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Have your Alpha Modes changed to "None"?


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There was this bug reported early this year with no updates. I never knew about it until I saw something similar happen the past couple of days, and I've just heard a private report and seen a post across the street from another person having it happen recently across every alpha-masking surface on his sim.

Hence, if you notice some alpha textures spontaneously switched to mode "None" and they stay that way across login sessions, don't panic.

Or, go ahead and panic, but at least you know you're not going crazy.

Or you may be going crazy, but at least this phenomenon doesn't add evidence of your slow slide into madness.

Oh, and, if this is happening to you, maybe add a comment to that jira with some details? Because I suspect something new is triggering the bug now, and it might be good to track it down before it's an epidemic.

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Yes it happened on model house windows. Everyone saw the windows as black. I finally rezzed another copy and so far so good.

 

I tried to leave a comment on the JIRA the other day but I could not find a comment button. This is the most Twilight Zone-ish thing I have heard of in SL.  A person w mod rights just LOOKS at something and breaks it for everyone?  I would have said that was impossible.

 

I always hope when LL breaks content or the Marketplace they will jump right in and fix it, but that doesnt always happen (see Faye Feldragonne's posts in the Merchant forum about half her inventory being renamed Red Tux Baby, or the Texture Organizer breakage).

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Thanks for the further confirmation. As I mentioned in the jira, there's at least one other recent report in a post on SLU.

As to commenting on the jira, I thought all that would be needed is to login (far upper right) to enable a Comment button (far bottom left), but now that I try with my alt's account, the button never appears. I know Qie's jira account isn't quite normal, so maybe it's not normal to be able to comment on jiras that have already been accepted. Not sure, but anyway, sorry for the confusion.

I guess that means posting here or on the SLU thread is helpful for getting a record that there really is a problem, weird though it certainly is.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 weeks later...

Found some more surfaces affected by this bug, although I can't be 100% sure they didn't get that way during the same event(s) as before (all on the same sim, Tussock). These happen to be part of one big linkset of mostly mesh, much of which is textured with alpha masking. Six faces on four of the linked meshes were affected; they happened to all have custom specular and normalmaps, too (not the case for the cases reported earlier), but not all faces of those meshes lost alpha-masking.

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Qie Niangao wrote:

They have no materials maps, but they were set for alpha
masking
, not blending, right? (All mine have been, and if plain ol' alpha-blended surfaces start spontaneously switching to alpha: None, we're all in
deep
doo-doo!)

When this last happened I removed all materials (normal maps) and set the whole window to Alpha Masking, 100 cutoff. All was good. I thought.

When I checked them today (after receiving a customer report), the outer panes were set to Alpha None instead of Alpha Masking. The rest of the window remained Alpha Masking.

 

I talked to Whirly and sent her a copy of the window. I am going to send the "curtains" texture change script controller, which changes the affected outer panes -- but does not affect transparency levels in any way. Will keep checking in here as well.

BTW, I sell a lot of this house but I only get a report of this once a month or so -- but each time it is reported, I can see the bug manifested on my model. So far I have been able to fix it but it does not seem to stick.

 

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Pamela Galli wrote:

... each time it is reported, I can see the bug manifested on my model.  

Do I understand correctly: When there's a report of this happening on some mesh instance somewhere, you also see it has happened on your own instance? (!)

If so, this bug is even stranger than I'd appreciated.

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No no, when someone buys the house, they report that the windows have gone black, usually within a short time of purchase.  Then I go check my model, which was working fine LAST time I fixed it, and it has reverted to Alpha None. I thought removing the normal map did the trick, but no.

 

What is odd is that I do not get multiple reports -- one person has the problem, and my model has the problem, but evidently no one else with the house has a problem, or at least no one else reports it.

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Sorry, either I said it imprecisely, or else I'm just being dense. I meant to confirm that you get a report of this happening to an instance of your house somewhere, and when you check your own instance of that house, this happened to it, too. If that's not what you're saying, then I'm very sorry for (still) not understanding, (And again, if that is what you're saying, this really is unfathomably weird.)

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Qie Niangao wrote:

Sorry, either I said it imprecisely, or else I'm just being dense. I meant to confirm that you get a report of this happening to an instance of your house somewhere, and when you check your own instance of that house, this happened to it, too. If that's not what you're saying, then I'm very sorry for (still) not understanding, (And again, if that
is
what you're saying, this really is unfathomably weird.)

Sorry if I misread -- what you say above is correct. 

IOW when I go check my model to see if it, too, in addition to the customer's copy, has reverted to Alpha None, well yes it has. 

I have never heard of any bug weirder than the ones associated with this one, where just looking at it will change how it looks for others -- altho Whirly says the original bug is fixed (I dont know which is the original).

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  • 1 month later...

Pamela, I have some "good" news.

I reproduced your bug with the windows - only took 7 weeks  lol.

I have NO clue yet what caused it to happen but it happened right infront of my eyes.

I was logged in on default LL release, Second Life 4.0.1 (310054) Jan 14 2016 18:17:17 (Second Life Release) & alone on the region.

One minute the windows were all alpha masked as expected. I was camming around the region & suddenly I noticed all the windows were black. I verified my alt on Firestorm also saw them as black and when edited, the textures were all set to alpha mode none.

Every single one of the windows had changed to alpha none.



 Now to see if I can get it to happen again...

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Thank you Whirly!  I sent you an IM a few weeks ago when I noticed the windows in the model had turned black. But I dont look at them every day so not sure exactly how long it took them to turn.

I just hope someone can figure this out. I am surprised I have not gotten any more reports in all this time.  Could it have to do with estate managers looking at them or something, like that related bug?

 

 

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Pamela Galli wrote:

 

I would really love to know why these windows are affected and other alpha masked window  textures and plants are not.

Oh, I'm fairly sure that *any* alpha masked texture would be affected by the bug, as long as it's modify to at least the object owner. Are your windows mod to your customers?

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I too am very grateful to Whirly. Thanks to the continued / renewed attention to this, it appears Obvious has found a repro, which should help isolate the bug and get it fixed.

What's evidently happening in that repro, however, makes me wonder what all else is being sent, spuriously, from viewer to sim.

I guess I always imagined, erroneously, that when a viewer starts editing an object, that kinda "unlocks" the object's representation, sim-side, to accept updates from the viewer. Evidently every object is eligible for updates from every viewer all the time, protected only by object permissions.

Once again proving: you learn something new every day -- whether you want to or not!

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Whirly Fizzle wrote:


Pamela Galli wrote:

 

I would really love to know why these windows are affected and other alpha masked window  textures and plants are not.

Oh, I'm fairly sure that *any* alpha masked texture would be affected by the bug, as long as it's modify to at least the object owner. Are your windows mod to your customers?

Yes they are. In any case I have only seen the problem on those windows, and on nothing else with alpha masking. I use alpha masking on a number of things, too. Now I am wondering if I should try uploading another copy of the texture, in case it is corrupted at the database level. 

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are the textures on those particular windows larger or more detailed than on your others? i would expect that the longer the texture takes to download, the more likely this bug would trigger.

plain old luck can matter too, since right now there is a race to get the texture into your viewer's memory before it notices the object.

 
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