I paid a visit to Roche today. I did this in part because I’ve been meaning to go since seeing it in Honour McMillan’s brilliant blog (probably the finest photo journal for SL explorations and thought-provoking musing on life, the metaverse and everything that there is), and partly because I’m trying to get to the bottom of a viewer issue plaguing me.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been encountering some issues when taking snapshots which see either the snapshot floater itself refuse to save images to my hard drive and / or which cause a sudden and huge memory bloat with the viewer which eventually brings it to a juddering halt. The issues don’t occur all the time, and appear to only affect my main account.

They mainly make themselves felt when I’m visiting multi-region estates, the mainland or regions with sim extenders, and only occur when I’m operating in deferred mode with shadows active. I’ve tried everything to get around the issue – an example of which is the last image in yesterday’s post, which took no fewer than four attempts for me to capture to disk due to the viewer refusing to save, then suddenly deciding it would after all. I’ve tried with draw distance turned right down, I’ve tried after clearing cache, with and without attachments, and so on and so forth. Nothing seems to make a difference. I’m reduced to picking a few choice words at random then either resorting to a screen capture tool or relogging.

The problem isn’t down to a single viewer, either. For a time I was blaming Firestorm – and my apologies to the Firestorm team for quite possibly single-handedly raising their crash rates in October. However, Both Zen and the last few releases of the SL Beta viewer (both with and without tcmalloc disabled) have yielded the same results (I’ve not got around to trying with others). The other oddity is that the same problems doesn’t occur when I’m on individual private regions (or those with surrounding regions hidden), and I can still upload snaps to my profile feed long after the floater has given up trying to save to my hard drive.

Nor does it appear to be hardware-related; while I quickly encounter problems with my main account, my Crash Test Alt (CTA) doesn’t encounter the same issues; so much so that I’ve been using it somewhat more frequently of late to get out and about to take snaps rather than facing an inevitable faff around or resorting to using a screen capture tool to grab some images.

All-in-all the problems have me a little puzzled.

Roche, on the other hand, doesn’t have me puzzled – it has me captivated. A Homestead region, it is the personification of beauty through simplicity, offering the lens artist a wonderful series of opportunities for film and stills which are quite unique.

This is a place which invites you co come and play, to fiddle with windlight and other settings to your heart’s content and see what you can produce. It is both backdrop and focal point; canvas and artwork, offering many opportunities for creative expression. It’s also a place deserving of careful exploration, because the attention to detail here is equally wonderful; my favourite part of the region is actually so hidden as to be easily missed – the short stretch of railway line which hugs a part of the shoreline; it simply invites the imagination to create a raft of narratives to go with it.

I love regions like this and Scribbled Hearts on Water Reserve or Blackcloud Oh’s Black Kite, simply because of the way that they do call to the artist within each of us and offer a page on which our imaginations can write a tale or two. This may have been my first visit to Roche – but I seriously doubt it will be my last.

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