Plants all f%$^& up

[Thallann]

Ok, I need some assistance here. So I've been on my sim for over 3 years and had my plants rezzed for nearly that. But today I log in and the majority of my vegetation look like flat textures stuck together. (see photos 1-3)

However, I used some of the same plants at my family's vacation spot in another sim and they have not changed.  (Photo 4)

Any idea why this is happening? Will it resolve itself or do I need to uproot these plants and replant them? BTW - tried restarting the sim and this does not help.

Edited April 8, 2020 by Thallann

[Mollymews]

i have had this happen to me also at different times.  I think its a viewer texturing issue.  The viewer stalls and the textures don't render at highest resolution

my fixes were to try a viewer refresh on each object by right-click edit and hope.  I think some TPVs like Firestorm have a menu/dialog option to do this (not sure exactly where in the TPVs this is. Somebody else might be able to tell us)

when there are heaps like this then my go to is: Clear Cache and force the whole region to refresh with new assets data  

[ChinRey]

13 minutes ago, Thallann said:

Any idea why this is happening?

Yes. It's the alpha channel (the data that sets the transparency for the different parts of the texture) that fails to load. It has nothing to do with the sim so restarting it isn't ging to make any difference.

I think the first thing you should do, is edit the plant, go to the Texture tab and check that Alpha mode is set to either blending or masking. There have been some incidents in the past when rezzed objects have had their alpha mode switched to none by accident and if that happens, you get exactly the result we see in your picture. The bug that cused this to happen is presumed to be fixed at least twice but with code as messy as SL's you never know if it turns up again.

If everyhing seems ok with the alpha mode, it's almost certainly corrupted cache files and the solution is what Mollymews suggested: clear cahce and restart.

[Madelaine McMasters]

I'm with ChinRey on this. That's an alpha channel problem and probably caused by a glitched setting in the particular instance of each plant.

Edited April 8, 2020 by Madelaine McMasters

[Thallann]

THANKS! The alpha modes were set to NONE. Simply changing this fixed the issue.

I was really dreading weeding up all these plants and placing them again. This was a big help!

11 minutes ago, Mollymews said:

i have had this happen to me also at different times.  I think its a viewer texturing issue.  The viewer stalls and the textures don't render at highest resolution

my fixes were to try a viewer refresh on each object by right-click edit and hope.  I think some TPVs like Firestorm have a menu/dialog option to do this (not sure exactly where in the TPVs this is. Somebody else might be able to tell us)

when there are heaps like this then my go to is: Clear Cache and Hi thanks for the reply

 

[Thallann]

5 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Yes. It's the alpha channel (the data that sets the transparency for the different parts of the texture) that fails to load. It has nothing to do with the sim so restarting it isn't ging to make any difference.

I think the first thing you should do, is edit the plant, go to the Texture tab and check that Alpha mode is set to either blending or masking. There have been some incidents in the past when rezzed objects have had their alpha mode switched to none by accident and if that happens, you get exactly the result we see in your picture. The bug that cused this to happen is presumed to be fixed at least twice but with code as messy as SL's you never know if it turns up again.

If everyhing seems ok with the alpha mode, it's almost certainly corrupted cache files and the solution is what Mollymews suggested: clear cahce and restart.

THANKS! The alpha modes were set to NONE. Simply changing this fixed the issue.

I was really dreading weeding up all these plants and placing them again. This was a big help!

[ChinRey]

49 minutes ago, Madelaine McMasters said:

I'm with ChinRey on this. That's an alpha channel problem and probably caused by a glitched setting in the particular instance of each plant.

I'm really worried that it may be that old bug popping up again. It's a really nasty one and besides, softare bugs are not supposed to have nine lives - only cats shuld be allowed that.

/me is interrupted by a "new message" alert, reads the new message and...

45 minutes ago, Thallann said:

THANKS! The alpha modes were set to NONE. Simply changing this fixed the issue.

Oh no, it is actually back!

To keep it from happening again with those particular plants at least, lock them. To give you an idea how bad it can be, that bug can be triggered whenever the owner or somebody else with editing rights to an object comes near it. They don't have to do anything, just beign there is enough.

 

Edited April 9, 2020 by ChinRey

[Mollymews]

13 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Yes. It's the alpha channel (the data that sets the transparency for the different parts of the texture) that fails to load

I think the first thing you should do, is edit the plant, go to the Texture tab and check that Alpha mode is set to either blending or masking. There have been some incidents in the past when rezzed objects have had their alpha mode switched to none by accident and if that happens, you get exactly the result we see in your picture.

thanks muchly   This is going to make my life a lot easier from now on

Edited April 8, 2020 by Mollymews
on

[Reid Parkin]

Glad you got it sorted @Thallann  funny thing is it never happens to me. Here's an image of how to fix it.

 

 

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Reid Parkin said:

funny thing is it never happens to me. Here's an image of how to fix it.

I'm assuming it is the old bug that bites again of course. It is of course possible that Thallann edited the plants at some point and accidentally changed the alpha mode but I'm fairly (s)he would have noticed.

---

I'm sure we all know that the alpha mode settings are a li'l bit dodgy in many ways. It's part of the New Materials (along with normal and specular maps) that were introduced in 2013 at a time when LL still were simply stacking new shinies on top of the old software rather than integrate the new with the old properly. So like most of the updates they made during the six dark years, it's essentially a hack.

This is a bit clumsy explanation but what happens is that when your viewer loads an alpha texture, it doesn't know at first what the mode is, so it assumes it's set to none. Normally that isn't a problem because it will get the correct info from the server before you even notice but if there is a glitch in the connection or with the server, that false data can remain for a while, long enough for the viewer to send it back to server. If you have editing rights to the object, the server will then assume you have changed the alpha mode and update with this false data.

The most frustrating part of this is that you don't even have to be very close to the object. all it takes is that it's within your draw distance and is loaded from server (rather than from cache) at a moment when your viewer and the servers have a bit of problems communicating with each other.

---

Since you replied and the plants are in your style, Reid, I suppose they are by you and you may be a bit nervous about it all. So to give you a li'l bit of peace of mind, it has nothing to do with who made the textures and items or how they are made. It can happen to any alpha texture and there's nothing us content creators can do about it.

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Edit: Come to think of it, it's rather interesting if the alpha mode bug pops up again right now, just as LL is busy movng functions from the simulators to the cloud. Maybe somebody should file a JIRA about it but it's too vague still - we need an expert's opinion. Paging.. (let's see...) @Beq Janus, @animats and of course a Linden... let's try @Vir Linden.

Edited April 9, 2020 by ChinRey

[Kyrah Abattoir]

Recommended to set it to alpha MASK (if it looks allright with those textures), it is easier on the viewer and gets around transparency glitches.

[Beq Janus]

@Whirly Fizzle any idea which JIRAs does this zombie bug relates to? 

 

[Beq Janus]

I spoke to Queen @Whirly Fizzle of Jiratopia and she pointed me to https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-11333

A special case of an older bug https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-8715

As best we can tell, these are fixed and remain so, but there are edge cases whereby they can re-occur but it is rare and not something anyone has reliable reproduced. 

Note the circumstances here. If you have edit rights to the item it may become a permanent issue, if you do not then a simple restart will fix it.

Luckily having edit rights means that you can go in and fix it. so yay!

 

[ChinRey]

56 minutes ago, Beq Janus said:

As best we can tell, these are fixed and remain so, but there are edge cases whereby they can re-occur but it is rare and not something anyone has reliable reproduced.

So it's fairly safe to assume that it hasn't been woken up again?

[Beq Janus]

8 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

So it's fairly safe to assume that it hasn't been woken up again?

"fairly" yes. The cause is on the viewer-side, and as there has been no FS release for months and we have not seen an increase in these reportings in that period we can be certain that this was not the case. Now...if the OP was using a recently updated viewer (by which I mean that last week or so) then I cannot be so certain. There could be something and as we on FS are looking at our next release being sooner rather than later I would like to confirm this 🙂 @Thallann can you confirm what viewer you were using when this happened?

The problem occurs when an asset is still being loaded for example the object details have arrived, the mesh data has appeared but we are waiting on textures (another good reason to *not* clear your caches too often kids), there is some kind of race condition whereby the viewer is trying to draw the object, but the object is not yet fully available and so it goes awry. This is clearly not a normal case because we are typically "drawing all things" 20+ times a second and in a given scene of moderate complexity there are always going to be some items not yet fully loaded and yet we are not seeing this routinely, so it has to be this combined with other factors (such as editing perhaps) which through witchcraft and sunspot activity conspire to fail. So given we do not know all the factors (and I haven't looked close enough to give more than the vague description here) it *could* be a server change but ... Occam's razor says the OP just got unlucky.

As for cloud migrations etc. unlikely too (with the aforementioned caveats) content is not pulled from servers owned by the lab, it comes from a content delivery network (CDN) none of that is changing, nothing user facing at this stage basically, so while I can perhaps construct a scenario for this I would be going against my gut feel. I'll go with William of Occam for now, OP got the short straw. I fully reserve my right to be wrong as the flood of "that happened to me yesterday too" replies pour in 😉 

[Reid Parkin]

2 hours ago, ChinRey said:

So it's fairly safe to assume that it hasn't been woken up again?

I didn't know it ever went to sleep. Customers IM me from time to time about the problem (as did Thallann). It's never happened to me, which is weird since I'm working on my plants all the time. I've seen it in people's gardens and friend told me he bought the plants like that, so I told him how to fix it. I'll try to keep track of how often I get asked how to fix it, but to me it doesn't seem like it was ever fixed. When Thallann IMed me I didn't think 'oh no this old problem has resurfaced', I just anxiously reponded, as I do from time to time.

[Thallann]

16 hours ago, Reid Parkin said:

I didn't know it ever went to sleep. Customers IM me from time to time about the problem (as did Thallann). It's never happened to me, which is weird since I'm working on my plants all the time. I've seen it in people's gardens and friend told me he bought the plants like that, so I told him how to fix it. I'll try to keep track of how often I get asked how to fix it, but to me it doesn't seem like it was ever fixed. When Thallann IMed me I didn't think 'oh no this old problem has resurfaced', I just anxiously reponded, as I do from time to time.

Hey Reid, thanks for responding. And from the images I think you can see that not all the plants affected were made by you.  If I counted correctly there are 4 other creators. SEE  before and after images:

My grass from HPMD*   - pics 1 and 2

Hibiscus bush from ~AB~  - pics 3 and 4

Also from creators not shown due to upload limit here on the forum:

Flowering vines from Heart   and Alligator bush from Sky Studios

 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Thallann