and through which essential asset data on avatar bakes, textures and meshes (at present) can be delivered to SL users

 

[Qie Niangao]

Is it this?

[ChinRey]

20 hours ago, DNArt said:

Hi LL every now and than after a sim restart the server messes up the alpha mode of some of the textures. its either set to none or the wrong blending type. since it takes a sim now longer to load all textures assets etc

That bug was supposed to have been fixed long ago but you're not the only one who say they have seen it again recently. There are lots of details in the thread Qie gave a link to but the short story is that it's not a pure server issue but a combination of server and viewer. Basically what happens is that if anybody with modify rights to an object comes anywhere near it, the viewer may send a false message telling the server that the object has been modified and the alpha mode changed. Yes it's silly but this is pre 2014 code. That tends to be a mess of undocumented, unintended and absolutely crazy dependencies and it can be really difficult for the current Linden Lab programmers to figure out what on earth is going on.

One solution is to lock the objects that are affected. It's a good idea to do that routinely whenever possible anyway so hopefully it's not too much of a bother.

Edited January 14, 2018 by ChinRey

[animats]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

That tends to be a mess of undocumented, unintended and absolutely crazy dependencies and it can be really difficult for the current Linden Lab programmers to figure out what on earth is going on.

Yes. The wiki page which is supposed to document Object messages is blank. No wonder they can't make it work right. Viewers and sims have to be working from the same spec for SL to work properly.

[DNArt]

oh wow @Qui Ninangao @ChinRey & @ animats  yeah that sound exactly like it thanks for that info. The changes seem to always appear after a server reset maybe this could give LL a hint on where to look. With more and more advanced graphics objects (like decals) in a region i hope LL realize the bug will become more and more annoying. Alwin pointed out this is a user forum,  are Jira's the way to talk with the Lindens? or do they have a more custom friendly way to get/give feedback? what the team was doing in Sansar (having weekly meetings with users) was kind of nice and more direct. I hope they realize in time SL is do lacking lots in graphics speed and shader quality by far there better unique and still money making product     

[Monty Linden]

On 1/13/2018 at 6:11 PM, DNArt said:

Highwinds, a CDN provider Linden Lab initially selected for this project, has 25 data centres around the world and a dedicated network from and through which essential asset data on avatar bakes, textures and meshes (at present) can be delivered to SL users

I hope that's an old message, we've been using Akamai for a good while.

[DNArt]

@Monty Linden, lol yeah it sure is. Google still found it for me do to illustrate CDN is in use quite a while. Should have added the date of Quote thanks for pointing out. 

[Love Zhaoying]

On 1/13/2018 at 5:54 PM, animats said:

If you turn on viewer logging in Firestorm and watch the error messages go by, there's a surprising number of HTTP 404 Not Found errors, 503 Forbidden errors, and gateway errors. Each of those indicates some asset the sim told the viewer to fetch, but fetching it failed. In-world, each of those errors means a texture that didn't appear, or a prim that had to fall back to a lower level of detail, or an object that didn't appear at all. Those ought to be rare events, but they're not.

You can see the OP’s logs? ?

[Ardy Lay]

Oh gosh!  Yes!  This has been happening around me and I thought maybe I was the only one that noticed so I asked some people that frequent the area and they see it to, they just didn't want to annoy us with complaints about walkways, trees and other things in the common areas looking weird after a server update, figuring it would resolve itself in a day or two.

No, it doesn't resolve itself.  I have been scouring the parks, libraries and residential common areas finding and fixing these things.  Alpha mask does indeed change to None on a few items.  I flip it back and move on.  Now, I suppose, I will be locking these items forcing the others in the group to ask me to unlock them when they want them moved, which happens when somebody wants a new seasonal look, or finds a cool lawn chair or tree or something they want to make room for in their area.

I may script these items to detect when they have been changed and see if I can get them to report who changed them.  With luck I can determine what viewer is doing it and perhaps have the script fix the object properties too.  (Damn.  More scripts sucking up resources.)

Edited February 17, 2018 by Ardy Lay

[Grumpity Linden]

Would you give the latest Maintenance viewer a try?  I believe this problem should be fixed there:  http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers#Second_Life_Release_Channel

Thanks!

[animats]

It's a shot in the dark, but maybe this is also the cause of some Firestorm texture-related crashes.

If you build the Firestorm viewer from source yourself, you get a few libraries that are, for licensing reasons, different from the ones used in the standard viewers. One of those libraries is a free JPEG 2000 decoder.

There's a Firestorm crash which pops up a fatal dialog "Bad number of components for texture: 5". This means the JPEG 2000 decoder encountered an image with 5 channels. Usually, there are 3 (RGB) or 4 (RGBA). A JPEG with 5 channels shouldn't be in there.  If another viewer is run, it gets the texture into cache without crashing, and then self-compiled Firestorm viewers don't crash in that area.

But a 5-channel JPEG probably isn't decoding into a valid image. The decoder in the stock viewer may just be more tolerant of junk JPEG files. That could result in persistent bad textures in-world.

Unfortunately, the message doesn't identify the texture name. I've suggested putting the name in the message, as a first step, so we can find out where that's coming from. It looks like bogus JPEGs are getting further into the system than they should.

Edited March 18, 2018 by animats
Clarify

[astarynite]

Hi, I filled out a JIRA yesterday regarding Alpha Mode Turning to None, and since the viewer update there have been texture changing trees turning to Fall colors . https://jira.phoenixviewer.com/browse/SUP-19403

I do not have mod rights on most of the Alpha Mode Turning to None plants, trees, treehouses, and even a snow globe.

I also do not have mod rights on the trees where the texture has changed.  I was able to contact one of the owners of the affected trees and he was unable to change the trees back to summer colors.  

The JIRA is being sent to support and I wish they would look into it more deeply.

Below are 2 pictures of treehouses I do not have mod rights on that have changed to Alpha Mode to None. 

The first is the LAQ Treehouse that was at LAQ.  The sim does not seem to be there anymore but I am sure the owner remembers the mess.  I did leave him a msg that there was something wrong with the treehouse. (and the surrounding trees were affected as well.)

The second is another LAQ Treehouse owned by a woman who was holding a portion of the MadPea Easter Hunt on her property.  I did not know her and I do not have mod rights on her treehouse.

These are just some of the instances of this happening to items I do not have mod rights on.

This is frustrating and nerve wracking to say the least.

I have setup a friends LAQ Treehouse, a copy of the snow globe, windows that are set to have the possibility of changing (which was mentioned in a blog).  All of these items I do not have mod rights on.  I added some ferns into the mix that I do have mod rights on.  Just trying to recreate the issue.

star

 

 

 

[Qie Niangao]

I don't really understand how this is specifically Firestorm related, so I'm not sure it belongs on their jira, but just to probe further in case this is actually distinct from the report filed (since 2015) in the Linden jira:

When you say 

44 minutes ago, astarynite said:

I do not have mod rights on most of the Alpha Mode Turning to None plants, trees, treehouses, and even a snow globe.

I also do not have mod rights on the trees where the texture has changed.  I was able to contact one of the owners of the affected trees and he was unable to change the trees back to summer colors.  

does this mean that the affected items were never viewed by anybody who does have Mod perm on them?

As I understand it, the theory has been that only viewing by somebody with Mod perm on an item could cause the alpha mode contamination, although everybody would see it afterwards. If this is a counterexample, that could be informative (albeit mysterious).

[astarynite]

Thanks for your reply Qie.  To clarify...

I did not have mod rights on the LAQ Treehouse with green leaves.  That was owned by the creator of the LAQ Treehouse.  I had some friends tp in to see it, they did not have mod rights on it either.  They saw it as I did.  I do not know what the owner of LAQ saw.

I did not have mod rights on the pink LAQ Treehouse.  The owner, who has mod rights,  did see it as messed up.  She said the house itself was textured with leaves.  I saw it as the pic I have above.  She was livid and I did not want to get  any closer to inspect it.  I asked her for a pic but she did not give me one if she took it.  

The same for other items that have changed.  The snow globe that changed, I did  not have mod rights on, and the glass turned black.  The owner, who has mod rights on the snow Globe, saw the snow globe was black and could not change it back and threw it out. 

I hope that has answered your questions.

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Edited April 14, 2018 by astarynite

[astarynite]

I should have filed in the Linden JIRA?

 

Edited April 14, 2018 by astarynite

[Willow Wilder]

6 minutes ago, astarynite said:

I should have filed in the Linden JIRA?

 

Did you test using the LL Viewer as I've suggested twice now on your support ticket? That would be helpful if you could do that, and report back on your support ticket. Thanks. 

[astarynite]

Will do!

Thanks, Willow

[Pamela Galli]

It still happens every few months for me, always on the same house.