not seeing all outlines on selected objects?

When you've got objects selected, you see their outlines hilighted in yellow or blue, even if they're behind other objects... well, you used to. Lately it seems like sometimes you won't see all selected objects getting hilighted, or sometimes some of them will flicker, and this can add a lot of guesswork to certain tasks. It kind of reduces my faith in the fact that what I'm telling the client to do is what it thinks I'm trying to tell it to do.

It turns out that this is an unexpected side-effect of occlusion culling. If some of your selected objects are behind a wall, then occlusion culling will make them not render. If they're not rendering, then their outline won't render either. This means that having occlusion culling on can make it so that not all selected prims will be hilighted.

If your computer can handle it, it's best to turn off occlusion culling while building. Just hit control-shift-O, or uncheck the menu item "object-object occlusion" in the client -> rendering menu. This is especially important if you tend to use drag-selecting in a complicated build with a high draw distance. You can accidentally end up selecting something that's far away, and if you have occlusion culling on, you won't even see that it's selected. This means that you could end up moving chunks of your build that are far away without even realizing it.

My feeling is that selected objects should never be occlusion culled. I've bug-reported this.

I think the addition of the limitless camera distance helps too, since you can now rotate all around a large build and eliminate the problem of occlusion culling. Combine it with the 'hide selected' option on. I'm only wondering if 'hide selected' has a toggle hotkey.

I had that happen yesterday when I was retexturing something (and I had the camera fairly close too). I didn't see the outlines on anything but the part I wanted to retexture and ended up putting a nice wood texture on everything EXCEPT what I had selected. Luckily, the person I did the retexturing for had an extra copy and got the room back, but sheesh, talk about someone feeling like a giant dumass!

Oh, and I found out that undo doesn't work to undo texture screwups. You can change textures in one click, but forget undoing it...

Well, being able to rotate all the way around doesn't always help. I was working on a fairly big rectangular-shaped build where I wanted to select wall pieces all the way around. This involved selecting a good 50-60 prims due to decorations that shaped the wall, and I could pan around the build all I wanted, but I would always only see the selection outlines for the prims facing me. That's when I realized occlusion culling was getting me. I realized that the only way to really be sure of what I had selected was to turn it off.

I've had the exact same thing happen and it's good to know there's a reason and solution. I rebuilt my house recently but took it to the sandboxes so I could leave the original in place. I collected the whole thing, furniture and all, before replacing the original, and had a hell of a job working out if I'd gathered everything up, for just the symptoms you describe - at the time I figured it was just because it was a large bunch o' prims, but I wasn't suffering any of the usual tell-tale prim-overload issues.

Pain in the backside, but I'm glad you found the cause so it can be avoided. I fully agree that selected objects shouldn't be occlusion culled - I can't see a single reason why anybody would want that (but then I couldn't see a reason why anybody would want 'select only my objects' turned off by default either, so who knows. Let's hope this one gets the same treatment).

I can! Almost everything I do in-world involves working on prims owned by members of my group that are shared. That option doesn't let you select even those prims. Plus, when it's on, it totally confuses people who don't know about it -- they try to edit objects owned by their friend who has granted them modify rights, and they can't seem to make SL select the prims. It's a real nightmare of a feature, because there's no obvious indication that it's activated.

Well I wasn't saying there wasn't a reason I just remember that every time I made a build and went to drag-select I'd end up screaming "WHY ARE YOU THE DEFAULT?!" at my computer as I selected everything in the sandox. And then the feeling of peace when one day I realised that for some time that hadn't been happening any more, and order was restored

'S the usual thing though, isn't it - you can't please all the people all the time. I only work with my own prims and selecting other people's is a pain in the ass - you use group prims and the opposite is true.

An 'only select the objects I have permission to edit' option would be considerably more sane.