SL_ouch™ – another weekend of crashes
To all those who keep seeing my name appear, then disappear almost at once… please accept my apologies. The mainstream viewer is moderately crashy, but the RC viewer (now standing at RC2) is much much worse. My suspicion is that it relates to a recent change in the graphics options – if you look through preferences / graphics, you’ll eventually find a button labeled ‘Hardware options’, which allows you to tweak some performance options. At one time, this just allowed you to turn anisotropic filtering on/off, and later it allowed for fiddling with vertex buffering.
Recently, an option to change antialiasing settings was added. This option (like the anisotropic filtering option) is entirely redundant, because it’s possible to change system-wide settings for these (usually using an application from the graphics card maker). Some system setting programs allow different profiles on a per application basis – ideal for customising settings for SL_ipshod™, you’d think. Clearly though, it’s not good enough for the people of SL_apDash™.
There are only two slight drawbacks to the SL_eepy™ approach… (1) it wastes time that could be used for fixing broken things, and (2) it’s broken, so it needs fixing itself. Not only does it not change antialiasing for SL_owboat™, it even disables the system settings, so you end up with no antialiasing at all – just jaggies everywhere. And, as I discovered, if I set 8x antialiasing it prevents my system from creating an application window, so the whole thing crashes on loading, even before logging in. And the only way out is to track down the SL_oppy™ xml settings file and manually edit it back to something useable.
And none of the crashes created by this problem are logged, so none will get back to the SL_ovenly™ authors, and the problem will be carried through to the mainstream viewer. At which point, SL_imChance™ will be inaccessible to me.