Spiral Stairs Issue

Has anybody else encountered this issue:

I've made some spiral stairs by the usual method (thin slice of cylinder twisted around) but it seems impossible to walk up them. It's as if their is a solid (invisible) block containing the stair piece, from the top of the stairs you can walk out on top of the invisible block, at the bottom you can't get onto the stairs since you appear to hit an invisible wall.

Even more strangely is that this same set of stairs were fine just a couple of days ago.

Any ideas?

This is a known issue stemming from the way that SL views certain shapes as having negative volume or something. There was an explanation about this a while back but I have no idea what thread that was in. (Anyone have a link to that?)

Anyway, lemme guess, the staircase you can't walk on currectly spirals up in a clockwise direction. What's happening is since the physics engine can't handle that particular shape for whatever reason, it uses the object's bounding box for collision purposes. A friend and I spent a good chunk of time doing experiments with this problem one night. I've never seen any problems with staircases that spiral up in a counter clockwise direction. Also, it is possible to make a clockwise staircase.... but it requires a bit of trial and error. From our tests, there didn't really seem to be much of a pattern as to what angles/sizes would work. For example, I got a 90 degree clockwise spiral to work as a staircase by combing one that twisted something like 31 degrees and another that was 59. (I'm not sure if these were the exact numbers but it was somewhere around there.)

The moral of the story: play around with combining different degrees of twist to get the desired result. It's a pain but the only method I know of to get the shape you're after.

HTH.

-Meiyo

Thanks for the reply.... I think i'll just swap for a counter-clockwise spiral

It's pretty easy to write a spiral staircase rez'r, the only bad thing being that it takes a lotta prims. One of those, "yeah this is how it's done but the game makes it prohibitive" things (based on object limits).

You can, however, manipulate cylinders in ways other than twisting...you can hollow and advanced cutaway to make a few curved/arching pieces, then just connect them.

Spiral stairs can be done on prim per prim basis, including having railings, etc. But again, that takes a bit of prims, and I'm probably assuming you wouldn't want to do it in that fashion.