Self-destructive Prims

Funny OR NOT funny I inherit a prim from Rapture.. from a good great builder.. No joke.. I used at Doyle.. and Doyle itself are not working good when it comes to perfect align..

That prim I used for a building project.. drag copy it and 2 days later all of my build was phantom)) No I shall not smile i cryed and hated SL for days after that..

We had a Linden specialist looking at it.. builder himslef.. but no answer..

.......

I nowdays always start with ”fresh” prims. and I am known for being very very very EXAKT --- but ... but... building are ”complicated”.

Whenever folks say, "Well, I've been here a long time and I've never seen this" just has to make me wonder. I've never personally seen the president either, but I'm pretty sure he exists. LOL

Several users have said that "Yes, this does happen." Others have said, "No, never seen it" as if that somehow negates the experiences of those who have. Then they indicate that well, maybe the way you're building is messed up... and again try to put the blame on the user rather than the company providing the service. (News-- founder of the Builders Guild here. Built 3 sims from the ground up-including ElvenGlen. Owner of ElvenWorks Wares. Not a slouch in the building department, eh? And neither are others here).

I have seen (not just on my sim either) prims "walk" right in front of me and off of a sim. I have walked past a build before and had a prim jump right out in front of me... then I receive a note it just went off the sim edge. Self propelled prims?

This is a documented problem, not just in this thread but mentioned in others as well. So to those who've never experienced it... hey, glad you haven't. But it's still a problem that LL has known about for some time (because I bug reported it long ago) and that needs fixed.

I do appreciate the thoughts of possible causes... however, I can't really see any legitimate instance in which a prim should "walk"-- whether linked or not. Whatever the reason, it indicates coding problems.

Ah, that's a whole nuther problem... prim properties changing on their own (or maybe a related problem... because part of prim properties is position, for sure). Yeah, the "prim suddenly goes phantom and can't be changed back" problem is documented as well. Only way to overcome it is to do a drag-copy of the phantom prim(s) and then destroy the one you just drug away (it's the faulty original). For some reason, the one that remains will be non-phantom.

The REALLY scary thing is objects that change their permissions. You set it nomod/nocopy and suddenly... folks can copy it. Oh, that is fun. Merchants are especially fond of that one.

What I don't understand about all this: an object is basically MATH, right? Each prim on a sim has a set of mathematical co-ordinates that define its existance. Those figures should never change unless intentionally changed. So why would a prim suddenly start changing its own position? Why would a "phantom flag" suddenly switch from 0 to 1 and then refuse to switch back?

I hate to repeat this thought... but I've never seen such problems in other VR games.

In a word, bugs.

Bugs are magical creatures. They can, and usually do, produce many effects that should not be possible.

Occasionally, users can tell that these things should not be possible.

More often, users just think that the programmers are incompetent or that they are deliberately screwing them over, in spite of all evidence and logic to the contrary.

This is because users don't have to go looking through half a million lines of arcane code in a language designed by Torquemada's direct descendant -- code that has been written, rewritten, patched, unpatched, broken, fixed, fixed again (we hope), scrapped, redesigned, unscrapped, deleted by mysterious Code Gnomes, undeleted, lost, found, accidentally left out in the rain, rewritten, accidentally run through the laundry, re-rewritten, and then finally compiled successfully and hopefully working as intended -- in order to determine if something is their fault, a coworker's fault, nobody's fault, the fault of the design, the fault of the OS, the fault of the compiler, the fault of commodity drivers from a vaguely disreputable hardware company operating out of the back room "lab" in the basement hidden under the temple of a bizarre cult of Teletubby worshippers somewhere near the unfashionable end of Asia, the fault of the user, the fault of the author of some random program running at random intervals on some users' machines but not others, the fault of Murphy/Heisenberg/Azathoth/Roswell Greys/Republicans/Democrats/the Illuminati, sunspots, short circuits, long circuits, bad circuits, stale coffee, stale electricity, server towers, cellphone towers, microwave towers, electrical towers, the Tower of London, actual insect-type bugs living in the server, or just a random fluke caused by a particularly well-aimed cosmic particle.

(At least 15% will turn out to be, in fact, entirely unexplainable by any conceivable set of circumstances ... and considering the above list, we're talking about a very loose definition of "conceivable", including changes to fundamental physical properties of the universe. Even Mulder said, "Sorry, I got nothin'".)

... while half of your users are screaming that such-and-such new feature is desperately needed in two days or else the sky will fall (when said feature will take two months of seventy-hour weeks, minimum, if everyone in the company is dedicated solely to adding that feature ... and that assumes you can teach the artists and marketting types enough of the language to write "Hello World" in less than a month).

... and the other half of the users are screaming that some other bug entirely is destroying the program, and absolutely must be put at the top of the list, and by god, fix it before any more features are added at all (even ones that can be coded in your sleep while you are waiting glumly for the latest bugfix attempt to fail to compile). (Each user is talking about a completely different bug. Sometimes several mutually exclusive bugs that can't logically exist in the same program.) The number of users that are capable of explaining these bugs in such a way as to make them easier to locate is, in fact, a negative value.

... while on a tight schedule for shipping the next update.

... while feeling vaguely queasy because of the toxic mixture of fast food and caffeine that you must consume in order to sustain yourself, because that's the only thing you have time for/will keep you awake long enough to get anything done (about 67 hours per day, if you are lucky and don't mind skipping lunch).


* Disclaimer: I am not a professional programmer, a bug, a member of the Illuminati, Azathoth, or a Roswell Grey, but I do play one on television.

Do the shifts happen only when your build is on the ground? There was a recent thread about how terrain data is *compressed*, which causes movement artifacts for anything on the ground:

/111/25/64837/1.html

It wasn't mentioned in the thread, but there may be other geometry compression as well.

It seems the Lindens are at least aware of the terrain compression issue (and by extension may be aware of other geometry compression artifacts if they exist) and it seems to be something they are thinking about.

LOL, funniest (and most accurate) post I've seen in a long time.

Fortunately, there are cures to such:

1) Write the program right, using nice module techniques, in the first place.
2) Plan and orgnize the code using professional business methods rather than hobbyist hacker methods, and...
3) Pray a whole lot.

LOL

Just had this thing happen in my parcel about a week ago. Kind of killed sections of the haunted house that was hosted there. A real pain, concidering the thing is a combined project of several artists. Need to round them up together again and see about fixing it sometime.