[Opensim-users] On Linux, Latest SL/Opensim viewer not compatible with opensim water...

[Chris]

 From what I understand, some time ago LL had removed some local assets 
from the viewer code, including the default water shader texture, and 
the transparent highlighter (that red smokey texture you see when you 
enable transparency via CTRL ALT T) since they can directly be served 
from the SL grid servers. This results in the client not being able to 
find the textures either locally or get it from the server (since to my 
knowledge they don't exist in the OpenSim's set of assets that it is 
distributed with). Thus on more recent viewers, you see a shiny, smooth, 
almost mirror-like surface on the water, instead of ripples; and if you 
ever tried editing transparent / semi transparent prims on these viewers 
you may notice that when you enable show transparencies they all show up 
a solid red color instead of the smokey semi transparent highlight 
texture; Which by the way, solid opaque red is really hard to work with 
when editing a number of objects in close proximity and they all have 
some kind of transparency :)

The bad thing about the said asset removal is that you can't simply copy 
those assets from an older viewer and put them in your problematic 
viewer's install directory... It appears those viewers are now 
hard-coded to retrieve those assets from the server and will ignore the 
presence of the ones you copied over.

It's a bit of an "ungraceful" and a bit brute force approach I suppose 
but; I have a small IAR that I made up that inserts the water shader and 
the transparent highlighter textures into your inventory. Once it has 
been loaded the database will have the correct textures and UUID 
references for them and the viewers should start displaying them 
properly again. You don't even have to keep them in your inventory once 
it's loaded. Problem is, they are the same textures as found in the 
viewer's install directory and I am not sure if they can be distributed 
with OS. If none of the developers here have an issue though with me 
linking to the IAR that fixes the issue then I will gladly upload it 
somewhere and post up a link? Let me know please :)

-- Chris

On 4/2/2014 9:58 AM, riebling wrote:
> My intuition is that it's a viewer problem; does the Kokua viewer display
> water the same way when connecting to SL? If it does, then it's not an
> OpenSim problem. I am 99% sure water is 100% handled client side, and
> OpenSim server code has nothing to do with it.
>
> Maybe try some more experiments to narrow down possibilities.
> I just downloaded and ran viewer Kokua_64_3_7_4_32111_x86_64 on Ubuntu, and
> got normal looking water.
>
> One thing I DID notice about Kokua was that it does not allow me to choose
> advanced graphics settings. Kokua locks me out of certain things, where
> other viewers (Singularity) do not. (My graphics hardware is low quality
> motherboard-based, and generates a warning at startup) In spite of this,
> With Singularity, I can actually turn on shaders, advanced lighting model,
> water reflections, etc.
>
> Perhaps the Kokua developers would be interested in your findings.
>
>    http://wiki.kokuaviewer.org/wiki/Communication_Channels
>
> Good luck getting water to look better!
>
>
>
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