transparent patches on avatar no matter what

[RAWRFoxy]

My friend's avatar just started having some problems with transparent, rectangular patches. Last night, it was just a small patch on her left hip, above her bum. The patch had "avatar comm" written in white letters on black background just above it. Other than that, it was entirely transparent. It would come and go at random. Today, she has multiple huge patches. One across her whole chest, one on the right side of her right thigh, all the way across the backs of her thighs, and one on the right side of her face.

These patches do not have anything to do with anything she is wearing. They happen no matter what skin, shape, clothes, etc she has on. We have rebaked, rebridged, relogged, and reset to the default avatar many times. It is now happening right away when resettting to default. This glitch is visible to everyone, including her. We have had builders, creators, and coders unable to help so far. Is there anyone with any other ideas? Is this something that is wrong server side?

 

Here are a couple pictures of it.

 

http://i.imgur.com/JJVZHZ0.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/ppJcmsR.jpg

[Trinity Yazimoto]

it seems shes wearing alpha layers.

Ask her to check typing "worn" in the search bar of her inventory and check everything shes wearing there. 

[RAWRFoxy]

Not at all. I was the one in her inventory for her, because she has MS and it's very difficult for her to move her hands. I fix things for her and set them so all she has to do is click a couple things to use sets. This happens no matter what she is or is not wearing, even when the only thing she has on is the shape, skin, and eyes, including default.

[Cerise Sorbet]

"Avatar Comm" matches the left hand corner of the menus as they appear on the Firestorm viewer, so this is a clue that pieces of the user interface are being baked into the avatar texture. Unexplained transparency can happen that way too.

Some common baking problems like this can come from a corrupt cache (so, empty it), running a viewer on a secondary monitor (don't do that, at least not while changing outfits), old video driver (time to update), unsupported hardware (ouch). Look into the secondary monitor and cache possibilities before you dig into the others.

[RAWRFoxy]

That's a lot more specific and may actually help. I'll try clearing the cache first. She does use dual monitors, but I'm not sure which one she runs the client on. I do know it's run on the main monitor, since that's all I can see on team viewer. I just don't know which plug it's in.

 

Edit: She just informed me she no longer has her second monitor, so that's not it. I have cleared her cache and it's reloading everything from scratch. So far, I see her body with no holes on my end, but no colors or textures yet. Her end is still the cloud. I'll update after everything is loaded again.

 

Edit 2: She's still not completely loaded on my screen and not at all on hers yet, but the holes have just reappeared. She was able to run it perfectly fine for over a week. This problem did not occur til now. Her hardware and drivers are fine. I just checked those, too.

 

Edit 3: After a lot of frustrated restarting, rebaking, relogging, and rebridging and her finally being able to see her own avatar, the holes are finally gone and have been for a few minutes. It may have been the cache clearing but just didn't want to entirely fix until she could fully see herself. I'll give it a couple days just to be sure, but it does seem fixed. I'm not sure there was anything else that could have been done, so hopefully that's it. Thank you very much for the help.

[Cerise Sorbet]

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RAWRFoxy wrote:

Edit 3: After a lot of frustrated restarting, rebaking, relogging, and rebridging and her finally being able to see her own avatar, the holes are finally gone and have been for a few minutes. It may have been the cache clearing but just didn't want to entirely fix until she could fully see herself. I'll give it a couple days just to be sure, but it does seem fixed. I'm not sure there was anything else that could have been done, so hopefully that's it. Thank you very much for the help.

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Yes, sounds like you were seeing the old version of her baked avatar that was still on the server, from before the cache clear, until she had a fully loaded inventory and could rebake for real.

This is exactly the kind of trouble that server side appearance will eliminate, so even if it does happene again, you can assure her it won't go on forever.

[RAWRFoxy]

Are there plans to switch to server sided appearance? I thought that's how it worked already, since you don't have to reapply your looks when logging in from another location. 

[Cerise Sorbet]

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RAWRFoxy wrote:

Are there plans to switch to server sided appearance? I thought that's how it worked already, since you don't have to reapply your looks when logging in from another location. 

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Right now, the clothing layers are composited on your own viewer (that's when the glitching happens). Your viewer uploads the baked textures to the local region, and they're stored as temp assets there. Your avatar carries around a pointer to that server, so that when you move elsewhere on the grid, your and other people's viewers know where to fetch those temp textures. If they've expired or that host is down, you get a fresh rebake triggered.

On the new system, the compositing will be done on special new servers LL is introducing for that purpose. The viewer's job will be reduced to "I'm wearing this set of clothes, please bake me an avatar from them." and texture fetches will be on a more conventional central system, more like where regular assets go.

The first official viewer to support this looks like it could be released as soon as tomorrow. LL already forwarded this code to third party viewer developers, and most of them are ready to go too. The server end is not active yet, because viewers had to come first, but it's going to happen really, really soon.

 

 

[RAWRFoxy]

That's good to know. Apparently, the glitch is still there no matter what she wears, but at least it's only on the back of her left hip and can be covered. Hopefully the update will resolve it entirely, so she will no longer have menu buttons on her behind. lol

[Dana Hickman]

Just wanted to add that the problem of getting viewer or other desktop textures baked into ones avatar is an old one, but clearing cache usually works. The most common cause of this (that I've seen or heard of) is people bringing up OTHER program windows (like a web browser or itunes) in front of the viewer window during the time that the viewer is refreshing those textures. One can reproduce this fairly easily, and I've even managed to corrupt the exterior textures of my skybox with pieces from my Firefox web browser toolbar at one time.. so it's not only avatars that can be affected, and there's really no mistaking what caused the problem.