New FIRESTORM 7.1.9 Got Many Issues

[Kathrine Jansma]

On 8/13/2024 at 11:20 PM, Perrie Juran said:

And while I don't know if any anti-virus does this, what they should do, similar to how Firewalls work, is ask you if you want to exclude it when you install it. 

In theory, you can add some AV exclusion configuration logic for the default Microsoft Defender AV into your installer, as it runs with Administrative permissions during installation. Its just a call to Add-MpPreference (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/defender/add-mppreference?view=windowsserver2022-ps) after all.

Microsoft automatically adds some rules for certain server roles (e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-endpoint/configure-server-exclusions-microsoft-defender-antivirus#automatic-server-role-exclusions ), but it is a grey area.

In practice this would probably be a reason to flag the installer as malware most of the time...

[Perrie Juran]

7 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

In theory, you can add some AV exclusion configuration logic for the default Microsoft Defender AV into your installer

Fascinating.

But I would say this, these are user enabled settings so in that sense it does not happen automatically.

[AmeliaJ08]

21 hours ago, Kathrine Jansma said:

In theory, you can add some AV exclusion configuration logic for the default Microsoft Defender AV into your installer, as it runs with Administrative permissions during installation. Its just a call to Add-MpPreference (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/defender/add-mppreference?view=windowsserver2022-ps) after all.

Microsoft automatically adds some rules for certain server roles (e.g. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-endpoint/configure-server-exclusions-microsoft-defender-antivirus#automatic-server-role-exclusions ), but it is a grey area.

In practice this would probably be a reason to flag the installer as malware most of the time...

Given the apparent importance of FS being whitelisted (I'm still unconvinced but the devs seem to be pretty set on this and the logic is sound, I just don't really feel the huge impact of periodic scanning of tiny little cache files but it has to exist) then this seems like something FS/viewers in general should be doing?

The whole procedure to whitelist an app and the necessary folders in Windows isn't exactly noob friendly.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Given the apparent importance of FS being whitelisted (I'm still unconvinced but the devs seem to be pretty set on this and the logic is sound, I just don't really feel the huge impact of periodic scanning of tiny little cache files but it has to exist) then this seems like something FS/viewers in general should be doing?

The whole procedure to whitelist an app and the necessary folders in Windows isn't exactly noob friendly.

It's a case of, "If a Second Life viewer was a malicious worm, it would act exactly the way it normally does." Throw in that several third-party viewers aren't "signed" in a way that commercial software is, and a certain amount of paranoia on your anti-virus program's part is expected.

It's like credit card companies. I have one that raises hoohah if I pay a company a different amount than usual, and one that says to itself, "They haven't used this card in years, and now it's being used on-line to make purchases in Japanese yen. . . . .seems legit." I mean, it was, but you'd still think they'd be suspicious.

[Frionil Fang]

5 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

The whole procedure to whitelist an app and the necessary folders in Windows isn't exactly noob friendly.

I did write a Powershell script that uses the before-mentioned commands to do the whitelisting for you, just copy/paste the directories and files the viewer wants to whitelist. Understandably a script that elevates itself to admin permissions would have to be provided officially by Firestorm themselves because it's very suspicious coming from some random person on the internet. At that point they might as well just make it automatic during install. All I could do was to leave it on their JIRA as a feature suggestion

[Kathrine Jansma]

10 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I just don't really feel the huge impact of periodic scanning of tiny little cache files but it has to exist

AV adds latency to every file access.  The periodic scans are not the issue, on-access scans are the problem. Thats often not an issue if you have enough I/O requests flying around in parallel. Thats what Windows IO Subsystem is great at, parallel I/O.

But if you do sequentiell I/O, your pipeline dries up rapidly. You need to wait for AV to scan those tiny files, and AV takes longer for it than the whole file operation would otherwise take. 

The viewers cache I/O pattern is mostly sequential, so it gets hit hard by AV, even when using a single I/O Thread to make it less bad. But really fixing it would need a different I/O and cache model.

Microsoft noticed the issue for its own development tools too and added some improvement called "Dev Drive" on Windows 11, which reduces some of the issues with AV (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/ ). It has a kind of performance mode that delays AV scanning so it does not affect the performance as badly (see Protect Dev Drive using performance mode - Microsoft Defender for Endpoint | Microsoft Learn ).

Edited August 25 by Kathrine Jansma

[Toothless Draegonne]

On 8/24/2024 at 6:13 AM, BriannaLovey said:

Something simple like this

bool gpu_is_intel_gpu()
{
	std::string gpu_name = gFeatureManager.getGPUString();
	boost::algorithm::to_lower(gpu_name);
	return gpu_name.contains("intel");
}

void configure_texture_multithreading_thingy()
{
	gSavedSettings.setBool("RenderGLMultiThreadedTextures", !gpu_is_intel_gpu() );
}

would alleviate the need for the user to disable an obscure debug setting in order for the viewer to perform optimally. But nope, why bother testing stuff when you can just wait for users to run into problems and deal with it later?

Something like that was already in (pre-PBR) viewer code and is why Intel Xe96EU chips did far worse than they should have, with VRAM limited to 512MB on a system that has a unified memory architecture. "If Intel Then Potato" is not robust code, and isn't even true (these days).

[Dmitri Polonsky]

"There are MANY issues. The worst one is the offline notices that won't close or clear. I have tried multiple means to do so when logging in and they will not clear without multiple relogs and cache clears. Logging in and being notice free is about a twenty minute job now."...any word on this issue yet? Notices are still broken and won't close without multiple relogs and cache clearing.

[AmeliaJ08]

34 minutes ago, Dmitri Polonsky said:

"There are MANY issues. The worst one is the offline notices that won't close or clear. I have tried multiple means to do so when logging in and they will not clear without multiple relogs and cache clears. Logging in and being notice free is about a twenty minute job now."...any word on this issue yet? Notices are still broken and won't close without multiple relogs and cache clearing.

I have not encountered that particular bug in release but it is discussed on JIRA and supposedly has been fixed, have you tried the most recent Alpha? a lot of issues have been worked on and it's very stable in my experience. Not to give the wrong impression, it is for testing purposes but I find it a lot more usable than the release.

If you can wait though we are expecting a new release quite shortly that will presumably include all of the work that has been done.

 

Edited August 29 by AmeliaJ08

[Dmitri Polonsky]

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

I have not encountered that particular bug in release but it is discussed on JIRA and supposedly has been fixed, have you tried the most recent Alpha? a lot of issues have been worked on and it's very stable in my experience. Not to give the wrong impression, it is for testing purposes but I find it a lot more usable than the release.

If you can wait though we are expecting a new release quite shortly that will presumably include all of the work that has been done.

I hve the most recent version and it is an issue on all my computers not just one. All have various configurations and hardware.

2 hours ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

 

 

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, Dmitri Polonsky said:

I hve the most recent version and it is an issue on all my computers not just one. All have various configurations and hardware.

 

Well if you're willing, try the Alpha. You can get the link by joining "Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group" and looking in the notices. There has been a lot of bug fixes and it is very usable.

 

[JeromFranzic]

43 minutes ago, AmeliaJ08 said:

Well if you're willing, try the Alpha. You can get the link by joining "Phoenix-Firestorm Preview Group" and looking in the notices. There has been a lot of bug fixes and it is very usable.

 

Yes. Do this! I don't even have a beastly PC and it works well for me, in Windows 11 and Lubuntu. More importantly, for my needs the Open Sim versions are relatively stable as well. I can Dutch angle everywhere I want to now lol!

[AmeliaJ08]

1 hour ago, JeromFranzic said:

I can Dutch angle everywhere I want to now lol!

Haha I had no idea I needed those controls until I tried them, very cool

[Emily Peridot]

does anyone know why this viewer insists on resetting my hover height every time I take a step ? I've tried adjusting through appearance and the firestorm preferences button , but it persists making my feet sink into the ground

Edited September 1 by Emily Peridot

[JeromFranzic]

12 hours ago, Emily Peridot said:

does anyone know why this viewer insists on resetting my hover height every time I take a step ? I've tried adjusting through appearance and the firestorm preferences button , but it persists making my feet sink into the ground

It may be something with your chosen animation overrider. If you are using the FS AO, maybe one of the animations added on is clashing with FS's Hover Height control. Looks like something that's JIRA worthy, may be worth reporting or someone else reported it already.

Edited September 1 by JeromFranzic

[Perrie Juran]

20 hours ago, Emily Peridot said:

does anyone know why this viewer insists on resetting my hover height every time I take a step ? I've tried adjusting through appearance and the firestorm preferences button , but it persists making my feet sink into the ground

If you use RLVa check your RLV device. Thee is a RLV function that messes with hover height. You'd have to ask someone who knows more about RLV than me for details. I am only aware of this.

[Bo Juisser]

On 6/24/2024 at 3:08 PM, ThatGirlBeauty said:

I downloaded the new version when it was released, and Everything in the game was loading very, very slowly. I also noticed they changed around the building tools, which I personally didn't think was needed. Also, they changed the image Upload price from 10Ls to 50Ls. Has anyone else noticed anything different? I went back to the older version and sometimes my screen is Flickering black or it goes completely black. If turn off my VBO then the flickering stops.  

I saw that when I tried to upload in bulk, but if I did it one at a time, it was still 10Ls each.

 

[Leviathan Hydraconis]

On 6/23/2024 at 4:22 AM, RhythmC said:

From the moment i downloaded the new version the graphic on screen became horrible i made the adjustments needed at setting and still the default lights are ugly and to brights

lands environment does not look natural but like in studio or some video game

My screen started flickering colors from the environment reflectaions on water

a little bit of graphics glitch when you are in motion

Try close the new viewer version you get a window stuck on desktop screen saying "Closing firestorm" and after like 10-20 sec its gone what the hell is that ?

Viewer F.P.S getting low and sometimes crashing the graphics so you need to relog 

Secondlife looks like a video game in the new firestorm version and lights are taking over the graphic on screen . 

100% bad experience with the new version .

that is not PBR looks realistic not even close...that is broken rendering system make the SL world looks like studio edit light and not natural as it usually.

 

Back to the old good version 

 

 

Some of the graphics flickers are screen space reflecions,disable that it fixes those glitches.Closing that long is actually same as before,now it shows it's saving to limit corrupting files,and was invisible before.Make sure your videocard can handle the new pbr,and you set it up right.Exposure setting should be 1.0 or less,better at .5 for some people,otherwise will overbrighten things.I'm using 4060 and can ultra and max everything and get 60fps,turning mirror resolution to 1024 or lower,and/or frame time to every 2 frame or more will increase fps and still look nice.Only real issue I have is things turn black is zoomed too close,and alphas acting up.

Edited September 12 by Leviathan Hydraconis

[Pixann]

I have been getting at least 3 bug splats per day. Why does this keep happening since the upgrade?

[AmeliaJ08]

11 hours ago, Pixann said:

I have been getting at least 3 bug splats per day. Why does this keep happening since the upgrade?

Which version?

 

[BigRed4343]

I keep on crashing every time i log in i can only be on for a few seconds then white screen of death pops up i was stuck running but wasn't then i logged back on and was naked YAY fun

[Alwin Alcott]

8 hours ago, BigRed4343 said:

I keep on crashing every time i log in i can only be on for a few seconds then white screen of death pops up i was stuck running but wasn't then i logged back on and was naked YAY fun

as above you  .. what version are you using

[Jaylinbridges]

12 hours ago, BigRed4343 said:

I keep on crashing every time i log in i can only be on for a few seconds then white screen of death pops up i was stuck running but wasn't then i logged back on and was naked YAY fun

A white screen just means the program is still loading and is not a a "white screen of death".  The first time you start a new update, depending on the state of your CPU cache and the FS cache, it can take up to 1 min to get to the login page.  And sometimes with a new version, you actually log in and little rezzes while it should rezz in about 30 secs or less.  You just close the program and relog.  It works the second time around, and on successive logins.  Even if you clear the FS cache, it still loads very quickly as in seconds if you have a reliable and fast internet connection.   It's not important what Windoz and FS are thinking about when first introduced.   

It would help to know what OS you are using (version numbers too) and what FS Version  you were using.  Also what is your net connection,  wired, wireless, packet loss etc.  All of this in Help/About Firestorm/Info window/.  And if you upgraded from an older FS version, did you do a clean install?   Ask in the FS Support group.   Nothing is wrong with the latest FS Release itself.  Most have no issues at all with the new  Release.

 

Edited yesterday at 10:46 AM by Jaylinbridges

[Aishagain]

I'll just add my own request both @BigRed4343 & @Pixann what OS are you using and which version of the viewer?

In order to better help you both please load the viewer DONT TRY TO LOG IN and then click on the HELP>ABOUT (top left corner of the logon page) and copy and paste the data shown (remove any info in that that you feel might compromise your privacy).

I emphasise that both the FS team and the LL team are doing their very best to aid your SL experience.

FWIW  the most recent FS Beta and LL RC viewers are FAR better in terms of load on your system and speed of rezzing. The new texture resolution management software takes a little acclimatisation but it  should return your SL to you. 

No guarantee but it is hopeful.

Edited 23 hours ago by Aishagain
additional advice