Ground details change with logons

Her's the story. The parcel of land I live on is on a fairly rocky island. It was unevn but mostly green on my swatch. I flattened and lowered it and built my house. Now when I log on , sometimes the land is mostly covered with grass...other it looks as if the covering has been stripped away and the land is down to bare rock. Then next login it can be green again. I've played with all the graphics settings, none of them make any difference. I even tried reverting the land , then lowering again, but it still happens. Any idea? For the record, I do have a lower end ATI x300 desktop video card, maybe that has something to do with it?

At first I thought you were having some exciting new bug, but I thought of something when you mentioned the video card. I have a slow one too.

Since maybe 1.15, terrain textures load in blocks for me. It's very obvious to see the loading in the mini-map, but sometimes not when looking at the actual ground patch.

Most of the time on my home location, the ground patch stays invisible until the texture block loads. But on some places on the Nautilus continent I've seen it work differently, and in a way that sounds like your bug. Basically I log on or teleport to a place and see plain sand. Then as the texture blocks load, I can actually see the sparse grass texture replace the plain sand.

The main difference is that what I see would eventually get resolved within a minute or two as you wait for your terrain texture to load... and if you can already see the terrain on your mini-map, then this is definitely not the same thing.

^^^EXACTLY! Be patient, it will load. I often see the grass on land everywhere, show up as sand initially.

No this isn't a rezzing issue, I believe. Once the entire sim is rezzzed this is still eveident. One logon grass, the next stone. I have some pics inworld of the effect. I'll be on in a little while, you can see what I mean.

On land at sea level is where I've noticed this problem most. It appears that the Lindens have some sort of randomizer in the way it resolves how to overlay the green texture onto the sand texture. My experience is that for a while I wanted to have green islands in the middle of an irregularly shaped pond, but I discovered that the green texture was constant in its variations: a place that was green during one logon was brown sand in the next logon. I've talked with a professional SL terraformer and she says that my perception of the randomizer function is correct. The island sim land texture tools can be used to compensate for this, but we on the mainland are stuck in this regard. It is really ugly, sometimes, that desert sand look, sans green. Really ugly.

Yeah, I kind of figured you would have noticed if it was something that changed a minute after logon. It was worth a shot, though.

I guess the first question is whether this is a server thing (sim or asset) or something to do with your system. Have others seen the changes as well, or is just you? And is it really logon-based, rather than just time? For example, if you logged on twenty times in an hour (ouch!), would it go back and forth randomly, but stay the same for hours if you stayed around that long?

From what I can gather, whatever it starts at is where it stays for the duration of the session. It is a random pattern, it's never the same degree twice. Next time someone is there besides me I will ask them what they see, and compare pics. Good idea. I don't mind some of the rockiness, but at times it's just too much, looks like a spotted leopard.

I'm having this same problem on the sim where I rent land. It used to drive me nuts. I noticed it from the day that I moved in. It was evident to me because since the ground cover on my lot is partially sand and partially grass. I specifically laid out flowers in the grassy patches only to check back a couple hours later to find them sitting in sand and looking weird.

I asked the land manager about it and she had never heard of it. I think it was more evident on my lot because i'm on a corner. So at her suggestion, I started taking pictures. There were noticeable differences every couple of hours and I verified it with the pictures. Just to make sure that it wasn't my imagination or my lot only, I also took pics at a friend's lot on the same sim. Although his wasn't quite as noticeable to the eye, you could definitely see the difference when comparing the pics.

My land lady even came back to check it out again to see if she could see the change on her pc, to verify that it wasn't just my equipment. She saw it too. Its not that I couldn't see the ground cover... I saw the grass very clearly... in a different spot. She opened a ticket with the Lindens but their solution was to "clear cache". Hmm, not like I didn't already try that several times. I'm not one to cry wolf until I've tried to investigate all the logical things to do.

She tried doing this herself on both my parcel and another one. It changed nothing. She reopened the ticket on May 30th, and on June 1st she got a second response from support... this time they copied her a page from the wiki, how the textures work, and remark that they didn't see anything. She reopened the ticket again, but I haven't heard another word about it since.

My solution... I found a prim ground cover of low lying flowers and greenery to scatter about my yard and around my fountain. Not exactly what I wanted to see in my yard, but its better than shifting sand.

Gee who'd have thought I'd be grateful to someone named Dementia?
Thanks for some great info. I may have to follow suit and just get a prim lawn of some sort.

I live on a private island and get the same effect. I have a sandy beach in front of my house - most of the time - but sometimes it changes to grass, never anything else, just sand or grass. Are you saying that there's a way my landlord could change this?

Love Suzi

btw, I forgot to mention... it wasn't just upon login... that one day that I took picures, I stayed logged in, on my sim for hours just trying to gather the evidence. It didn't matter if I stayed in for the duration or logged in and out and back in. I get the same effects either way.

Hey Brenda, did your ground cover stop moving? I'm pretty sure mine did. I started noticing a couple days ago that my yard was always green now, so today I've been making a conscious effort to watch it again and it seems to have stabilized. Funny, I didn't change anything on my pc, so I guess it maybe it wasn't on our side after all. I'm happy to say the grass landed pretty much where I wanted it to be.

Something else I didn't mention before because I'm a newb about the technical stuff so I didn't want to suggest that my other problem was related. But anyway I had this "rift" or force field, I'll call it, in the front lobby of my home. You literally could not walk thru it. I could see a faint flickering of movement where it was. I always had to walk around it. And it was there for a while. But since my ground cover stopped moving, I figured I'd go inspect the mystery spot and sure enough, that's gone too.

Ghost prim!

Serious about that actually. They generally go away when the sim is restarted (like during updates or rolling restarts). And supposedly the bug that causes them is going to fixed in the next update.

Ya know, It did seem stable over the weekend, now that I think of it. Good call. Change your first name, it doesn't suit you at all.......

lol, you probably don't want to know that it used to be Venus Flytrapp when I played Lineage 2.

wow, I read about them, but I didn't now that they could cause a physical obstruction.

On that same parcel on my screen its always grass filled with a lot of rocks...

So I dont even think were sure what its "supposed" to look like.

Even so, its helpful when it actually stays in one place because then you can either landscape around what you have or camoflage what you don't want to see.

and I'm sad to say, I jumped the gun wth my post... I just went outside for the first time this morning and it is still changing... sorry for getting your hopes up

also just spoke with my landlady and she said they removed the ticket that she submitted about this.

Randomly changing placement of ground textures has always been there. You can control it somewwhat (on private sims) but making the spread between the 4 texture layers larger and centering your langht height bewteen the change heights.

The problem is, the 4 texture layers HAVE to be randommly blended togeather or it looks like total crap with solid bands of color chages. And it's not done on the SERVER because that would be a HUGE amount of data to have to send to the client instead of just 4 small textures. Well I suppose they could have send over something that would have constrained the randombess to some level without it being TOO bad, but it was kept simple.

Anyway if you are on a private sim and you want to try to minimize the shifing, then like separate the leves of the firsr and thrid texture by like 15 meters or somethng like this:

Set one corner (or the entire sim) at a low of 3 meters and a high of 60 meters and then there'll be areas (heights) where the ground is very specifically and mostly constantly one color. If the low is 10 and the high is 20 then they are all closly intermingled and vary a lot every login.

My reprieve was temporary also.