Objects randomly disappearing and reappearing?

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Hello SL hive mind. I've run into a weird issue that (I assume) is to do with viewers. 

In a nutshell, I have been building a forest/farm environment recently on my parcel. Its pretty complex (2500+ prims on a 1/4 sim parcel). I have noticed that things are randomly disappearing and reappearing. its not a LOD thing. Half the objects in the region will sort of randomly disappear and then reappear over time. 

I've tried Firestorm and Black Dragon and both do the same thing. Though it seems BD does it slightly less often than FS. The only viewer it doesn't seem to happen with is the LL viewer. And.....yeah, don't really want to use that  In all cases, I do have LOD settings bumped to 4. 

Sometimes I can trigger the items to pop back in by zooming my camera waaaaaaaay out and back in again (I have camera constraints disabled). 

Any ideas why this might be happening? Its driving me a tiny bit crazy and I have never noticed this sort of thing happening before. I dont seem to get the issue if I TP around and go to other regions. Is it potentially nothing to do with the viewer but the land?

[Codex Alpha]

This may or may not be related, or what you are experiencing:

 

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

1 hour ago, Codex Alpha said:

This may or may not be related, or what you are experiencing:

 

Hmm. Possibly. I am not noticing any flashing. And its not stuff in my peripheral. Its just I turn around and suddenly half of what I rezzed is gone and half of it is still there. Sometimes it happens right in front of my view too, though less often.

A further thing I have just noticed, if it happens, I cam over my neighbours parcel and cam back, suddenly everything pops back in again. its super weird. 

Edited June 3, 2022 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Henri Beauchamp]

If you recently updated to NVIDIA's driver 515.48.07 for Linux, be aware that it is totally borked and fails to render properly in ALM mode, with culling issues (disappearing or flickering objects & avatars, bad shadows and reflections, etc).

The bug has already been reported on NVIDIA's forum by a couple people. Until NVIDIA fixes it, revert to the previous driver (515.43.04, which is the former beta driver, is working just fine).

Edited June 3, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[NiranV Dean]

The reason this doesn't happen on the official viewer is most likely because both BD and FS are not up to date with the latest code which happens to have a bugfix for some smaller items not showing up properly, which might be what you are seeing.

[Paulsian]

I get that when I copy and paste a lot of prims, it's almost like after something was copied so many times it starts losing durability? i'm talking hundreds of parts copied at one time textures and object rendering fails. while using official viewer.   

[Persephone Emerald]

I think I have more items going invisible when my GPU is getting too hot. If you log out of SL for a while and then come back after your computer has cooled down, is it better?

[Henri Beauchamp]

6 hours ago, Persephone Emerald said:

I think I have more items going invisible when my GPU is getting too hot. If you log out of SL for a while and then come back after your computer has cooled down, is it better?

Heat should make no difference whatsoever in regard to the number of rendered objects: this is the CPU which selects what objects data is sent to the GPU (even if the latter is also used to ”cull” objects hidden behind others, but even this cull result is processed by the CPU side of the code before the final draw calls are sent to the GPU).

GPU overheating would cause bugs, either in the form of graphics ”artifacts” (bogus textures on objects, distorted objects, parasites/noise on the screen) or right out crashes. Note however that all modern GPUs will simply lower automatically their frequency when reaching temperatures close to their ”absolute maximum ratings”; artifacts seen nowadays are usually the result of an excessive over-clocking of the GPU or VRAM, and not overheating.

If your GPU overheats (or rather heats up too much for your taste), then consider improving the air exhaust from your computer (for desktop computers), lowering the operating frequency of your GPU (for laptops) or using frame-limiting features of your viewer (the simplest and most performances hurting method being to enable V-sync: it sadly slows everything else down, and not just the frame rate); I recently added a frame-rate-limiting feature to the Cool VL Viewer because it became so fast that it made my GPU fans spin noisily for no purpose (rendering at 300+ fps is not really useful). The coding of this feature is yet smart enough to avoid hurting network/rezzing performances (the ”free time” being used to rez textures and pump the network instead of having the CPU just waiting and twiddling thumbs for the next V-sync pulse).

Edited June 12, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[AnnabelleApocalypse]

Thanks for all the responses folks! I forgot to check in for a while. 

Its nothing to do with my GPu overheating. I have a 3080 TI  that I monitor through Nvidia tools and it all looks within acceptable levels. Ive had a graphics card overheat on me in the past and know what that looks like. 

I am getting a solid 40fps while this is happening. It does seem to have stopped happening as frequently since I last posted. 

I also discovered that if I just spin my camera round in a circle (holding Alt and mouse) everything pops back in instantly. So while annoying, now I know how to fix it its not too annoying. it seems to be some sort of auto-culling thing like discussed in Codex's thread. or as Niran says about FS and BD not being 100% up to date. 

Hi Niran btw!  Always wanted to say thanks for making such an amazing viewer. Don't listen to all the ass-hats who post in your blogs comment section (cant believe the cheek of some of those people). Your awesome!

Edited June 12, 2022 by AnnabelleApocalypse

[Henri Beauchamp]

37 minutes ago, AnnabelleApocalypse said:

I also discovered that if I just spin my camera round in a circle (holding Alt and mouse) everything pops back in instantly.

Typically a race condition between viewer spatial partitions updates and server ”interest list” messages sending... This may also be worked around by right-clicking in the empty place where you know some object should be showing: it instantly causes the object to ”pop-up” into existence.

This race condition bug has existed since the ”interest list” got implemented by LL. Some viewers (the Cool VL Viewer is one of those, of course) allow you  to ”rebake” or ”refresh visibility” of objects: ALT SHIFT R shortcut for the Cool VL Viewer, which also auto-triggers this ”object rebake” after login, far-TPs and region borders crossing (since these are also the victim of this race condition).

However, I noticed that LL's latest ”performance viewer” was more prone to NOT rezzing some objects until you got your camera closer to them (I noticed this when comparing the FPS performances with my viewer: the texture consoles showed that only half the number of textures were loaded by LL's viewer compared with mine, and looking closer, I indeed found out that some objects simply were not rezzing at all until I zoomed in on them)...

Edited June 12, 2022 by Henri Beauchamp

[Jackson Redstar]

One issue may be with the Dynamic Draw. Not sure exactly how if calculates how to be Dynamic, but with this on, alot of stuff will dissapear at a small distace (10 meters or less) Turning this off prevents that, but at the expense of often killing FPS. When I film weddings for example, things at the end of the aisle will not rezz (flowers, other small objects) so I have to keep Dynamic draw off to keep the whole scene rezzed

Edited June 13, 2022 by Jackson Redstar

[JeromFranzic]

It happened to me a few minutes ago... ugh! Experienced it in both Windows and Linux. This screenshot is from the LL Performance viewer in Win11. I also tried several TPV's in Linux. 

I was in the mood to use a non mesh avi, and it kept loading stuff from mesh avis! Wanted to play an in world game somewhere with little lag on my end... annoying!