Posts filed under ‘Issues’
Endless Loop Fixed in PhotoStand II version 1.2.1
Some customers may have encountered a problem with the 1.2.1 version of PhotoStand II, in which the stand will continue to generate menus even after you’ve closed them. This problem was fixed in later updates to the PhotoStand II. If you’re a PhotoStand II Pro user, please update to the most recent version (1.2.3). Send me a notecard inworld to arrange for an update, and please include your full SL name in the card. If you are a PhotoStand II Basic user, please just drop by AMS @ Lady Vale (Lady Vale 112, 240, 301) or AMS @ Smaug (Smaug 220,232, 33) to pick up the latest free version of PhotoStand II Basic.
To check the version number of your stand, please follow these steps:
- edit the stand (right-click the stand and select edit)
- open the Contents tab in the edit window
- scroll to the bottom of the Contents list to locate the script titled “Control – PhotoStand II – v1_”
- check the “v1_” number: if it is “v1k” then you are using version 1.2.1 and need to update your stand
- if the final letter is higher than “k” (i.e. “v1m”), then your stand should be fine (note: in the latest version, 1.2.3, the Control script is labelled “v1n”)
Please accept our apologies for any inconvenience caused by this problem.
Lights under new viewer
It seems that the new Second Life viewer, version 1.19.1 (4), has some quirks about local lights that may affect PhotoStage and PhotoLite. In particular, there are some situations where one or more local lights apparently switch off when other light sources are nearby. This happens, for example, when you are wearing a facelight.
We have observed the following. If you are wearing a facelight and use PhotoStage or PhotoLite to create a light, it rezzes up correctly in an “on” state, but apparently switches off (i.e. it stops illuminating the scene) after one second or so. If you right-click and edit the light object it will switch on again instantly and, in fact, if you look at the Light checkbox in the Features tab of the Edit floater, you will see that it is ticked. However, the light object apparently does not emit any light when it is not being edited.
Evidently, this affects the look of your photos, since lights that are supposed to be “on” do not illuminate the scene as they are supposed to do. The workaround is to avoid wearing any facelights or similar light sources when operating the PhotoStage or PhotoLite.
This seems to be caused by the way in which the new viewer version handles local light precedence, which is different to what previous versions of the viewer used to do. If you have any feedback about this behaviour, please post a comment here. Many thanks.
New updates of PhotoStage and PhotoLite
We have just made available a new version of PhotoStage and PhotoLite, numbered 1.1.1 in both cases.
The major new features in this release are:
- A chat interface has been added. This means that you can control your PhotoStage or PhotoLite by typing commands on the chat area.
-
The much improved PhotoStand 1.1.0 is included. This new version of PhotoStand features rotation pinning.
-
Technical fix: we have rewritten most of the communications infrastructure in both products, which works around the cause of the dreadful stuck menus effect.
Please see your User’s Manual for detailed instructions on how to use these new features.
If you already own a PhotoStage or PhotoLite, remember that you can obtain this update for free by click Options, then Update from the main menu. As usual, you can buy these products from the Ananke Media Systems demo site in Lady Vale as well as the online stores OnRez and SLExchange.
No-transfer textures failing to show on the PhotoStage backdrop
We have detected that no-transfer textures fail to show on the PhotoStage backdrop. You can add a no-transfer texture to the backdrop, but when you try to use it by navigating to it using the Previous/Next buttons, the backdrop turns white (or whatever other colour you had it set to) and a script error is shown.
We have traced the cause back to the SVC-368 issue documented in JIRA. It seems that the llSetLinkTexture() function does not work well with no-transfer textures.
The obvious solution is to use transferrable textures with the PhotoStage. We are updating the User’s Manual to reflect this.
In addition, we will study the feasibility of modifying the PhotoStage backdrops so that they work around the bug. This is not a trivial change to make, and it may take some time. We will announce any progress here. In the meantime, please stick to textures with transfer permissions.
We hope that you understand that this is not an issue with PhotoStage, but a documented error of Second Life.
Oh, and thanks to Corbin Carling for raising this issue with us.
After the 1st February blues
Now that the SL glitch that broke the PhotoStage’s scripts has been solved, we can spend some time explaining exactly what happened.
Linden Lab announced an update of the server code on 31st January. This was applied as a rolling restart, which caused no apparent problems other than the sims going offline for a few minutes as it is usual. However, the server update changed something that was not documented, announced or advertised. Before the update, the Description field of any prim could contain many characters, including (why not, one could ask) the character called a pipe “|”. This character is often used by scripters and programmers as a delimiter, i.e. used to separate blocks of text or values from each other. The Description field of prims is also used frequently as a common place where data can be shared by multiple scripts running in a single prim. Finally, I must point out something that is pretty evident, but apparently needs pointing out (you will see why in a minute): when you put some text into the Description field of a prim, you expect it to stay there, unchanged, until you (or somebody else) changes it. This is just common sense.
After the update, things changed. You can still put a pipe character into the Description field of any prim, but that character is automatically and silently converted to a question mark “?”. Imagine that your script puts the text “hello|there” in the Description of a prim; next time you look at it, it will show “hello?there”. As you can imagine, having characters changed by SL under the hood, silently, and without your permission, is not a good thing. Your script relies on finding some text there and, instead, it finds something else. As a consequence, what used to work before doesn’t work now.
I am going into rant mode now.
PhotoStage update available now
PhotoStage 1.0.6 is now available. This is an “emergency” update that works around the problems introduced by yesterday’s rolling restart. No functionality changes have been made.
Current owners of PhotoStage can get the update automatically by clicking the Reset button on the PhotoStage main menu. The new version will be dispatched to you after a few seconds.
The new version is also available from all our retail points, both web and inworld.
Important: please don’t forget to transfer any backdrop textures and saved configurations to the new version of PhotoStage before you delete the old one.
SL glitch affecting PhotoStage
It seems that the fixes that Linden Lab applied to SL servers during yesterday’s rolling restart have introduced a number of problems. The official Linden Blog reports so (http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/02/01/fix-may-cause-problems-for-scripts-relying-on-long-object-names-and-descriptions/).
A few minutes ago we detected that these problems can affect the correct functioning of PhotoStage, and immediately contacted Linden Lab via customer support requesting more information and, ideally, a fix. We are also investigating a workaround to make PhotoStage function correctly even if Linden Lab don’t fix these problems. We will make a PhotoStage update available as soon as we can. We will send a new group notice once it’s ready with specific instructions on how to obtain it.
In the meantime, we apologise for the inconvenience, and we hope that you understand that this is a problem introduced by Linden Lab and there is not much that we can do to avoid it.
Ananké Media Systems 