I Got Bugs In My Pocket, I Don't Know What To Do With Them

Above is the nasty and rare, SL Texture Badness Bug! Below I will tell you Ninja Starley's magical cure! I'm gonna blog about that, some video tutorials I want to do today, hmmm oh and a new Taunt Quality Reward System to which Willow is the first recipient (she does not know yet)! And a few news and links...I'm already stressing that there are too many stories to write today. On with the shew...

Second Life Texture Badness Bug
There is a rare texture bug that happens to some people randomly in Second Life and it happened to me yesterday. Fortunately, Starley is the master bug repair queen on this issue because several of her customers have had it. This bug comes in two varieties...nasty yet fixable, and super nasty, not fixable. Starley says that one to two customers a week are now getting the lighter bug and she has only seen the unfixable one two times ever.

What happened to me was that I was going to take screen caps for some hair and Whammmo! The edit control panel picture was melded onto my head instantly! If I right clicked myself for appearance, I became normal, but as soon as I left appearance, the bug was back. Here is how to fix the issue from a notecard that Starley made.

Starley writes:
If your skin or clothing item is moddable, it is easy to fix this bug yourself. If your skin is bugged, the first thing to do is put on a default skin. Here is a plain SL one to use.Wait for the skin to rez fully, then change back to your bugged skin and wait for that to rez fully. If it's still bugged when it's completely rezzed, follow these steps: Go to appearance mode, on the appropriate tab (skin, if it's a bugged skin; pants, if it's bugged pants, etc). Change any slider by any amount. Hit "Save" and exit appearance. That will refresh the textures in 99% of all cases. If you wish, you may now go back to appearance, undo the changes you made and "Save" again. If your skin or clothing article is NO MOD, you will need to contact the creator to perform the steps for you and provide you with a fixed copy of the item. If you fall in one of the remaining 1% where the above steps do not correct the issue, try the following: Go to appearance, on the SHAPE tab, change any slider by 2 points, hit "Save" and exit. This should solve the problem. If you STILL see texture issues, you may need to clear your cache. In preferences (Ctrl P) on the Network tab, press the "Clear Cache" button. Then exit and relog into SL. Voila! That should do it. :) If you are still experiencing issues after taking all of the above steps, you may need to update video card drivers.

Those steps will fix almost all occurances of the problem. Here is kind of the short version of what I did. Try these three steps:

1. go into appearance
2. slide your skin pigment darker or lighter maybe 10-20%
3. save as and exit appearance

This seemed to work for me. I did put on the default skin and then another skin but that didn't seem to do much compared to Starley's tip of just adjusting the pigment slider slightly. I also noticed that when I put on other skins, I was ok...so the bug seems to target one item and stick to it, and so if you can nudge the pigment, it seems to trick it into releasing or something.

Now there is a worse version of this bug that can not be repaired and here are two screen captures. One of the hardest problems with these bugs is newer customers trying to explain it...they believe the product is buggy or crap, when it is an SL bug. If a person can screen cap and show you, it is easier to diagnose, but few people who are new have screen cap skills and so they think they are getting crooked and we might think they are insane explaining the issue. hehe.

Generally speaking, the unrepairable bug version is usually people with computers that do not have an SL approved video card. They may have a old card or a laptop with a weaker card, and these seem to get bugged skins etc that can't be fixed. It never hurts to toss in a new video driver as well. Starley also had a suggestion to ask that if any technical people out there are reading this and have better info, please feel free to post a comment and help clarify the issue. Thank you Starley for the repair tips! If you get the bug and need help, drop by Celestial City and Starley can hit you up with that notecard as well which links to a default skin.

News Stories and Fast Links
Here are a few links I saw and want to toss out quickly:

MMORPG New Organized Crime Target
I have had my WoW account hacked and as they say at the end of this story, it is difficult at best telling the cops "they stold my Blue Julie Dagger and 20 Arcanite". This is white collar crime that is no fun and there are few repurcussions.

CAPSoff Google Group
Sol sent me to this group posted about on SlashDot. It is like an ALL CAP hanging posse. hehehe. CAPSoff.

New Video Tutorials In The Making!
Today I am taking a hair break and want to crank out a few short video tutorials. Here is what the plan is:

IMVU Bundles (if they are not broken)
Second Life Classifieds
Second Life Prim Fun
How To De-Crook or De-Crap your computer

If things go really smooth, I might try the dreaded "Submit your first 3D item to IMVU" but I'll wait and see how things go first. Oh! And I wanted to tell Elika that her computer is as cool as all the rest!

Alluring Elika wrote
::cries:: I'm a dell user :( Don't hate me....but I love my Dell. I'm not computer savvy and would rather have someone make it for me than me do it myself

Wait! Elika... *big hugs* I need to restate some of my rants from yesterday; Dell computer's themselves do not such since all computers use Intel or AMD cpus and and Nvidia or ATi video card...parts are parts. The problem with Dell corporation, is they load these computers up with so many programs at the factory, it lowers user satisfaction levels, do to long boot times, low memory levels, software conflicts, and annoying upsell mall ware. There is great news...and the news is...anyone can "clean" aka "de-crap" or "de-crook" their Dell, with about 15 minutes of effort. I tried to describe the technique, but everything is easier in a video, so I am going to make a quick tutorial on the subject which I hope helps anyone wanting to learn the dark art.

Again, here is a quick test for anyone who has never done it...this will take 3 seconds. Do this and we will check what is under your hood:

Step One.......click START on the lower left of your monitor
Step Two.......click RUN
Step Three.....in the box type MSCONFIG then click return or enter

a little window jobby should open. Click the very right hand tab called Startup

Step Four.....click that STARTUP tab as said above
Step Five......look at all the crap!

If you have an older computer that you've never done this with, or if you have a computer from the top three sellers, you may see 20-30 items in here, all checked on! Most computers rarely need more than 5 things at the most on in this area. All these things are coming on secretly when you boot. In the video, we will turn these bastards off! It really is ninja fun and if you enjoy a good purge in real life, you will enjoy this cleaning fiesta. These tricks make Dell's run faster that AlienWares! Oui.

Taunt's New Quality Reward Program!
100 years ago, Sanchy the wife and I used to own a sign store in Cucamonga California. The store was called Swifty Sign and you can still find the website for the store in google...we sold to our good friend and employee, Scott aka 'Little Buddy'. If you have read this blog, I'm sure you have said to yourself "boy, that Twid couldn't spell himself out of a wet paper bag!" This is true. Can you imagine the problems I got into, making signs and selling them to customers, only to have angry customers return two weeks later, bonking me on the head with a sign because of a missed spelling error!

How do you improve spelling errors at a sign shop? Well you can yell at employees and say "by golly you better catch all errors or no chocolate cookies for you!"...but this approach is mean and never works...I would hate a boss like that. You could yell at me and say "no more spelling errors or you get a spanking!" That never seemed to work that well either. Personally I find you can solve a lot of problems with cold hard cash!

We started a rule "find any spelling error on any sign before it goes out the door, and you get $10." Wow! I have never seen employees read signs so carefully! We went from 5 spelling errors a week to maybe one a month! My employees were peeing their pants with glee since some of them were making and extra $50 a week just catching my bad spelling! Sanya and I tried harder not to spell poorly since it was costing us cash! hehehe This system worked very well and they still use it today.

Well today, Willow caught that I had the Sharise Demo in the Sage box! That was very kind of her to let me know. Kyau and Ashley have also caught some of my mistakes in the past and I rewarded them with hair as thanks. Today, I want to start the "Find a Taunt Store Error, Get $1000L". So if the blonde hairs are every in the black pack, or if a color is missing, or a pack is mispriced, and you catch it first, IM me and I'll thank you and hit you with the cash. Yay! Let me be lawyerish and say *some limitations apply. LoL I hope this is a fun Win Win thing.

My Graphic Artist Pet Peeve
Here is one last story that I personally find interesting and humorous. Starley was telling me about a new SL Business website online. The site looks just awesome. I do have one complaint and some of you will think I am crazy...but do you see that logo on the top left...I call that logo "Excited Man With Hands In Air"! OMFG...it is like, 1000 graphic artists all got together on a boat and said "I really think we need to all use a stylistic excited man with hands in the air logo"..."great idea!" and then they all ran off and did the same logo! Back when I had my porn newsletter, I used to collect these logos...sadly I lost the page but it was up to 25 designs...and there honestly has to be at least 50-100 companies using this logo! Hehehehe. Of course the biggest is Cingular, but there are tons and tons and tons more...I am always flooding Starley with IM links to them. Let me try and find one...that took 3 seconds....BizRate. Excited Stylized Man with Hands In Air. hehehe. Hmm wonder if I can find another...4 seconds...Excite Excited Stylized Man with Hands In Air. Cingular for fun. Keep your eyes peeled for "excited stylized man with hands in the air" because is he out there...everywhere. hehe.

Ooops, just found one three minutes later. Vonage. "I have not legs but I am an excited sylistic man with hands in air".

Comments

[Torley Linden]

Quick Q about the bad texture bake bug, does this work for you?

Debug menu> Character > Rebake Textures

Please let me know if it does!

[Willow]

Another tip, which I find handy if not actually rezzing is to turn antistrophic filtering on or off (whichever it isn't set to), click apply, let everything re-render or whatever then click the box again, apply again to get back to your original setting and voila! Whatever wasn't rezzed is rezzed now!

It's worked a few times in the past when I have been modelling for Elika! WOOT!

[dev]

just flush the textures, like in other game engines in the debug menu. That's why we code it.

[dev]

just flush the textures or rebake them in SL (depends the engine), like in other game engines in the debug menu. That's why we code it. That always corrects the problem.

[Starley]

Rebaking does NOT fix the bad bug. I've been on live help for hours with this and absolutely nothing suggested by anyone has ever fixed it. Rebaking, avatar vertex, clear cache, restart, reboot, update drivers. Nada. It's like permabug. I do not see a flush textures in the debug menu. I see flush animations in debug > character. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place?

For a little more clarity, I get a customer report of the first (fixable) bug about once every week or two. I've seen the bad unfixable bug only 2 times ever. The first girl I worked with for about 3 hours and she finally got so frustrated she logged out and I don't think she ever came back. :(

All I know of the 2 customers affected was that they were both running a Dell laptop, but I don't remember the specs.

[dev]

Rebaking should always work. Called various things to different engines, still always works 100% but that might also be a hardware issue for you (laptops for one and dell for two), as I asked around here. Running dual 7800 cards on the alienware test machine here, and one single 6800, works fine. No issues and the people i've worked with that have occasionally has this bug, use the rebake method, which always works instantly. Of course we have direct access to these textures too. Havok isn't too great either. Lots of possibilities combined can produce different results, I just know everyone I've worked with, which run about the same specs as the test machine, don't have issues. Being serious gamers, most of us are running alienwares or equivelent built rigs.