These days I use SL Go from OnLive a lot when engaging with Second Life. However some days I like to just fire up a local client, there are things SL Go can’t do. Unfortunately I had decided to install the latest AMD Catalyst drivers quite some time ago and this does not play nicely with rigged mesh in Second Life.
This is explained in Jira Bug-7653 : AMD Catalyst 14.12 Release ( plus 14.9.2, 14.11.1, 14.11.2 Beta) drivers will not render rigged mesh unless hardware skinning is disabled.
Well usually it doesn’t matter too much, others can see me ok if they aren’t using these drivers and it’s amusing to watch my beard conquer the Second Life world. However today, Inara Pey brought news of a fix in the works from AMD : AMD’s Catalyst™ 15.3 beta driver offers SL mesh fix.
Inara’s post points to the release notes for these beta drivers, which includes the following in the Resolved Issues section :
[413076] Second Life : Rigged mesh objects are not rendered correctly when hardware skinning is enabled in the in game settings.
Second Life isn’t the only platform mentioned, there are fixes for Star Trek Online, Total War : Attilla and The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim as well.
However, buoyed by this news regarding Second Life, I decided to give it a whirl and delve into the murky world of installing beta drivers.
I would advise people not to follow my path if they aren’t sure about what they are doing. Beta drivers are not the finished article and as well as resolved issues there are also known issues which may cause you new problems. However I do have some good news regarding the Second Life fix, it appears to work.
Logging back in to Second Life once I had installed the drivers, my avatar rezzed as expected.
The above image is my comparison, from left to right, using SL Go, using the official release AMD Catalyst drivers and using the Beta release AMD Catalyst drivers. Whereas I will miss my beard causing havoc, this looks like a fix that will please Second Life users.
As I said, the drivers are beta, I would suggest that people wait for the official release, but if you really can’t wait and are sure you know what you are doing, the beta drivers are available in the link I provided earlier to the release notes.