Invisible Objects and Mouse Problems

Has anyone run into one or other or both of the following gliches.

I was building a house yesterday and had just finished the stairs, so I went to climb the stairs and found I was blocked by something. So I flew upstairs and tried to come down, I got down a couple of steps and found I was walking on some invisible surface. Cntrl Alt T doesn't show anything there. I moved the entire house twenty metres to the left and the problem was gone. I appear (or not as the case is) to have an invisible object at about 500 metres up.

My mouse has become incredibly sensitive, alt + left button is hyper sensitive. The slightest movement of the mouse and the camera view flies off out of control. Makes building at the moment almost impossible. I've checked the setting for the mouse and nothing has changed.

Thanks..Perre..

With stairs, if you use a sculpty (phantom) and then link it to nonphantom prims, it reverts to its (invisible!) collision field.

Which looks nothing like stairs, and sticks up through where you want to walk.

Also, if you have invisible collision fields around, you may be working on the inside of prims (sometimes megaprims) and that can wreak weird havoc upon your camera.

Might not be that, but, just saying! Check those out and good luck.

It could also be the old 'ghost prim' problem.

Sometimes, when you delete a prim, the client & inventory & asset server know it's gone, but the sim code doesn't, so the sim still acts as if there's an object there (you collide with it) even though there's nothing there, and thus nothing to see if you turn on "view transparent".

The only way to solve that is to have the sim restarted.

Hmm, well it's definately not a sculpty prim problem as these stairs are built from bog standard prims as found in the build prog, but I know what you mean.

I think the ghost prim sounds a distinct possibility, in fact I suspect I may have a few dotted around the place. There's been several occassions when my avi seems to bump into objects or step over an object, turn him round and retrace his steps and he does it again. All in all it's all very peculiar.

"invisiprims" don't show up when you show transparencies. The easiest way to find those is to make a platform with a 1% alpha fade.. then move it around. The invisiprims will "cut a hole" in the platform and you can see them easily. (this is why I work with a double thick platform, one for the "ground" and one slightly lighter/darker, set just slightly alpha, to allow me to find the invisiprims I leave lying around.

If you're building on your own land, and there aren't any "guest prims" unaccounted for.. you might use a tool like the "find my stuff" object.. this will scan for the 16 nearest prims, and point them out to you with a particle beam. I find this tool immensely useful when cleaning up after a multi day/multi-week build. I'll drop one on you inworld.

As to your camera flying off at weird angles.. are you using hollowed prims to make the walls? There is a longstanding bug with focussing (alt + mouse) the camera on hollowed and dimpled surfaces. It's not as bad as it used to be, but it still happens (particularly with hollowed and dimpled Huge Prims).

Also check for transparent parts of windows, plants, and drapes.. a lot of times builders use these tricks to make 'really nice" looking builds, but you sacrifice a lot of usability in terms of camera focus.

Thanks Winter I'll try your idea with the 'alpha fade', I've got a fair idea where the invisible object is so that should show it up nicely.

I suspect (actually I'm pretty well sure) the mouse problem's a graphics card problem. I recently downloaded a load of updates for my card and this problem's materialised since then. Also when I use Windlight with the latest client I don't have this problem..only with the older pre Windlight version (which I prefer (used to) to use when building). Soon to be resolved though as I'm about to replace my graphics card with some NVidia G Force thing..according to several threads..it's the business!

Perre..

Oh this reminds me of another bug issue. Once I was transitioning from one client to another, and when I installed the newer client, I got this weird "camera rotates around itself" bug. There;s not really a "fix" for this. The lindens even logged into my account to see if they could locate the issue.

It turned out to be some kind of corruption in my PREFERENCES FILE. (c:/Documents&Settings/User/Application Data/Second Life/Settings)

I logged off SL, deleted the prefs file, and logged back on. The problem was gone.

These will be listed in About Land > Objects as "Selected/Sat upon" prims.