Second Life Viewer last update made insibile parts visible

[Virenz]

I mean wth is this? Invisible parts are visible on glowing, transparent or reflections objects. I 100% remember such stuff never existed before. Even invisible +18 body parts are visible, lol. Anyone facing same issue with official Viewer?

[Akane Nacht]

I've been having some fabulously glitchy hair alphas since last update that I've never seen before. Not sure if it's SL viewer or my graphics driver or both.

Edited May 29, 2023 by Akane Nacht

[Virenz]

Akane this is 100% last update, i always log into this location with glass in front of me, and noticed those glitchy alphas immediately after update log 😨. Is anywhere here way to report it for Linden lab? New to this forum

[Kathrine Jansma]

The official bugtracker for the Viewer is at:

 https://jira.secondlife.com/

you can login with your usual SL credentials and report an issue by using the "Create" button in the top menu.

 

See also:

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Bug_Tracker

There is some documentation how to report a bug listed here:

 

[Virenz]

Kathrine thanks much, reported this bug

[Qie Niangao]

I'm not sure this is a bug. Is it possible that before, you ran your viewer without Advanced Lighting Model enabled? The "alpha sorting glitch" has always appeared at different times with and without ALM, and now everyone has ALM enabled at all times so the glitches will not happen some times they used to, and happen some times they didn't.

At least in the "transparent antler" case (the first post in the thread) this should be easily fixed by setting the surface's alpha mode from "Alpha blending" to "Alpha masking". (That's assuming the attachment is Modify enabled. If not, yeah: It's dead, Jim.)

The hair alpha looks like the same problem, but I'm not sure whether it's just hair interfering with different layers of blended alpha surfaces of the same hair, or if there's some other blended alpha surface on the face. (This still happens to me when I wear hair that overlaps eyelashes I haven't set to "Alpha masking" but I'm not sure what's happening in this view.)

(The reason I suspect it's ALM is that I always run with ALM enabled and haven't seen any difference with the new Linden viewer that has ALM enabled at all times. But I used to have this problem when I swapped between ALM and non-ALM, on older viewers that still suffer a performance penalty with ALM.)

[Virenz]

Qie Niangao its max graphics settings, and i bought this body, its locked on alpha blending, what do you mean its dead, it was working right before 😰

Edited May 29, 2023 by Virenz

[Virenz]

Nah its 100% update bug, i didnt change this avi for year, and it got such alpha glitch right after update, even fur on body glitches out like crazy

Edited May 29, 2023 by Virenz

[Qie Niangao]

Yes, but to me it looks like the standard alpha-sorting glitch that we've had all along, just happening somewhere you're not accustomed to seeing it in the past. It's possible there's something other than ALM that triggers it in the new viewer (there's been a bunch of changes to speed up rendering, so that wouldn't be a huge surprise), but I'm thinking developers may not be eager to give up performance improvements to revert the specific times alpha-sorting glitches and doesn't.

It would be informative, maybe, to try with one of those older viewers—Firestorm, say—that still permits turning off ALM, and toggle that setting back and forth in front of that window where you know it didn't used to happen, to see if turning ALM on will make the glitch happen. If not, it could be some other rendering change. (We're supposed to be able to see some of those other rendering changes in certain Linden water characteristics, for example.)

[Henri Beauchamp]

2 hours ago, Virenz said:

Invisible parts are visible on glowing, transparent or reflections objects.

Do you mean 100% transparent, or ”invisible” (old ”invisiprim” feature, with the special 38b86f85-2575-52a9-a531-23108d8da837 texture UUID); I would assume the first since LL's viewer does not render invisiprims any more.

In the second case, this would be a known issue in ALM rendering for viewers still (optionally) rendering invisiprims, such as the Cool VL Viewer or Marine's Restrained Love viewer, and is due to the shared (and conflicting) use of the stencil buffer between invisprims and full bright faces in ALM rendering.

2 hours ago, Virenz said:

Anyone facing same issue with official Viewer?

Is it with the Release viewer, or the PBR project viewer ?...

The PBR viewer is likely to have such glitches, but I would be a little surprised if it happened with the release viewer (I did not notice any recent commit that would induce such an issue in LL's git repository).

1 hour ago, Akane Nacht said:

I've been having some fabulously glitchy hair alphas since last update that I've never seen before.

This is not an alpha issue but a mesh optimizing issue; here again, the PBR viewer would be likely to have it, since the code for the mesh vertex cache optimization moved from LL's custom implementation (which was plain bogus under Linux and macOS: it only worked properly under Windows, due to an idiosyncrasy of its C++ library standard containers implementation) to a meshoptimizer library based implementation, but I think they did not do it right (thus the bug); see this old bug report (fixed) for the Cool VL Viewer that explains it all...

Edited May 29, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Qie Niangao]

9 minutes ago, Virenz said:

Qie Niangao its max graphics settings, and i bought this body, its locked on alpha blending, what do you mean its dead, it was working right before 😰

This would be a really good time to contact that creator and tell them the urgency of getting a Modifiable version of their products out to every customer as an update. Obviously the scripts don't need to be modifiable, but old unmodifiable mesh is going to be dead weight anyway, once Physically Based Rendering is tablestakes, which will be Real Soon Now. If you can modify the body, you'll be able to make some of the materials upgrades yourself (if you're so inclined).

[Qie Niangao]

2 minutes ago, Henri Beauchamp said:

Is it with the Release viewer, or the PBR project viewer ?...

The PBR viewer is likely to have such glitches, but I would be a little surprised if it happened with the release viewer (I did not notice any recent commit that would induce such an issue in LL's git repository).

I think the release viewer is the PBR viewer now, isn't it? https://releasenotes.secondlife.com/viewer/7.0.0.580330.html

[EDIT: Oh, wait, that is the PROJECT viewer. Hmm. It loaded into the standard viewer directory so I thought it was the release viewer now. Odd.]

Edited May 29, 2023 by Qie Niangao

[Virenz]

Henri Beauchamp its default release, 6.6.13.580262

Talking about 100% transparent, i was using that stuff all the time, also mod creators do that too, their huds just hide body parts by using 100% transparent. There is tonn of other alpha glitches i spot with this update, fur cannot render on alpha of body, breath smoke also conflicts with that.

You guys dont have such glitches with last update? 

[Henri Beauchamp]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

think the release viewer is the PBR viewer now, isn't it?

Certainly NOT !

The PBR viewer is just a release candidate, for now...

[Qie Niangao]

1 minute ago, Virenz said:

You guys dont have such glitches with last update? 

Now I wonder if you'd have better luck with the PBR viewer. I'm not seeing any different alpha sorting behavior there than I've always had with ALM enabled.

[Henri Beauchamp]

12 minutes ago, Virenz said:

its default release, 6.6.13.580262

Hmm... Maybe it's a change in the attachments alpha sorting algorithm, then... They changed it (again), recently, but got it wrong. However, this alpha sorting issue they have in their code would only show up between attached prims, not between an attached prim and an in-world object... Strange, and definitely worth a bug report on the JIRA !

Edited May 29, 2023 by Henri Beauchamp

[Virenz]

Im gonna try out 7.0.0.580330 just to check then 🤨

[Virenz]

Ye, no such bug at 7.0.0.580330, standing at right same place, all alphas and fur on body working right

Well, ladies with 6.6.13.580262 gonna see my alphas glitched out then 🤤

[Qie Niangao]

I agree it's worth a bug report anyway, lest they merge whatever they changed in the release viewer into the PBR (7.0) branch and break it, too.

[Virenz]

Ye i reported it here https://jira.secondlife.com/projects/BUG/issues/BUG-233937

[Akane Nacht]

2 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

The hair alpha looks like the same problem, but I'm not sure whether it's just hair interfering with different layers of blended alpha surfaces of the same hair, or if there's some other blended alpha surface on the face. (This still happens to me when I wear hair that overlaps eyelashes I haven't set to "Alpha masking" but I'm not sure what's happening in this view.)

Hmm.. it's the same hair I have on in my profile photo. Had it for a long time and never seen it do this til right after last update. I tried fiddling with the graphics settings, including ALM but the issue persists. I thought it might be LOD related as I can occasionally get it to snap back to normal with some zoom out/zoom in. But if I change hair, change the colour, or even move camera a little, back it goes to glitchy. 

2 hours ago, Virenz said:

Ye i reported it here https://jira.secondlife.com/projects/BUG/issues/BUG-233937

thanks, following.  

[Theresa Tennyson]

In a recent release candidate they changed the "highlight transparent" so that it would once again show transparent objects as transparent when highlighted (it started showing them as solid a few updates ago.) When I tried it briefly I got a similar result to that.

ETA - Yes, that's the version that's listed in your "environment" description in the JIRA.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Theresa Tennyson

[Chike Nightingale]

On 5/29/2023 at 3:47 PM, Virenz said:

I mean wth is this? Invisible parts are visible on glowing, transparent or reflections objects. I 100% remember such stuff never existed before. Even invisible +18 body parts are visible, lol. Anyone facing same issue with official Viewer?

Yes, getting this issue too with the LL Viewer and yes, I think I know what +18 item you are referring to, which stopped being entirely transparent.

 

On 5/29/2023 at 4:55 PM, Akane Nacht said:

I've been having some fabulously glitchy hair alphas since last update that I've never seen before. Not sure if it's SL viewer or my graphics driver or both.

Seeing this too with hair, since the release of the viewer I am using. The reported known issues are a bit scary with 7.0.0.580330, so not sure if it is too soon to start using it?

 

My current viewer is 6.6.13.580262 (64bit)

[JeromFranzic]

On 5/30/2023 at 10:16 PM, Anthony Marques said:

Yes, getting this issue too with the LL Viewer and yes, I think I know what +18 item you are referring to, which stopped being entirely transparent.

 

Seeing this too with hair, since the release of the viewer I am using. The reported known issues are a bit scary with 7.0.0.580330, so not sure if it is too soon to start using it?

 

My current viewer is 6.6.13.580262 (64bit)

7 viewers are best for PBR experiments in the beta grid. I'd stick to 6.6.13 for most of SL.

[Wulfie Reanimator]

On 5/29/2023 at 11:55 AM, Akane Nacht said:

I've been having some fabulously glitchy hair alphas since last update that I've never seen before. Not sure if it's SL viewer or my graphics driver or both.

I have this issue in Firestorm 6.6.8 but only when I have "Highlight Transparent" enabled and only on rigged mesh.

The alpha sorting breaks in a very distinct manner, it's not quite the same as what we're used to seeing.

Edited June 2, 2023 by Wulfie Reanimator