Ground textures move?

I saw it before, but last few weeks it seems to be happening more often. The ground textures on my sim seem to be 'moving'. I have a 1 beachsand texture, 1 grass and 1 rocks. Normally everything at 'beach' level should only have the sand texture. Land, that is a bit higher, gets a grass texture.

Lately I see grass coming through the sand at beach level. One day it's there, the next day it's only sand again. I didn't do any kind of landscaping in between. It happens on several places on my sim.

It's actually wonderful that my sim seems alive, but I wonder if this behaviour is normal and why it happens.

Any terraforming anywhere in the sim can affect the way the land textures are baked onto the terrain. Sometimes someone can change there land on the whole other side of the sim and you might see a diference on your side.

That sounds familiar.

The same thing happens when I restart a sim; when it comes back online, the ground texture variations may be slightly different compared to before the restart. I've never bothered to try and find out if this is actually a bug or just something that just happens everywhere and all the time.

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I have that also I own the sim so, it has nothing to do with teraforming by neighbors. Mine changes a few times during the day

Trying to landscape it correctly and realistcally can drive you nutz if your land is mixed sand and grass like mine -- Just look at me [O/o]

I have not been abe to get a good explanation for it.


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The first thing would probably be to narrow it down to either a sim problem, or a viewer problem.

If you have two puters and you noticed a shift, log on an alt and have it look at the same spot. If it's a sim problem the two should see the exact same issue, if it's a viewer issue the alt will probably see something different. Not very definitive either way but can't think of a better way to see which part is causing the problem .

I can recall an odd number of bugs where different video cards would render the terrain different as well though, and some cases where the terrain changed until I relogged and then everything was back to normal again...

It's by design, the boundaries between the textures are generated by the viewer on the fly, and slop is built into it.

There is an old JIRA on this one, FWIW. http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-538

I think it may have to do with the textures rezzing with different offsets or some such. I have the sand texture at my parcels which have a patch of darker wavier sand interspersed, and they appear at different locations on different days. Never thought to see if there is a pattern or rotation in the change, I just know they move around...

Edit: Missed the post above this, makes sense.

The sim that I rent my home parcels on is like this and it drove me crazy to in the beginning. One day I even took screenshots of the same area at different intervals during the day to prove that it was really going on to my landlord. She contacted LL to find out what was going on. I don't remember what they told her, but its amounted to "live with it". So I have, it hardly bothers me at all any more. I love my home so if thats the only thing that not perfect about it, I consider myself lucky.

Viktoria is right, the client randomizes the actual blending of the ground textures. You can fire SL up in to windows at the same time and each one will show different textures on the ground.

LL really SHOULD do something about this. There are one or two compeltely unused "layers" of data in the sim "Map" that COULD be used to manually edit the texture mixing on a sim and increase the ability to purposly landscape the ground by 1000 fold.

Thanks for your replies. It seems to be somewhat 'logical' that textures or height maps are not always rendered in the same way. Especially if a height map has few height differences in some areas and the ground textures settings only have little meters in between them.

But still... Everything is all ones and zeros, isn't it? So why do these changes occur on a same machine with the same hard- and software?

They are just ones and zeroes, but they're random ones and zeroes.

Goodness, I wish that was redesigned

Ground texture baking set by height and range values in SL is fast and yields nice but semi-random results.

It will look different on 2 PCs at the same time.
It can look different on the same PC at 2 different times.