Problems with land textures at Bourton Village

Hi, i own a new island called Bourton village and am experiencing problems with land textures incorectly loading for both myself and visitors to the island.
The island should be loading as mostly green grass land fading down into beach areas but around 50% of the time all myself and visitors are seing is just sand across the whole island or worse still just grey.
The textures have all been checked out and are working fine, when the problem occurs and i look into the texture list in the estate menu, i am seing textures missing from the list. If i relog the problem seems to go away but for others the problem remains.
I have contacted the Lindens about this and as yet have not received any answers as to what the problem might be.
I was wandering if any others here had come across this problem before?
If you would like to check it out for yourself, do a search for Bourton Village on the map.

Would be grateful for any input.
thx Phill

dont hold your breath, took me 2 hours to rez a default land texture -.-

I've had the land textures remain stuck on L1 after several hours on a sim.

This SHOULD be a known issue now, the number of times I've reported it in the last two weeks.
FYI here's how to reproduce it:

Log on to the island. TP to a mainland sim (doesn't seem to work with other islands for me). WAIT for the mainland textures to load. TP back to your island. Volia! You now have an island displaying only the low rez version of its lowest level texture.
And for me it never loads - the only way to get my ground textures back is to relog.

But wait! It gets better!
I spent bloody HOURS getting the texture levels just right, so one area I have nice sandy beaches with waves breaking on them.
Well, had... Now the texture distribution is all over the place. At one point I have sandy beach, an hour later it's grass, an hour later it's mixed. Meanwhile the rocky scrub texture wanders all over the place - its a mess.

This is on an island (Lyonesse) where about 80m of riverbed prims vanished over-night too. No autoreturn on, not in trash, not in lost and found. Just gone.

I've had a few Linden theories (none of which held water) on the vanishing prims, but no one wants to talk about the texture problems.

This is EXACTLY the problem i am having, right down to the random texture distribution. I was beginning to think this was a problem unique to my sim but on talking to other island owners, it appears that is not the case. The only Linden suggestion i have received so far is to restart the region and to try different textures (the ones i am using are from the stock library textures). Neither of these suggestions is working. I have spent a lot of time and effort on getting the terrain just the way i want it and I am now getting increasingly frustrated at logging in to a huge mound of mud.

Please nice Linden folk, can you give us some answers as to what is going on and what is being done to fix the situation. I have looked forward for so long to owning my own island and this is spoiling things at the moment.

Well I used custom textures, not library ones and had NO texture difficulties until the update before last.
Therefore it seems to me that something about that incredibly well thought out and extensively pre-tested update is the cause of this problem, along with so many others.

I do agree with you though, it's intensely annoying to have spent a lot of time and effort getting an island landscape to look just the way you want it, then to have the textures start up an independence movement and strike out on their own. Makes you wonder why you stumped up $1250 doesn't it?

First I thought this was a lighting issue, this is on a main land sim. I was trying to match my prim grass to my regular grass and every once in a while it wouldn't match. I would try to change the time of day etc. without any difference, it was kinda driving me batty. This kind of explains a lot. Another thing why would you put a completely different looking texture for low resolution compaired to high resolution?

Count me as being one of the people reporting bugs every time I spend 4 hrs waiting for the grass to show at my store, WaterMoon Breeze in Bam.

The mud is disgusting.

Since today's update I'm now seeing this all over the mainland too - nice green sims are now failing to load anything but a nasty mud/stone combination.
This really does need sorting out, and quickly.

'm still waiting in vain for Linden information on what is going on here.
The only response i have received so far despite numerous emails and bug reporting is one from a concierge who visited my land and has stated that the development team are aware of the problem but cannot state which patch things will be sorted.
Come on guys, we are paying serious amounts for these islands, if i buy a tv and it doesnt work properly then 'we are aware your tv is not working correctlly but we dont know when we are going to get round to fixing it' simply would not do.
I fully understand that fixing these kind of bugs is not always a simple matter but at the very least some feedback as to how things are progressing is not a lot to ask?

Its an nasty but known problem - which does not make it any better.

At the core is the old asset server problem of textures not loading timely (or ever). When one of the 8 textures does not load, the lowest one is used for all of the terrain. As the lowest is usually some rock or mud you get a nice sim all over.

The texture not loading is usually one of the low rez ones.

If you as an island owner want a quick fix: just open the estate management window (Region/Estate), switch to the tab Textures and drag any other low rez terrain texture to the patch where the big x is showing. Click on the button Apply and voila: all will be fine.

It does not matter what texture you are using as a replacement as the low rez textures are nearly never used anyway.

For a lot of sims the lowest level texture is NEVER used except by this bug, particularly on the Attol and Korean continents. I don't know why they don't just make the lowest texture grass on all sims that are completely over the low-texture line, but when people (myself and others I've spoken to) have tried to explain how this would help they get requests to see if they can fix the problem by clearing cache and adjusting the network settings.

Which doesn't help.

This isn't rocket science, is it?

It isn't rocket science but no system designer likes "special cases". And I as a buyer would not like hardwired textures on our sims. This suggestion might pass as a quick hack but not as a fix.

What has to be done is either: finally fix the asset server problem, or change the algorithm which renders terrain textures. It is absurd that three high rez textures, which are available, are not rendered just because 1 (one) low rez texture (which is not needed now) isn't delivered by the asset server.

Hi, thanks for the input Dana and Argent.
Just to complicate things a little further, i am finding that sometimes i am seeing everything correctly when other new arrivals are seeing a single texture or no texture. I am guessing this has more to do with what is already in my cache.
Like i say though, the thing i am finding most annoying is the lack of any Linden feedback, if I knew work was definately being done to fix the situation and when exactly we can expect a fix would be more than happy to wait. As it stands, i dont think it seems a priority and thats annoying.

Well something has changed. I'm not getting the base texture only on return from the mainland any more - but the textures are still wandering about

Maybe ensuring the terrain texture UUIDs are different from the other textures in the sim has worked?

I just wanted to comment some Lindens have found this absurd too--there's a project for a better solution to simplify the whole land texturing process altogether, and it wouldn't be a crap bandaid.

I'll add this thread to the file we have open on it so we're well aware of Resident support.

No ETA on it but every bit of support helps me advocate for its priority.

Thank you, Torley.

This would be wonderful and add a lot to the beauty of Second Life; at least on some days.

Thank you Torley and thanks for listening.

If it helps resolve the problem, here are my observations so far;
The problem occurs when tp'ing from the mainland to certain islands.
If no textures or just a single texture appears, then relogging normally remedies the situation for the viewer.
Changing the base textures for numerous different ones in my case does not resolve the problem, so i dont think it's a case of corrupt textures.
The bug seems to happen a lot more frequently at peak in world times.
If i clear my cache and relog without moving to the mainland, the textures do normally still load correctly, it's only when i tp to the mainland and then come back that only a base texture loads.
If only a single texture loads for one person, it is the same for everyone else who tp's from the mainland, but if i have relogged i am seeing all the textures in the texture drop down chart. It's only if i am seeing a single texture myself that they appear to be missing from the chart.
In every case where only a single texture loads, it is always the base textures that are missing.
The bug occurs on two of my friends islands that i know to, but not on all islands, in both these other cases, the islands are fairly recent additions, one is a couple of months old, the other about four months old.
As stated by Inigo, the bug seems to have surfaced mainly after the update at the beginning of August..

Hope this helps. If you need any more info, please feel free to contact me inworld and i will be happy to help with any testing.

Sorry, but I can not second all the findings of my fellow resident, but some:

1. It is definitely NOT reproducable.
   
2. The bug is an old one, which happened to me at least for a few months. It might be, that it happens more often these days. At least we are getting more customer complaints about it. This could be because we have more customers these days.
   
3. The bug happens on the mainland and on private islands. It happens more often on private islands to me. This could be because I spend 90% on The OTHERLAND Archipelago, our private continent, though.
   
4. I can see no repeatble pattern for TPing between mainland and private estates that can reproduce this bug. It happens, when I am spending two or three days in a row on The OTHERLAND Archipelago, too.
   
5. I suspect that it might have to do with packet loss. Our private continent is very low lag in many regions. So I often fly around with the drawing distance set to 512. If I get into a more laggy region with this setting, heavy packet loss can occur. The chance for rock/mud sims to appear is much larger then.
   
6. Everytime I check (I dont do this always), it is one of the low rez textures, that can't be fetched from the asset server.
   
7. As long as one low rez texture is missing, all the sim is rendered in the lowest (high rez) texture.
   
8. The texture itself is never corrupt. Sometimes it loads after a while or a after a relog. Then everything renders fine again.
   
9. Replacing the missing texture with any other texture in the Estate Tools usually helps as a workaround. Replacing it with the same texture from inventury does NOT remedy the problem. Double clicking on the texture in inventory opens up a blank window. The texture definitely can not be fetched from the asset server.
   
10. Relogging sometimes helps (like with many other asset server problems), sometime not.
    
11. Sometimes more than one resident present in the sim can observe the bug simultaniously, especially after they have entered the sim together. Sometimes only one resident can observe it and the one standing right beside can see the intended textures.
    
    

No, it isn't an easy one.