Friday, March 7, 2008

Problems with SL

I've had a lot of viewer problems recently. The regular viewer and the RC have slowly gotten worse and worse (the regular viewer became completely unusable, I moved to the RC, which was good...for a little bit, and then it too constantly crashed). I switched to WL, and dialed the settings down, and had a far more stable viewer than I've seen in about a year. Maybe ever. (The Beta Grid is still quite substantially more stable, but even it had a lovely crashfest yesterday.)

However, with the decision of LL to combine the RC and the Windlight viewer, I appear to no longer have the option of using the Windlight viewer. As of today, when I was forced to switch from the WL viewer to the WL/RC, I can't even _start_ SL in that viewer, it crashes before I even get to see a login screen. "Default settings have been set to recommended levels for your system" and crash. (I've filed a jira, but, considering how many crash reports there that were related to the other problem were effectively ignored and quite obviously not fixed, I am in no way optimistic that it will do any good whatsoever.)

I'm back on the regular viewer, because at least that I can log in to. However, it's still massively crashy. I may not be able to even use it for long (I switched to WL because it was less than 5 minutes in SL before a crash, and that's with me not moving my camera or my avatar in any way. If this continues, I'm effectively being locked out of the platform).

This is especially frustrating as I've been working on a number of projects, including items for a fashion show on the 18th. I've not given up entirely on SL yet, and am trying to find ways to continue, but at the moment I'm extremely pessimistic (having just crashed, again).

5 comments:

H K said...

I know how you feel. I recently bought a new video card (one that SL says specifically that is supported) and it does not work @ all with the RC viewer or the standard release viewer. It crashes instantly upon logging no, no matter how many times I've reinstalled or eliminated SL from my system. I've been forced to try to work and create on windlight. (What's worse, my camera settings seem to have been changed so no matter how much I fiddle in preferences, I can't seem to get back to how it was before for zooming and such.)

What I've found to help with the crashing under windlight is to turn the video preferences all the way down when creating (the little slider bar we now have) and then selectively check off things that are an absolute under custom settings - things like shading, view distance, etc.

Hope this helps, you're not alone.

Samara Kasshiki said...

You might try the onrez viewer -- http://viewer.onrez.com/ which many of us have been using for several months with better performance. Not a "pretty" as windlight which I still use for photography. Interface is a bit different and you have a CSI welcome screen that you need to click though but it has helped a lot of us :))) Good luck.

amaterasu said...

Give the 1.18.5 Bleeding Edge (nicholaz-BE-v) viewer a go. I find that pretty much fixed most the issues I had with SL, and is much more the classic viewer than the On-Rez one is. You can get it at this link http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.
com/2007/12/release-bleeding-edge-be-v.html
Make sure you have the correct version of SL installed to run it (link is in that post)

Good Luck!

Allegory Malaprop said...

Hazel: Until yesterday, I was a WL convert. I'd been having massive badness and slowly been working my way through the list, and WL was insanely, refreshingly, amazingly stable, _and_ way less laggy (my settings were dialed way down, draw 64, no whizbang features, but I didn't care, it _worked_). Yesterday, when they merged the WL and RC code paths, I couldn't even get to the login screen before crashing- I can't change settings, because it doesn't get that far! Hence my frustration- the one viewer that had made everything better got nuked, for me.

Samara: The onrez viewer got weeded out with the last round of viewer wars (which was 2 or 3 weeks ago maybe?), when everything crashed me in under 5 minutes. I find the interface difficult to work with, but I'll still be giving it a try in the hopes that the upgrade to 1.19 for it did something positive, instead of just more negatives, but I'm not optimistic.

Amaterasu: Does the Nicholaz viewer work in the post 1.18 environment? He had stated he wasn't going for 1.19 as of yet, and they've said they've locked out pre 1.19 viewers. It worked for me (very) briefly, before it started crashing constantly, just like the regular viewer (and, since he isn't updating it as of yet, I'm assuming it won't have improved, since the underlaying regular viewer problem still exists). Boy Lane's viewer was somewhat more successful in not crashing all the time...but it corrupted textures constantly. Sculpties wouldn't load properly and were inside out huge blobs, half my face was #ff0000 red most of the time, my pants were half teal, and uploaded textures got corrupted and turned very messy.


Thank you all for the tips, and I'm not giving up yet. This post was largely born of massive frustration on having found the one thing that worked for me didn't any more, and having crashed the regular viewer yet again- it's proving slightly more stable this go round (I've been able to stay in for over an hour, so long as I don't change location or do much, which sure beats crashing just after logging in), but there's still something seriously wrong.

amaterasu said...

Sorry on the delay replying. If you go to the Nicholaz site, download 1.18.5 from there, then install his according to his instructions, then Yes, it does work.
I am running Nicholaz at the moment on 1.18.5. and it is stable.
Personally I am dreading 1.19 being compulsory on all viewers as that will lock me out (anything WL does not run for me).

 
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