Physical problems

I want to build a bowl with small spherical balls that roll about in the bottom.

I have found that if I make the balls Physical they behave as you would expect until the number grows when all of a sudden adding one more they take an instant dislike to the bowl and climb out and disappear.

What is it that governs this behaviour and is there anything you can do about it?

Obviously if I make the balls non physical they stay where I put them even inside one another. Not what is required.

SL is still using a 7-year-old physics engine. Don't expect to do anything too complex with it. Sorry, I know that's not the answer you wanted.

No its not but thanks anyway. As a bit of a newbie to this 3D modelliing stuff I wondered what was causing my prim balls to be scattered around.

cheap physics calculations that are build for speed not perfect accuracy. It is meant to look good in other words you would never want to put anyones line life on the line with a simulation done in SL. Having many physical objects touching each other and moving at the same is just is a good case for problems.

So what is the hold up? I've read about Mono but know little or nothing about it. Would that help?
My real need is to model a group of balls rolling in a bowl. A bit OTT but the effect would be stunning. At the moment I am concentrating on trying to model the balls in a texture (no 3D) but with motion simulating the motion in RL. Difficulty in getting the lighting right.
When you look at it horizontally there are no balls there and at low angles they look horribly distorted. From a reasonable height above it seems to be OK. So I'll have to constrain the view angles that they can be seen from, not easy in SL.

Mono is going to be more about script performance.

The physics engine in SL is licensed from Havok, a generally well-regarded company and product; but the version SL uses is several generations behind what is available now. It's a matter of some contention (and wry humor) since an update to a newer version of Havok was promised years ago and hasn't happened yet - you may see comments on the forums from time to time.

Sorry I don't have any useful ideas regarding your current project.

It goes to show that I know nothing or next to nothing about 3D modelling and graphics. Thanks for the info.

I read elsewhere in these forums that sometimes the physics engine will stop physics on the object in certain cases, such as a ball bouncing up and down - when ball reaches apex, sometimes physics is turned off due to some timeout reason or what not.

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You can add a timer to reset the script and you can add a line that uses llGetStatus to verify physics is turned on in the ball.