Tricks for tracking down and eliminating missing prims?

My brother and I have become concerned that there are either phantom prims or prims we don't know about on our land.

We have done some accounting and there are discrepancies; what can the collective forum mind suggest that we have not already thought of?

There are two problems - first, a number of prims that are not accounted for in the "set to group" total (we have autoreturn on) and are identified in the About Land screen as "selected/sat upon." From reading previous posts here, my guess is that these are "phantom prims" that will clear up after a sim restart. We are on mainland, so should I put in a ticket to request a restart?

The other problem is just tracking down and identifying all the prims that supposedly are real and ours. The About Land screen shows 883 of these but each of us has flown around doing our own accounting and we're each coming up about 60 prims short. (Our counts aren't in complete agreement but if we were both within 10-20 prims of the Linden total I would not worry about it.)

So what can you recommend for tracking down and accounting for all of your prims on your property? I have tried the following:

* searched underground using wire-frame mode
* searched at 0,0,0 using wire-frame and camming (yes, sadly, our land includes 0,0,0)
* set my draw distance so my field of view encompassed my whole land and flew up and down very slowly, attempting to select things along the way
* pored over my land, selecting everything I could think of and keeping a careful tally on a notecard

The bulk of our prims are located on a platform 700m in the sky. But between this platform, a smaller platform a few hundred meters below, and a few prims on the ground, we can't come closer than 60 prims to the About Land total. What do you all suggest?

I can't think of anything.

Madhu- I experienced a similar situation a long time ago - I did nto know about restarts then. If for some reason that cannot be done- what I did rather unintentionally was to return ALL- I ltook every last thing I had and anyone had on my land - it was a lot believe me! Then restarted from zero. Drastic response I know, but like I said, it wasn't intentional. It did, however, made me realize every once in a while- you gotta shake the cobwebs.
Good luck- just remember what was of particular interest if you choose that route- so you can reassemble - I am sure there are tons of pix of the cafe

In ABOUT LAND click on the REFRESH LIST button and you will see who owns how many prims on your land. I haven't seen any discrepancies with this number, but there might be an occasional one.

Also, when you are searching, be sure to turn on HIGHLIGHT TRANSPARENT in the VIEW options. It helps sometimes in finding discrepancies.

Lastly, you might want to think about SUBDIVIDE in the EDIT TERRAIN to find out exactly where the rogue prims are located at.

IM me inworld if you need any help in finding them.

One option:
Set you draw and select distance high.
Set "Select my objects only" or not, depending on what you are looking for.
Do an Edit Select over a wide range of the emptiness around you at intervals from ground up to 780. You might find a few unexpected highlights.
I've found more than a few tiny and transparent prims floating about at times.

Another:
Shift-drag prim-copying is your enemy.
I've lost count of the number of times that a laggy building session has left what looks like a single prim actually being a number of cloned prims all at exactly the same location.
I get paranoid sometimes - moving a prim just to check if it's sharing space with a clone or two.
You can 'lose' a lot of prims with shift-drag.

Another:
I have a Conover's Gadget that scans for prims up to 90m range. I'm not in atm but a serach for Thomas Conover should help.
It lists by owner and can indicate the location of a listed prim by shooting at stream of particles at it. This is particularly useful if the prim is inside another prim.

Assuming the counting is by dragging a selection rectangle around the assemblies and looking at what the Editor thinks the count is, you'd get those double-primmed things counted. (They *are* a nuisance.) And there's still a 60 prim discrepancy between those totals and the parcel prim count, I'm supposing.

It may well come to Amaranthim's suggestion. Before I learned never ever to build on anything but a sandbox (usually vacant land of my own--emphatically *not* the land where the assemblies are to end up), I also ended up having to strip parcels bare and re-rez from inventory the stuff actually desired.

In my case, what happens is that small prims, like 0.5m or less in each dimension, just get lost; poseballs are frequent culprits. Finding them requires that your avatar be within draw distance of them; just having your cam close enough doesn't do it: they don't rez, so they can't highlight. And now they can be scattered anywhere over your parcel from 0 to 4096m in height. It would take hours and hours to hunt for them by moving your avatar a hundred meters or so vertically (and possibly horizontally, for a large parcel) and re-selecting a drag rectangle, over and over again.

I've also written one-off scripts to scan my parcels on occasion. I never bothered to make this general-purpose at all--and it would seem a non-trivial task to make such a scanner do as well as theoretically possible and to detect when it just can't resolve all the objects. (Imagine, for example, 17 identical one-prim objects at exactly the same coordinates; no sensor can see all of them.) But probably somebody has done it.

I once blew up a beaded necklace with some very tiny beads. I didn't even realize that I had done this, but the partner found them one night. Prior to that I had been raising hell about our prim allowance and had assumed/semi-accused our neighbor of hanging over our property lines. (not to him personally though)

I'm glad you've asked this. Excellent question.

Thanks for the suggestions, folks. I will give them some thought and see what I can find.

A few follow-up comments:

* I should have mentioned that the searching I did through the ground and the airspace was done with "show transparent" on.

* The About Land list of owners isn't going to help me because I am trying to locate 40-60 prims that, according to About Land, are owned by me or by my brother, but that we can't account for with objects we know about. There are no foreign-owned prims on the land.

* Subdividing is a good idea. Then I could redo the accounting for each subsection. It would be an even better idea if not for the fact that most of my prims are up in the sky; it's very hard to tell up there which subdivided parcel I'd be standing on. But, I could probably come up with some subdivisions that would help.

* When I did my count I did it by selecting objects or selecting around areas and letting the editor tell me what the prim count was. So I'm not too worried about doubled prims.

* Returning everything on the parcel is not really an option; I am not up to rebuilding the entire cafe at this time. Put another way, the time and effort it would take me to put the cafe back together is not worth the price of 60 lost prims on my parcel; even with the lost prims we still have a margin left to work with before we need to tier up.

Thanks again everyone! Please keep the thoughts and suggestions coming; I hope these ideas will be useful to others as well.

Be very, VERY careful about subdividing, you could end up losing a lot of your builds.

The problem with subdividing is this (for example): if you own an entire sim, and have 15,000 prims at your disposal, and you use most of these in a huge build in the centre of your sim, and you then want to subdivide the sim into, say 16 parcels (a 4x4 grid). Each parcel can then support 937 prims, but you have nearly 15,000 on just one of those parcels, so around 14,000 of those prims get returned to you!

So, BEFORE doing any subdivision make sure you set the object bonus appropriately, and if in doubt, set it high, from the nominal value of 1, to the number of parcels you intend to create, so in the above example, set it to 16. This assumes, of course, that you intent to join them all back up again after you have found those errant prims.

Rock

Subdividing is OK as long as the land ownership does not change.

I got a magic wtf objects retuned once when I subdivided a plot off of a larger parcel and deeded it to a group. Bang! Random(ish) prims returned.

Oh, I think I am confused about the subdividing. I am on mainland, so there's no prim bonus or anything like that. I thought I could just divide up the land into parcels and then see how many prims were used on each parcel, to make the counting easier. I didn't think I was going to have to change the ownership of any pieces of land, and I would not do that anyhow - as I said I have zero intention of rebuilding my entire property. Am I missing something?

Yeah, I wouldn't do it this way, but it doesn't have to be too overwhelming a task to strip the parcel bare. Here's how I'd do it:

I'd drag-select a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted to keep (like the whole cafe, maybe) and while selected, right-click and Take it into Inventory. Then I'd repeat with all the other assemblies I wanted to keep. Once everything good was selected, I'd just return everything else.

Then I'd go down to the ground, turn on View / Parcel Boundaries, open the Editor with Control-3, and drag one of the saved assemblies to somewhere near the center of the parcel, KEEPING THE EDITOR OPEN THROUGHOUT and not clicking on anything outside the selection set. Drag it around to position it within parcel boundaries where you want it in X and Y, and then just start dragging it up to the desired height.

This may take some prior practice, just to be safe, but it should get what you want and only what you want re-rezzed on the parcel, without a lot of re-assembly required.

Then you go to a public sandbox somewhere to rez and sort through whatever treasures got returned to your Lost and Found folder. You know: cigarette butts, beer cans your guests threw over the rail, that kinda thing.

Thomas Conover has a device that helps you find lost prims. I have never used it before, not sure what it does, but it might be worth your while to have a look see.

It may not help you, but when I wanted to account for every prim on my two rentals (make sure auto-return is *off* and there are no Selected/Sat Upon prims and Build is turned off for everyone and turn off any temp-rezzers):

If you have a larger parcel (>4000m²), "Select only my objects" will miss a *lot* of prims (smaller prims/linkset aren't sent to the viewer if you're more than a few meters away regardless of draw distance, a selection rectangle won't select Linden plants, etc).

Draw a selection rectangle from different spots on the parcel anyway and set the prims to a different group (you could set them to (none) but since the viewer still has the bug for prims not set to a group, you'll get a lot of headaches). You don't want auto-return to be on here .

Stand in the middle of the plot (turn off rendering off surface patch, turn off object-object occlussion, turn off rendering water and uncheck Atmospheric Shaders - WindLight will occlude anything underwater, you'll have a hard time finding anything with it turned on) and "Show" for prims that are still set to the group and look for white outlines, set those prims to the other group and rinse and repeat until you don't spot any anymore.

Linden plants will need to be set to the other group one-by-one, drag-selecting won't pick those up.

Physically walk to every spot on the parcel that has small objects (unlinked poseballs, flowers, starfish, etc) and "Show" on non-group prims again.

Finally look at "About Land" for prims that are still set to the group to get an idea of how many are left. Walk across the entire parcel, occasionally doing "Show" for group set objects.

Since you're dealing with multiple people, have everyone do it one after the other. If you have 1000 prims on the parcel and start with 80 "Other" prims, when it reaches 1080, you found all of yours.

When you know you've looked everywhere, cross your fingers, think good thoughts and return everything still set to group.

After that just start from the top and set everything back to group until there are no "Other" prims left (this time, pay attention to the selection rectangles to make sure there are no prims stuck in the floors, walls, ceiling, etc).

You can turn auto-return back on now, but you'll save yourself all this trouble if you simply turn off build for everyone and get in the habit of always building/rezzing with a different group tag than the land is set to. When you're done building, link it all together and set it to the proper group. Everything that's not set to group is either a prim you forgot to link, or litter building prims that can you get rid of by returning all "Other" prims.

(Alternatively you could have a scripted object scanner roam around the parcel and in the air at the end and IM you the location of any prims that are llSameGroup() so you can walk/fly up to them instead of mass-returning them)

Madhu, also, if you have any sort of temp-rezzer on your land, you'll get some odd counts. I got a money tree and was always 20 or so prims off the count after that. It drove me nuts until I finally figured out it was the money tree, LOL.

Just fyi, show transparent won't show scripted invisiprims, so you might want to turn on beacons for scripted objects to see those?

I wish someone would put one out commercially. I was looking for a script that inventoried objects/prims on tenant land a while back. Until you have tenants, you have no idea how often they lose the most bizarre and embarrassing things, usually under the floor. I saw Crap Mariner's blog entry that Dedric Mauriac had done a one-off for him, but again, not useful when I (or Madhu) need it.

I put a very small script in every (root) prim:
The script has a name and a version number set as global.
The script shouts its version number and name on state entry on a secret channel.
If the script hears a script of the same name shouting a higher version number than its own version number, it shouts "update me", including all non-secret information needed for the update.
If a script hears an "update me" shout abd owner and scritname are the same, it updates that script remotely (it may hear many at first). The updated script will "state entry", shout its version number and name, and spread the update further.

That way, if I increase the version number in one script, all scripts in range get updated with the same code.
That gives some flexibility on demand, I can introduce any new code and content to ALL prims, as long as the script is active and running, as long as no math-error or stack-heap-colision occurs.

Caveats: Somehow you can not rezz like >500 prims that are scripted like this at once, rezzing will fail. It it rezzing does not fail, it can cause a lot time dilation.
An Updating chain reaction can cause a little time dilation and the deelay for updating (to solve this) makes it slow.

I'm no scripter, Ollj...but this sounds to me like a real good way to create lag. I already have lots of scripts running on my sim...there are 27 rental properties, each one with a rental box, several doors, a window tinting system, and an in-home teleporter. There are some scripted animals running around, and a sim-wide couples dancing system with several remote danceball rezzers, and an intersim teleport system, and some animated textures in waterfalls and such, and several spas.

What I'm saying here is that I'm not shy about putting down things with scripts in them, when they serve a purpose.

But to add to that load another talker/listener script in every linkset? oooo, my head.

If you login to SL using SLEEK, it shows you a list of all the objects it can "see". Maybe that would help.

Do you all think it would be easy for LL to make a "land options" menu item that sends a list (via email, probably) of all the objects on your parcel, their owners and root prim location? Then people could sort it themselves. I'll make a Jira for it if folks think it's practical.

It's really impractical to find lost objects by searching manually with your avatar. Creating a reliable object that uses sensors to find everything is well-nigh impossible also, for the reason Qie mentioned. Even so, if I had time I would code up a little robot that criss-crossed my parcel up to 768m high and sent email about everything it finds. Then I'd have to make a little perl script to collate the list and eliminate duplicates. And it would still miss things.
.

This would be extremely useful, especially if it sorted by altitude, so you could quickly find things that were floating in parts of your airspace that you don't normally use.

For the particular problem I am having - tracking down 40-60 prims that are owned by group members and set to group - some way to get a list like this, whether it's a viewer tool or a bot - is really essential.

I appreciate the various suggestions of systematic ways to remove everything I know about and then return everything else. But at this point I am just not willing to take the risk of totally screwing up my build to try these tactics.

Until I find a tool that can give me a list of all the objects in my parcel, whether its one of the gadgets mentioned in this thread, or something as-yet-written, I am just going to keep flying-and-selecting until I've done it enough times that I have confidence in my total.

Thanks again for the suggestions, everyone. A number of you asked me in world so I'll post here - I haven't resolved the situation yet. The only time I've spent in world since posting my original query was spent hosting an event last night. I'll definitely be back with more when I get a chance to get back to prim counting.

I don't know how easy it would be, but I would sure love to be able to do this. I'm sure there are errant prims floating about my place, too, taking up my allowance.

I may try some of the systematic methods y'all have posted here, although I'm loath to remove any of my build as well. I spent too much time retexturing my house and then finding that it wouldn't all link up the way I need it to, and I'm sure I'd have a devil of a time getting it back in place where it should be!