Phoenix Firestorm Project

Crashing While Running Firestorm

If you find that you are crashing frequently, then perhaps the suggestions here will be helpful. Please don't skim the page - read it carefully.

It is important to distinguish between two things….

Being logged out or disconnected

If a small window appears, saying that you have been logged out of SL, this isn't a crash. Rather, SL is disconnecting you, for one of a number of reasons, including:

The region you are in is going down;
During teleport, the SL servers may fail to hand you over to your destination and so log you out; help on that is given here.
Your network connection has gone down;
Your network connection has become poor or unreliable and SL has lost contact with your avatar.

Things to try - in order:

reboot your router/modem, then your computer;
make sure your bandwidth is set correctly - follow the instructions hereexactly as given;
shut down any other programs that are making heavy use of your network connection, such as torrents;
If you use Mac with Yosemite, see if this might be your case.
If the problems persist still, try changing your DNS to Google, as explained here.

Being Logged Out While Editing Appearance

If you are being logged out when you edit appearance, or edit shape, or use the Appearance toolbar button, did you drop items into the Outfits folder that were not created via the Outfits/Appearance window? If so, remove those items.

Crash

Firestorm itself has crashed. The remainder of this page offers possible solutions.

Update your Operating System. See the advice from LL, and the reasons behind it, here.

(Windows-only)
- If you are using an ATI (AMD) graphics card, then please refer here for known problems with these cards.
- For nVidia users, please refer to this page.
- Also for nVidia: if you recently updated your drivers and are experiencing crashes, try reverting to an older driver that worked for you.

(Mac-only)
- If you have El Capitan plus Nvidia graphics, see http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/mac_el_capitan
- If you crash when uploading images to SL or when saving snapshots to your hard drive, see http://wiki.phoenixviewer.com/mac_crash_upload

In Preferences → Graphics → General, reduce Draw Distance by at least half (or more). Also reduce Max # non-impostor avatars.

Disable VBO: Run Firestorm and before logging in, press Ctrl-P to bring up the Preferences window. Then click on Graphics → Hardware Settings tab. Make sure that “Enable OpenGL Vertex Buffer Objects” is not checked.

Several creators recommend specific settings in order for you to be able to better see their products. Sadly, some of these recommendations will lead to many people crashing more. For example:
- RenderVolumeLODFactor should never be set over 4; a good value is between 2 and 3.
- TextureLoadFullRes should never be enabled.

(Grids other than SL only!) Disable HTTP Get Textures: Open the preferences window, then click on Graphics → Rendering tab. Make sure “Use HTTP Textures” is not checked. Please clear your cache if you change this setting.

It is possible that your graphics settings are set higher than your computer can handle. To see if this is the case, go to Preferences → Graphics, and click on Reset (the circular arrow to the right of the quality slider). After doing this, you may still need to reduce Draw Distance and Max # non-impostor avatars, as mentioned above.

If you have Shadows turned on, try turning them off. See this page for more side effects of shadows.

Another thing you can try is: Develop → World → Dump Region Object Cache, then relog. (The Develop menu is revealed with Ctrl-Alt-Q, if you cannot see it.) This sometimes also helps deal with odd texture issues; it may need to be done several times.

If clicking on a link or SLURL in Firestorm causes an instant crash: do you have AVG 2011 installed? If so, it probably flagged SLPlugin as malware. See here for more on this.

If you have Webroot SecureAnywhere Antivirus, see Webroot Issues.

If you are crashing when you try to upload a texture, please try disabling VBO, as described above. Also, if you are on Windows and running Microsoft SkyDrive, prefer refer here. If you are on a Mac, this workaround may fix the problem.

If the above tips do not help, you might benefit from a cache clear or viewer reinstall.

If you find that a full manual cache clear allows you to log in, and you crash unless you do this, then there is a good chance that you have one or more problems with certain inventory items; please see this page for how to deal with this.