Vanishing Prims

Several times I've had prims vanish when editing them. It's happened just by clicking on a field, before changing it, sometimes in the midst of a change. This has happened with position, scales and texture fields. Also a couple of times I was moving a prim using the positioning handles and it just kept going and vanished off into the distance. Those were later auto-returned, the rest just evaporated.

Thoughts?

There are so many ways a prim manages to escape our control, that it is reminiscent of a badly-run zoo.

Usually if a prim vanishes and does not come back through auto-return, the Z coordinate was changed to an infinitesimal or astronomical quantity. OR, sometimes one accidentally deselects it just at the important juncture and it becomes somehow deleted or worse.

But if the prim is still there but not visible (or is in a different position than its position arrows indicate), the problem is with the visualization performed clientside. Usually you should go away from it (at least the draw distance or greater) and return, then it might be drawn correctly. If not, perhaps teleporting far away and then back is the answer.

Many of these escapes are brought upon us by the erraticism of mouse movements; others by a delayed control-press acknowledgement by a slightly laggy server.

The vanishing prim thing is a new feature/anomaly of the 1.7 update. It happens more often with linked prims and less often in individual ones. Most of the time, its when you shift the UV settings and change textures.

If the vanishing prim was part of a link, then the easiest way is to shift-drag the linked object to make a copy. It normally reappears because the 'copy' that you drag out is actually the original. And the one thats sitting in place is a copy. Doing this causes it to re rez in the same spot. You don't actually need to fly out and come back.

Regarding the positioning handles. I think the Z value can not be infinitesimal. The most it does is hitting the ground limit or hitting the sky limit. If it gets driven into the ground, there are various ways to find it, tips of which appear elsewhere in the forum. I've only encountered this once, which I think is also a hard to repeat bug.

One good thing to do when moving or scaling prims, especially several all at once is to keep holding down the mouse button for a few seconds in the same spot until all the prims 'settle down' before letting go. This helps allow your client to transmit and retransmit the location of the translation several times to the server.

If you have accidentally deleted your prims, remember that its somewhere in the trash.

I posted this originally as Susan (my wife).

I don't think this is a fat finger problem, it's happened just by clicking on a field, not changing it and by dragging on the positioning handles. The latter was very startling, the prim just kept going, it looked like it was sliding away on it's own. The clicking on the field caused the prim to instantly vanish.

The linking comment is interesting. These prims were being repeatedly linked and unlinked, although they were unlinked when they went away.

I think it's a bug, but can't reproduce it, although it's happened several times.

This has been happening to me lately a few times. I would simply move an object around dragging a certain axis and POOF in the middle of the move. The object is no where to be found. No report of object being returned to inventory. This isn't a case of mouse jitters either. Not much use in a bug report with no kind of useful evidence and the fact that it is random for me.

I was editing my house, setting the edit linked prims so I could do just one part of the linked house and almost the entire house vanished!

I'm not very pleased by this, I put a lot of work into it.

There's something I've been seeing but haven't been able to repro accurately to my satisfaction. I'd like to know if anyone else has been experiencing this:


Does this sound familiar to anyone?

I had a boat "sink into the ground" and vanish when I right clicked on it to edit. I tried everything I could think of to find it. Even hiding surface patches..

No, it wasn't in my lost + found.

I finally gave up, flew to the other end of the sim to check on something, and when I came back it was back where it was supposed to be.

A couple of times I've discovered duplicate objects, where I'd replaced part of a build because I thought it was missing.

I assume this is due to the client not getting valid updates and losing track of the object, and it came back when it reloaded it from the local cache or the server. Perhaps that's happening with you?

Torley, yep! That fullbright annoyance has happened to me several times. It seems to happen whenever I change certain texture properties of a linked prim. I think it may have also happened whenever I applied a certain script to it. Not sure though but the texture properties seem to have this effect on it.

What I did to fix this issue was shift+drag a duplicate of the object. If I remember correctly it is the duplicate that is left behind. The duplicate ends up fixing itself so I delete the original and the fullbright bug doesn't reappear unless I mess around with the texture properties again.

The root prim dissapearing I haven't experienced yet.

Thanx Kurshie... I haven't played around with it that extensively, but that sure is WEIRD.

Torley, i've also had it happen to me on a number of occasions again, usually when working with the textures.

I was working on my A-Wing and the main hull "vanished" the Prim itself was still "there" and i could click on it but the prim was invisible. It was still Linked with the rest of the objects but the main prim was invisible, I think it was a major glitch and I think i had to restart the project. And no it wasnt Transparent, or phantom. I made sure it wasnt

Or worse!? Zombie prims!!!

Experienced this several times, myself, Torley. I can't explain the fullbright issue, since it seems to happen randomly, even when I'm not even editing or touching an item. The root prim of my sanctuary does this all the time. Changing the material fixes it... for a few seconds. *laughs* Really though, all you can do is wait for it to fix itself, which it usually does after a few minutes. Other than that, I can't imagine even why this happens.

I recently experienced the disappearing root prim issue while working on my lastest creation. Usually it happens just when I select a linked object, and even then, randomly. Shift and drag, to create a copy, always seems to fix this. And yes, I've verified that the root prim is still there, just invisibile. It's still selectable, and affects movement if you walk into it, etc.

As for WHY either of these issues happen, I'm not sure. Possibly a client issue. I should test this out, trying to replicate this problem when others are about, to see if they can witness the root prim bugs. In any case, thankfully it's only a visual bug, and while annoying, it's still one of the least harmful bugs. *laugh*