Transforming trees

Okay, I have an odd little problem. I have lots of Linden Ponderosa pines on my land, some of them the default "medium" size and some of them larger. I've been away for a couple of months and just came back to find that all of my large Ponderosas have somehow turned into little brown oaks! The properties info still identifies them as large Ponderosas, the measurements still list them as tall (z of 7 or something), but the trees themselves are rendering as small oaks. The medium trees are all fine, but new ones rezzed from the large prototype in my inventory rez as small oaks.

How very weird. I suppose I could just manually replace them all, but I'm hesitant to spend the time on that until I know it's not going to just randomly happen again the minute after I finish replacing them.

Personally, I'd recommend looking at some of the very nice 4 prim trees at Heart Gardens and replacing with them. A few less for your prims, maybe, however some are quite large (for example, they do an XL Horse Chestnut).

Before you replace anything at all, I would seriously suggest having others look at the area and tell you what kind of trees they see. It sounds to me like some local resource in your client has become corrupted. You probably ned to delete your account preferences folder to fix that.

Linden Trees should NEVER change en-masse like that. Not ever.

A couple of things you could try and see what happens...

Clear cache (always worth a try!)

Open up the Client/Advanced menu and go to Rendering/Types then uncheck trees (all Linden trees should disapear, then check trees again. See if they come back as Oak trees or not.

Worth trying before you reinstall the client etc.

This whole area is forest, so replacing them with prim trees isn't feasible. Honestly, though, I think Linden trees get a lot less respect than they deserve. I actually have that Horse Chestnut in one location, and one of the Botanical Emerald Forest trees, and a bunch of Lilith Heart birches, and they're all gorgeous. And they all drive me BONKERS because their huge alpha planes are always in the way when I'm trying to select things. And, yes, the lack of linkage for Linden trees is annoying and I wish there were a greater variety to choose from. But when I'm building, lagging, or rezzing and sorting inventory -- and I'm always doing at least one of those -- I'm tremendously grateful to be able to make my lovely trees temporarily DISAPPEAR with a menu click without having to replace them later. Can't do that with prim trees.

I turn tree rendering off and on two or three times a session anyway, and I've already cleared my cache and reinstalled the client in the last couple of days, for other reasons. None of those things helped. Hadn't occurred to me that it might be a local problem, though. I reinstalled because of a client crash that actually caused a kernel crash, which I haven't seen in years, so it seems reasonable that something else could have been corrupted at the same time. I didn't notice the weird trees until after that happened, so I'll check that now. Thanks!

Hmm... what would I check? I don't see anything in Application Support that looks like it even could be related, and I don't see any other preferences folder.

I believe this will work for either Windows or Macintosh:

Search your hard drive for a folder that has a folder name that is your avatar name, all lower case, with an underscore instead of a hyphen. For example. "ceera_murakami" is on mine.

That should locate a "SecondLife" folder containing your cache files and avatar preference settings. Open that containing folder. There will be one folder for each avatar you have logged in as (including any misspelled attempts!), plus "data", "logs", "user_settings", "cache" and "browser_profile". Delete ALL of these folders, and you'll eliminate any persistent files that might be corrupted, and which could carry over from one attempted installation of the SL client to another. Doing an Uninstall of the SL client does NOT remove these! Everything in them is easily rebuilt from scratch by the client when you log in.

Try that, and see if your trees become normal again.

The only down side to doing this is that you have to reset your Preferences settings, and you'll get all the newbie first-time-use pop-ups that happen the first time you teleport, etc. . Small price to pay if it restores your forest!

Update: It's NOT my client.

Not only did my neighbor see the same oak-that-ought-to-be-a-ponderosa, but we found more trees elsewhere on the sim that had also transformed into oaks. These other trees are labeled as cedars, but I confirmed long ago that they are actually just larger versions of the Linden ponderosa. And the version of the cedar that she had in inventory also rezzed as an oak.

Trees rezzed from the unedited library ponderosa are fine. The messed up ones all seem to be ponderosas that were stretched to greater heights. I tried stretching a fresh library ponderosa tonight, and it works fine -- whether it's still a ponderosa tomorrow morning, we'll find out.

I'm not sure whether it's relevant, but my trees that are messed up were probably all copied from a tree from the Terra Evergreen Rezzer rather than from the library proper. I rezzed them too long ago to remember for sure, though, and I couldn't even get the Rezzer to rez tonight when I wanted to doublecheck what it was producing.

Have you tried restarting the sim? Maybe something in the server data got corrupted?

Grasping at straws here. I've never, ever, seen a Linden-type tree change from one type to another spontaneously like that, and I must have planted tens of thousands of them by now.

That means involving the Lindens, so I wanted to eliminate all other possibilities first. Since it _seems_ to be all instances of "copies of copies" and no other types of trees, I wondered if it might be a problem with the particular copy that got copied. But there have been other oddities on the sim, things like a neighbor's objects claiming they belong to my groups (that weren't even created when the objects were rezzed). Random little things that didn't cause enough of a problem to worry about and that I've always dismissed as general LL bugginess.

But restarting sims always seems to be discussed as an estate owner thing, and this is a mainland sim. And don't they get restarted regularly anyway, with all the rolling restarts?

Yes, but LL folks will restart a mainland sim on request if you are having problems. In fact, if you submit a support ticket, that's probably the first thing they'll try. They did it for me a time or two when I've experienced oddities, and it surprisingly enough can solve a wide range of problems.

It isn't just you. There's a JIRA open on this at https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-2137.

Looks like a database problem.

That's not new, lol. A couple of months ago we suddenly had lots of palms at Aspen - a complete snow sim.