Baffled by invisible barriers...

Several builds which I have been working on have suddenly developed invisible barriers (invisible to ctl+alt+T too), which I cannot walk around, or in one case up a spiral stair.

I work in an empty green space on my own island. Nothing seems to be buried in the ground there; I am not using a sculpty shape; there is not a box problem either. Logging in and out again retains the problem, but 24 hours later the problem has sometimes vanished.

Sometimes if I move the entire building away and then back again, the problem is solved. Linking has sometimes caused the problem, and unlinking sometimes deletes the problem. I have had other ppl come and investigate, and they can see the problem, but not the cause or a solution. It does not occur in one specific zone of the workspace, but occurs randomly across the workspace.

Is this an occasional general 'moodiness' from SL, or am I hitting an occasional specific glitch, which some of you have encountered?

All advice welcomed!
Best wishes from Ainee Kohime

Take a close (as close as you can) look at location 0,0,0 on the sim.. Is there stuff there?

Thanks, Meade, i shall log on and try doing that now!

Nothing there at all, checked it with CTL+alt+T and with wireframe object selection.

Why would anything there have caused a problem anyway, please?

Best wishes, Ainee

A while ago there was a problem where objects would sort of half-fail to rez.. The sim physics would act like it was in the correct location but you won't be able to see it there - it would visibly appear instead at the 0,0,0 corner of the sim. Sorta had symptoms like you described.

Sorry - dunno what's causing the problem for you.

Try clearing your cache, and relogging. It sounds like a cache discrepancy. The viewer and the simulator are in disagreement about where objects are. Clearing the cache forces them to "talk it through".

Thanks, Chosen and Meade, i shall try clearing my cache. There is definitely a strange problem going on, as i just crashed for no reason i can fathom, so i shall have to blame that SL moodiness for the moment....

Best wishes from Ainee

Possibly related to this?: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1259

I have vague memories of reading about someone running into a "solid" spiral staircase bug, maybe Damanios Thetan? There are some rare bugs involving certain prims having the wrong collision shape. Try it in Havok 4 and see if it's still there?

There is a ghost prim issue. I have one at my sim.

http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1306

I remember the spiral bug, seems a staircase spiraled clockwise has issues like the one mentioned by the OP. If memory serves me, spiraling counterclockwise was the workaround.

I posted about this the other day, had the same problem:

/8/52/242286/1.html



Apparently, spiral staircases made out of twisted and cut cylinders have this behaviour if they are twisted one way, but not the other. As I understand it it's to do with the twisted and cut cylinder keeping the original cylinder's collision box, and is fixed in Havoc4 regions.

This is the solution I was given:



It worked beautifully, it's not quite the same, but I preferred the lines of the tube version, although you may need to play with the path and profile cuts to get exactly what you want, and one of the three staircases I made with it, suddenly began to behave as if the actual stair prim was phantom (the rails were fine). That was solved just by unlinking that prim and making a new one to replace it.

I had the same problem several months back in a larger house I was building. I deleted prims but when i came back the next day I noticed they were still present . Ghost prims? I tried clearing cache but they were still present. A restart of the sim finally got rid of them.

Ghost prims? Crikey, haunted sims... SL gets more like RL every day!

Thanks for all your advice, everyone, I will restart sim. The staircase with the problem, incidentally, ran counterclockwise, just to add more mystery...

Havok4? My sim is an older island, class 5. As a non-Tekky, I don't understand how to install Havok4 or Windlight. More advice on this is welcomed, but please make it 'Advice for Dummies' lol!

Best wishes from Ainee Kohime

Havok 4 also is not something you "install" yourself. There's an early adopter's program, which you sign up for through the support portal if you want to join, and then LL will set it up. Initially, there was a limited amount of people who could enroll, though. I'm not sure if that number has been expanded or not. http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/01/18/announcing-the-havok4-early-adopter-program/


As for Windlight, you DO understand how to install that; trust me. You downloaded the the regular SL viewer and installed that on your machine, right? If you didn't, you wouldn't be using SL in the first place. Well, Windlight is the same deal. You just go to the website, download the Windlight viewer, and the double click to install. http://secondlife.com/community/firstlook.php

Thank you for your advice, Chosen. I have enquired of the tekky person in the household, and i am reliably informed that unless we pay double to our ISP provider, adding Windlight would cause more problems than i have already. As it is, leaving SL running whilst i access the internet always causes me to crash, and i sometimes encounter invisible avatars etc who can talk to me but I cannot see them. Other people can see me wearing noob hair under my expensive wigs and send me photos of it... blushes with embarrassment....

So it will not be long before I will be driven by these petty frustrations to pay that double fee to the ISP - who only made my rather remote rural location accessible to Broadband a year ago! And SL has made me truly grateful for the hard work of all those men up poles! lol

When that time comes, I shall be able to enjoy all these lovely Windlight skies and water effects which i see on TV films of SL! But in the meantime, I shall continue being grateful to all you kind folks who help me with my struggles to make sense of SL's eccentricities!

Best wishes from Ainee Kohime

PS ...and just so you can chortle at my incapacities, i dug a well in my island to inspect whether there was anything hidden at 0 0 0.... and then carelessly filled it in, throwing a mountain all over my Palace! Thank you Lindens for doing a rollback so rapidly that I didn't need to confess to my Island Manager about my disaster! lol
..but now she tells me that a bug may mean that anyone who bought my Antique Low-prim furniture in the recent past, now probably has the item reset to full copy/mod... Has that bug been fixed yet, do you know?

I think WindLight is pretty much all the client side - it won't (or shouldn't, I think) eat a lot more network usage than whatever you're using now.


/me eeps! If you're not sure how to do something, like look underground, feel free to ask!! Sorry I wasn't more clear on how to look down there.

Lol, i did try to look down with the camera but as it was the absolute corner of my island, it was too tricky... yes, please, what is the solution?

Best wishes from Ainee

Enable the Client menu at the top of your screen (alt-ctl-D if it's not enabled). Then alt-ctl-shift-5 to "hide" the land.

There are various ways of doing it. I like Disable Camera Constraints in the Client menu, which unlocks all the normal limits on moving the camera around but doesn't really change how anything looks.

When you're doing stuff like this, it also helps to mark 0,0,0 on the map so you've got the beacon showing you where the exact spot is..