Yet another alpha texture thread. Slightly different, though?

[Alyssa Jessop]

Hi everyone,

I know there are dozens of threads on here about alpha channel issues, but I couldn't find anything quite like what I'm experiencing on the forums or in any of the bug tracking articles I read so I thought I would reach out to the community for help.

I am running Mac osx 10.5.8 (leopard) with 2gb of ram, a dual core 2.33ghz intel core 2 duo and an ATI Radeon x1600 graphics card with 256mb of dedicated Vram.

I initially downloaded the latest LL viewer and logged back into SL after a fairly lenghty break. Things seemed to go fine, everything looked normal.

Upon logging in for a second time, however, I noticed some weirdness going on with objects that had alpha textures applied to them.  The faces that were supposed to be invisible were not. They were not solid either, but rather they had a sort of lattice of black and white and invisible pixels that would vary depending on view angle.  Again, I've seen people who had issues with alpha textures appearing solid black or solid white, and I'm a little bit familiar with the OpenGL issues that alpha textures have endured since SL began years ago.  This is different.  I have a few screenshots to demonstrate but am not sure if It's kosher to post them in an op or not.

When I disable basic shaders, the issue reverts to a more familiar issue with these textures turning solid black and/or white.

Thinking this may be a viewer issue, I downloaded and instealled the latest Firestorm viewer, and lo and behold, things worked fine again on the first load.  But upon exiting and re-entering the grid, the issue returned.

 

This is only happening on objects that have had an alpha texture applied.  On objects where I set the transparency to 100%, things display properly, and on lots of older objects like hair that have mixes of alpha and drawn texture, there does not appear to be an issue.  This issue is only happening on faces and objects that have the 128x128 alpha or the 32x32 alpha textures applied to them from back in the day when 95% was the highest allowed transparency setting by default.

 

It has the feeling of some kind of texture corruption to me, but I have no idea how to resolve this.  Some people have said that it may go away if I upgrade to Lion, which I intend to do anyway, but in the mean time if ayone has a possible fix to this problem, I would appreciate the input.

 

Thanks,

Alyssa Jessop

 

 

[Nia Frostypaws]

Hi Alyssa. As people have mentioned regarding your OS X upgrade, that will most likely fix the problems. OS X 10.5.8 has rather poor OpenGL support, which the viewer was upgraded to use OpenGL 3.3 (slightly lower versions for some older graphics cards). OS X 10.6 and 7 are improved, and LL have done testing on those two versions.

I seem to recall Leslie Linden stating that OS X 10.5.8 is being left as is, since not many people are using it anymore. I can't seem to find the JIRA where he stated this, though.

[Alyssa Jessop]

An update:

 

I installed Snow Leopard and logged into SL and found that these problems had disappeared, so clearly it is related to the OpenGL issues mentioned earlier.

I then upgraded to Lion and things continue to run smoothly.

 

On a happy side note, upgrading to snow leopard (not clean install, upgrade) freed up 10gb of hard drive space, lol.