Terrain Drift?

heyas;

okay, serious time, now...

i've heard of prim drift and i know all about that, blah blah blah.

what about terrain drift? i swear, the terrain on our group land keeps changing slightly. nobody has permission to edit it but the group admins. i know i aint messing with it. and i know my partner ain't messing with it. so how does it get messed up? not huge changes like some joker puts a mountain in the middle of the store... just little shifts in the beach that make the sculpty sand not fit it anymore.

It seems to be a normal fact of SL life. I had a similar question about moving ground textures:

/327/94/271674/1.html

Double-check your land settings to make sure the "anyone can edit terrain" box is not clicked.

Also, are you referring to the actual shape of the land (I assume yes) or the textures. The latter are NOT stable. We have a beach on Livingtree, for example, that is also covered with grass. It depends on who is looking and when the sim was last restarted. Very frustrating that terrain textures do not actually do what they'e supposed to do. More poor legacy code to be weeded out... some day.

But yes, double-check the land settings first and foremost.

Yes, I've seen that too on my land.

Re. the land terrain textures, I have heard that every viewer handles the texture blending internally, rather than something happening on the server, *and* that this blending can change from log-on to log-on. I don't know if it really happens that often, but I wouldn't doubt it happens if you clear your cache.

Re. the terrain itself, the actual stored terrain settings are only as accurate as one point every meter - it's 256x256 points that are saved for an entire sim, and the contour difference in between those saved points is interpolated. I'm pretty sure that this is done on the server rather than the viewer, but it might be possible that something flakey / buggy in the region simulator is causing the interpolation to happen over and over, even without any actual changes taking place.

Of course, a 'mundane' possibility is if this part of your land borders someone else's land, then it might just be moving around slightly whenever the neighboring land is changed. The interpolation means that sometimes this can't be helped, if a neighbor adjusts their terrain it can affect yours.

-Atashi

Blending is entirely client side and video card dependant (obviously the values do come from the sim).

I'd almost compare it to prim flickering (two prim faces at the same position and interfering with one another) when you have certain spots on the terrain where two conflict.

The sim owner recently changed the terrain textures on one of my rentals (and lowered the range for the mountain side) and every time I'd tp home the land would look different (I'm right in a corner and the effect is far more noticeable there) and it would affect an area of about 8,000m².

Adjusting the terrain texture levels for that corner slightly will fix it.

We have a terrain mesh detail slider so at least some - if not all - is client-side as well.