Estate Texture Display screwing up?

I'm building a pair of sims. (Yay!) It's two side-by-side Island sims that share a tropical island theme. The terrain for the estate in both sims is set to show blue coral below the waterline, then white sand just below and just above the waterline, then some nice clumpy green foliage, and finally, at highest elevations, bare dark lava rock. Same settings for both estates, same group ownership. All of these are Linden textures, from the textures in the Library. Normally, it looks stunning. I am the chief architect and builder for these two sims, and have been set up as an estate manager and as a group officer for both sims.

On occasion, I will TP to one of these two sims (Wailele Isle), and on arrival the only terrain texture I see is the coral! Like it took over the whole island, right to the mountain top! Sometimes this self-corrects. Sometimes I have to log off and back on again, or TP away and TP back again, for it to be fixed.

I don't know at this point if it was only affecting my view, or if all people in the sim saw it this way. Each time it has happened so far, I was, to my knowledge, the only person in the sim.

When it happens, it happens to BOTH sims at once! I can look across the band of water that is between the two islands, and it's the same problem over in the other sim. Flying across the sim boundry, it still looked messed up.

I suspect that this is an asset server glitch, and that only I am affected when it happens. (IE: It affects only one viewer.) If it was something the whole sim was experiencing, I don't think it would occur across sim boundries like that.

Prior to setting the second island to the same texture choices, I did on occasion notice that the terrain of island in the other sim turned all white for no apparent reason, while the one I was in was fine.

This seems to have started about two client releases ago. With the release prior to the one that was released Wednesday of this week. Both client versions have had this bug.

The affected sims are Wailele Isle (mostly developed) and Nohona Isle (still virtually empty, as it is next in line for me to build on).

This happened again last night. I TP'ed to Wailele Isle, and all the terrain textures on Wailele Isle and Nohona Isle were coral, to the top of the mountain.

Flew across three sims, From Wailele to Nohona to Nohea (which looked normal), waited a bit, and flew back. No change. Logged off for the night, and when I logged on in the morning, everything was beautiful again.

WTF?

This has happened to me when tp-ing on the mainland! It's happened a couple of times on my land in Castaneae, including once to a visiting friend. If you hang out for a bit, eventually the "upper" textures show up. But it's very strange to see blue rock when you're expecting green grass!

I see this reliably on a mainland sim (Noonkkot): every time I arrive the ground is some kind of "dirty beach" texture. Sometimes it self-corrects, but usually I have to draw the client's attention to the ground texture first... changing groups sometimes seems to work, but it's intermittent. Going into preferences and changing the terrain detail setting, then changing my group, seems to reliably force a load of the correct texture.

Other people may or may not see the same problem at the same time, which would tend to rule out the asset server.

Other people have reported this problem on other sims.

Thank you both! At lest now I know I'm not quietly going insane on my own here.

(Well, I might be crazy anyway, but at least this texture glitch isn't a symptom! )

It happened again at lunch today. Looked in the Estate terrain texture controls, and none of the high-detail textures appeared to have loaded for me. So I tried group switching, and then looking at the Estate Textures controls again, and it straightened out.

Hope they fix this one soon...

Ceera--just going to add I've seen this too.

Sometimes I've TPed many places, one after another, and then when I settle down somewhere, only the highest level texture shows. Just like what Coal says.

I don't have a repro but I do know it's a problem, and thankfully, the terrain textures haven't actually gone corrupt.

If another TP doesn't work, then "Relog is the remedy". (Inconvenient, I know!)

Next time it happens to me I'll seize it by the neck.

It's happening extremely frequently on Wailele Isle, which is the Island sim that I am building right now. Haven't hardly seen it anywhere else. I still don't have verification that anyone else can see it when I do. Next time, I'll call someone to my location and see what they see. Maybe call in someone from live help, if I can't find a friend that is available at that time.

I can say that when it happens, if I look at the Estate texture settings, it seems the high-detail versions of the textures, and sometimes even the base versions, haven't all loaded yet. If I ignore it, the textures do seem to load eventually. But it may take 15 minutes or more.

Right now, I'm blaming it on asset server flakiness. I don't think the asset server is delivering the terrain textures in a timely fashion.

I have tried clearing my cache, and I have tried creating more free space on my computer's hard drive, so I know I'm not running low on space on my disk drive. But it keeps happening...

Some new observations:

If I am in a sim that I am an estate manager for, and if I get this terrain texture glitch, it seems I can force a comparatively rapid fix by the following steps:

* Open the Region/Estate dialog.
* Select the Textures tab, and see that several terrain textures don't seem to have loaded. It's usually one or more of the detailed textures that is missing, but sometimes all the detailed ones and a few base textures as well.
* Click on any one of the failed textures. (grey box showing) This opens the dialog to select a new texture.
* Make no changes, just hit cancel and close the dialog completely.
* Now open my inventory. It starts indexing itself now. As soon as my inventory has indexed itself far enough to see the Linden textures in the Library area, the problem self-corrects!

Opening the inventory without first opening the estate dialog doesn't fix this. If I do, it doesn't re-index my inventory. Apparently, I have to first 'make it realize there is an un-loaded texture'.

Haven't tested it yet, but doing a search for a specific item in your inventory might also force this indexing, and might resolve it for sims that the person is NOT an estate manager for.

Conclusion: This is an asset server and inventory glitch. On start up, or sometimes on TP, the SL Client fails to index the Library section of the inventory, or at least fails to do so completely. Since it can't find the Library entries for the terrain textures, it screws up.

Ran another test on my lunch break. Logged on, and terrain textures were screwed again. Opened my inventory and did a find on a random item, "Ruler", which should find an 'Avatar Ruler' object in my inventory. Inventory started to index itself. About the same instant when the ruler was found, the terrain textures popped back to normal.

I have verified now that it doesn't affect all individuals the same way. I had been working in the sim for a while, and had corrected the problem for myself. I had a visitor arrive, and I asked them what the terrain textures looked like to them. "Coral, all the way to the mountain top" was essentally their reply. A few minutes later, after trying the inventory search trick, they could see the correct textures.

I'll add my 2 pence and say something like this also happens to me often too. Not always, but often. The lowest texture stays visible while the others don't arrive for ages.

When it does happen I've noticed the the higher textures seem to arrive after all the other prim textures in the area.

Interestingly, the inventory search trick doesn't seem to work for me - I tried it when I first logged on the other day. Possibly because I don't have these particular textures in my inventory? Although I might, I've never really looked...
It's just weird to have your hilltop land look like the bottom of the ocean. Not necessarily bad, mind you... but weird.

hehe, yep! Having an entire island covered in ammonites from top to bottom is certainly weird! But the upper textures arrive eventually. Unlike IMs and certain items from llGiveInventory !

The inventory search doesn't work for me either.

Hmmm. Terrain has two texture values. One is a low-rez 'base' texture, which you see if your terrain texture preferences are cranked down. The other is a more detailed texture, for when you have terrain textures cranked up to higher detail levels. There are 4 pairs per sim, based on four elevation ranges. And they blend from one to the next.

Could someone try this test? When you see this glitch in a sim you are NOT an Estate Manager for, go to your preferences, and set terrain detail to the lowest setting. Apply and get out of preferences. Re-open preferences, and set terrain detail to the highest setting. Apply and get out of prefs. Tell me if that fixes it. I think it should force it to re-index the textures...

You might also try searching for something that you know is in the LL Library part of inventory. Like search for 'coral'. That might help.

Incidentally, I have also experienced this texture loading issue in The Forest, which uses a completely different set of texture choices for their terrain. So it apparently isn't related to any specific terrain set.

I have also experienced this in many regions and i thought it was just me.

Doesn't seem to work. I set the terrain details to none and got the bland greyness beloved to all (#$%#^#%#! rezzing!). "Some" gets me the bottom of the sea texture, and "All" got me the bottom of the sea as well... but with the brownish bits in different places, so maybe one is the base texture?

Incidentally, this is in a sim where the top texture (once it rezzes) seems to be "Atoll - grass 1", and it opens fine from my library (and doesn't magically rez when I search for it). However, the "Atoll - grass 1 base" texture (UUID a02f8978-20f4-b8be-894a-90c55daa433 won't open at all, before or after the terrain texture eventually rights itself. Weird, huh?

(and no, I'm not an Estate Manager there... or anywhere, for that matter)

Well.... I found one preferences setting that seems to make a world of difference. If I set my draw distance far lower, the terrain textures load almost instantly!

I had been keeping it at 256 or higher, so I could see a larger chunk of the island I was working on. Last night, I dropped it to 128, so I could enjoy better details in an indoor setting, and I didn't change it when I visited the Island this morning. What a difference! Terrain details and Linden trees and plants suddenly looked far better! In spite of the fact that tree detail had been turned down as well (there being no trees to look at while indoors...).

So, OK, I already know my video card sucks. No where near enough VRAM to get great detail. But I would expect that things like the base terrain textures should load FIRST!. Apparently, it's loading a bunch of distant object textures first, and runs out of room before it can get the ground at my feet? Bizare.

I keep mine at 96 or lower and I still get the problem. I know zip about graphics cards, so I've no idea how mine stacks up, except that it's better than the one I had in my last computer (which tells you nothing, I know). Higher draw distance means that I lag so much more, and I have no patience for that.

I usually keep my draw distance at 128 and I routinely have ground texture problems in several sims. This seems to have started in one of the recent updates, I never used to have a problem with it.

I will agree there, Argent. It never happened to me until the last update or two.

I recall reading something about a change that was made to reduce the delay on login, and that inventory would load later in the cycle, after you could move around. But it appears inventory of required textures is part of that, and it isn't always doing a full inventory check! I have had to search several times to get my inventory to acknowledge that it actually has over 7K items in it!

My observations is just that it seems fiddling with the sliders in graphics prefs DID have a positive impact, for reasons as yet unclear.

Mu own preference would be to at least ensure that the Linden Library textures load fully, before anything else. Most terrain textures come from there. Then load other textures, and then anything else.

What's frustrating is that it usually does load the high-res terrain textures just fine. But if even one of the 'base textures' fails to load, the whole terrain texturing system fails.

Of course, if the texture cache actually worked, it would be a moot point! If I could see the terrain when I logged out, I should have that texture cached when I log back in, right? But not in this release!