Strange Rendering questions - Distance from Avatar

It's really weird how SL decides what to render and what not to.

It really makes no logical sense at all (that I can work out)

I made some prims that won't render unless my Avatar is nearby, and yet other prims (larger and smaller) do render at the same distance.

And even prims a long way away render, whilst (as I say) a few normal ones of mine won't

It reall does seem quite bizarre and I can not see any logic

Just a test and some short cylinders will not rez until my avatar is about 25m away, then if I move my avatar away they dissapear again, yet everything else stays there.

Even other longer cylinders and smaller prims of different shapes.

Which viewer are you using?

What size are the cylinders?

Does everyone see the same problem or just you?

Have you done anything to piss-off a Linden lately?

Have you tried clearing your cache? It's possible that some items aren't filtering in and out as they should.

I have an older build, a piece of my art which is about 9 months old, on this I have 9 cube prims all made at the same time, all textured the same, the prims are all 0.5 x0.5 x 0.5 and are in three rows of three no further than 0.5m apart, in a square shape. The only difference is that they all have different objects in the contents. Now if i stand a fair bit back 8 show up, the ninth and always the same prim doesn't, i have to move in a lot closer for it to show, it seems to have taken on this 'property' since I rezzed it, as the first time I rerezzed it after nine months that prim didn't appear, so I rezzed another, the next day the missing prim was back, there were two inclusive the new prim I replaced it with, so obviously i deleted the new prim.

Just an observation.

Thanks for the replies.

This was with the standard viewer and also the Emerald viewer.

The items in question were small tubes (about 0.25 in size)

Update: Have fixed it.

What's totally fixed it is the old Render LOD factor thing in the debug settings.

God knows why they have it set so low as default. (I just had not got round to increased it from it's way-too-low default setting since upgrading viewers)

With so many sculpties in world now (not that mine were sculpties but they are affected in the same way) it's about time they changed this as I'm sure 99.9% of people in SL have never changed it and know nothing about it.

As a builder one should also take this into consideration too sometimes?

This is a tricky one, and where do you draw the line (so to speak)

At some stage you have to say "hard luck" (though it may sound harsh) and move on build / design wise.

As with web design. Do you always have to make sure a web page shows perfect for someone on a 640x480 CRT 14" monitor, or at some stage do you say, ok, I'm going for 800x600 or 1024x768 from now on as you'd now expect people to have upgraded and you can't hold back quality for the majority who have moved on.

It's difficult, and I guess it's the same dilemma that LL faces with their Viewer and SL world.

The LOD distance thing though, does MASSIVLY help sculpties, and when they were new and not that many around, I guess it was not THAT big a deal.

Now Sculpties are all over the place perhaps and they are a much larger part of the SL world, perhaps some tweaks could help.

My PC is by no means "State of the art" but even with the PC I had before this, I had no downsides to increasing the LOD factror from it's default 2.0 up to about 4.0 or 5.0 as people advise.

I suppose their must be some reason why they are reluctant to increase this one simple setting which can make a large visual impact on your SL experience (these days)?