Linksets de-linking when you try to remove just a few parts?

I have run into a very annoying building glitch recently, in the new Voice-enabled client as well as in the release just before Voice became part of the main viewer.

It used to be pretty simple to link a bunch of parts together, and later to de-link one or two parts, adjust or re-texture them, and link them back to the rest. I would just edit the linkset, check the "edit selected" box, click the parts I wanted, and when I did an 'unlink' with just those parts selected (say, two out of 120 parts), the selected parts would unlink. If I selected only one part to unlink, that one part would remain selected. If I selected two or more, then those parts plus the remaining linkset (still linked, minus the initially selected parts) would be selected, and I could de-select the linkset before working with the released parts.

What is happening now, and only sometimes, is when I have two parts of a linkset selected, and I select unlink, *the whole linkset unlinks*. If I notice the lines all changing to yellow, I can re-link, try re-selecting just the parts that I wanted to split off, and the second try usually works right. But sometimes I get NO visual indication that the rest of the linkset has fragmented! So I edit my loose part, and go to re-link it, only to find the original linkset is now completely de-linked!

The only possible trigger that I can detect so far is that the linkset is getting somewhat close to the limits for linking, both in complexity (number of prims) and distance between prims. In the most recent case, a 220 prim section of a house, roughly 24 M by 20 M by 10 M in size, had een linked perfextly, and when I unlinked one small roof section from near the middle on one edge, the rest de-linked without warning. And when I tried reselecting all the parts and re-linking, the link failed.

Has anyone else been hit by this mess? I plan to re-link that floor in two halves when I get back in-world, just to be sure the distances are not too great.

After much experimenting (and cursing) last night, the issue has been resolved for me. Seems to have been a recurrance of the old "poisoned prim glitch", where for some unknowable reason one or more individual prims in a linkset spontaneously becomes unlinkable.

I was able to fix it bt adding pieces back to the linkset just a few at a time, so I could identify which precise parts were refusing to link. I had three prims out of 240 or so that had become 'tainted'. Drag-copying the prims and deleting the original fixed each of them.

I know what you mean, way back in the days when I was building the Horyuji pagoda, I ran into this same problem a number of time. Your build is "only" 240 prims, I know how frustrating and patience testing this can be. Try 2700+ prims...

I thought this bug had quietly gone away, as I also remember it from a while ago. Nice to see an old friend return.

"The last of the network issues have been resolved and the grid is now back online and fully operational"
who are they kidding?
this is the worst I have known SL, it has been bad before but for weeks now nothing has been right and the introduction of the voice viewer has really messed with my building work, i want to down tools I am so depessed, and to make matters worse everytime i log in i am ruthed and I have phantom prims that are overloading my land that I can't locate or delete...

Just a thought. If you just want to adjust one part (texture, placement etc) then you can also check the edit linked parts box and all that unlinking-linking back is avoided alltogether. Most simple adjustments can be done like this without any trouble at all.

You still often have to unlink and re-link if you need to re-size a linked prim. Sometimes they 'snap back' if you resize them while linked. I usually try resizing them when linked, and only de-link if they refuse to resize. For texturing I leave them linked.

The build in question is a detailed reproduction of a Japanese Castle (Hikone Castle) and is about 500 prims at this point, in three main linksets plus several unlinked parts like doors.

I just finished a 1500 prim set of caves and dungeons for a client. Had to make it something like 30 linksets, because it fills a 50 M x 50 M x 40M high space. And the building above that space is another 1500 prims or so. Did a lot of linking and unlinking to tweak prim sizes in those two, and didn't have the poisoned prims haunting me there.

Oh well. Building in SL is a constant challenge to work around all the bugs and glitches, and still make something splendid, in spite of it all.

Exactly! Does anyone have any more info about this glitch! It causes a problem for a window script of mine. The script allows windows to be raised-lowered on click, and works (or, USUALLY works) when the window is linked into the house as long as it's not the root prim.

The prim snaps back whether the change is made by entering numbers in edit or by script. I haven't tried "resize" dragging, but I suspect I'd get the same results.

Right now I have 4 windows where two always succeed when linked into the house, and the other two always fail. Any idea what is the trigger for the bug?

BTW, when I saw this earlier at a friend's house that I'd fitted out, I rebuilt the offending window from scratch. But when I linked it in, it still failed. So I doubt that in this case it's a poison prim. I'll do more testing and let you know. Perhaps I should start a new thread on this, or is this a well-known problem with Jira entry?

Thanks,
Jeff

BTW, Ceera probably knows more about linking and editing than 99.999% of SL residents. Perhaps more. No newbie!

Thanks Jeff. I have a couple of scripts that resize or move prims that are linked to other prims, and the scripts usually work fine for me. But I also will usually leave any 'movable assemblies' seperate from the main linksets. Old habit from using swinging door scripts that simply could not be linked to the rest of the build.

So it could be the commands that you're using in your script, or it could be something to do with the complexity of the linkset. But I've run into poisoned prim issues on linksets as small as 70 prims, so I am not sure if complexity is the key issue either.

Ceera, I bet your scripts wouldn't work for the prims where you can't edit the size.

In every case, when I can't edit the size manually, I also can't set it by script, and vice versa. (I find I also can't set it by dragging the resize handles.)

The function my script uses is llSetScale().

I bet the reason is related to this:


The two windows I can't edit do happen to be the furthest from my house's root prim.

Learjeff, I've had movable linked parts (doors) fail to move by script when the object was close to maximum linking limit size. You'd click them, and they'd do that little spinny particle "update" effect and refuse to move. The solution was to break the build into smaller parts for me.