animats Resident Some folks seem to be so fond and proud of their workarounds that they never ever would support an actual solution nor the advancement of SL. ;)

KarlRichard Resident Watercraft have to detect the water level in order to be able to look like they are on the water while there is no actual water physics and displacement in SL, either, so sailing in SL is a workaround to begin with. Why don't make water physics first?

I'm not fond of them. But after six years of complaining about region crossing problems, it's clear that it's beyond the ability of Linden Lab to truly fix them.

animats Resident I understand your frustration, but I disagree. They are capable and did improve the sim crossings a lot already. Crashing has become far less probable since then!

Development is man hour consuming. A company has to set priorities where to invest them first. Maybe sim crossing fixes did not get as many votes as things like PBR etc. But that has been completed now, so you might help with your vote to make it a priority now.

Tech Robonaught Toothless Draegonne already mentioned that. It is not a solution of the actual physics issue, but a workaround which is only feasible for estate owners. On all the mainland this won't work.

steph Arnott The simulators are already hosted on AWS and have been since the beginning of 2021

Soap Frenzy, yes, its a third party server provider which charges for usage, LL pay the for the basics which is not what I was refering to. LL has already done a cost analysis for the resources it would need and decided to put it on hold until cost come down because SL users are not going to pay for it through monthly subscriptions.

GreyWolf Skydancer I'm experiencing the very same problem, since a couple of months at least: I had to stop flying, to stop sailing (and, of couse, to stop buying planes and boats) 'cause 50% of the times I'm even unable to cross to the next sim. No more flights, no more sailing and regattas... so, in a few, even no more SL at all.

LLs seems far more focused on PBR, right now: I'm wondering to whom the creators will be able to sell PBR items, if we residents will be all forced to leave SL.

Elwe Ewing Is this with the official SL Viewer or with Firestorm? FS came a long way last year to address these problems, it's still far from perfect but mostly tolerable depending on the machine running it, and settings, other than the bias issue I explained below. For example the original caching behavior was restored which helped a lot to prevent long freezes and "blackouts". I don't know if that was restored in the SLV, that's why I'm asking.

AlettaMondragon Resident Firestorm viewer v6.6.17 and v7.2.2. I'm having such issues since March 2026: before then the issues was the usual ones we're all used to, nothing too dramatic.

Elwe Ewing If V6 got too bad lately too, that's because it's too old for the current infrastructure and out of sync, more and more each time the simulators are updated. This always happens with old viewers, I used to have this problem in my first years when I was one of the notorious update procrastinators: if a viewer version was good enough for me, I was reluctant to update until it got blocked. Then I took the opposite approach a few years ago, went ahead into beta testing to find the bugs and get them fixed. Then the first PBR viewers were so bad I rather stayed on 6.6.14 for everyday use and only dipped my toes into V7 to see what they got fixed occasionally, but it was so horrendous, I decided I had to get into the bug hunt game there to get the most annoying things fixed. Some of those are fixed now, some still in, especially the latest release 7.2.3.80036 and the latest beta 7.2.4.80703 are pretty good. The beta has some fixes and new features that are pretty good, some bugs still unresolved or fixing one aspect broke another, but if they don't import bugs or break things before release, this will be a pretty solid release soon. Better than the previous one.

TLDR: If you get the new FS release (I think in a few weeks) or the current release now, you might get a smoother experience overall and sim crossings might be better than with earlier V7 versions.

AlettaMondragon Resident thanks for your thoughts, and at last I thought the same: I was initially sticking to v6.6.17, which left me some of my (stolen) FPS but, at last, when all the problems arised, I thought too that more recent viewers had them addressed, so I installed v7.2.3... no way: if login was ok, I've never been able to TP as it always crashed. So I fell back to v7.2.2, which I'm currently using. Anyway, the problems declared remained (and now, browsing JIRA, I'm seeing some of them still not addressed since 2024).

I'm sorry LLs needs to keep PBR going, right now, which I consider "the source of every pain" (for many reasons): they took that direction and, now, it's impossible for them to step back or, I think, even step forward, without receiving complaints from half of the residents.

So, at last, it's to see how this nefarious thing will go: if LLs will decide for SL's survival, admitting PBR was a silly idea, I think creators will paint LLs' faces on their darts game's targets and will leave SL en masse (like they was doing before PBR). If, to the other side, LLs will keep going with silly idea, I'm seeing many and many residents leaving SL as well (painting their darts targets or not), 'cause I'm not eager to spend big money only for the honor to buy new PBR items, so to make LLs richer: PBR gives me nothing at all (materials was here before it), I'm not a photographer, and PBR-aware viewers stolen 50-60% of my graphic card FPS: if I go in whichever modern game, outside SL, I've still 100+ FPS from my GTX-1080.

Elwe Ewing They probably made it much more inefficient than it should be, which is not a surprise, other platforms with PBR are far less resource heavy. I'd say that it's a big factor in SL that there is nearly no optimization anywhere, other than some performance-oriented regions like car racing sims, builders usually just keep rezzing the most complex objects, now mirrors too, which skyrocket the scene complexity that needs to be rendered, now with all the extra aspects of PBR. It is a big factor and nearly nobody does benchmark tests in SL, including LL, but the problem is, the PBR viewer is quite heavy on RAM and VRAM even when there is not much going on in a scene. So more than 16GB RAM is definitely needed now (it was terrible with 16 for me previously, now with 40GB there's no RAM issue) and I still don't know how much VRAM would be needed, but 8GB is definitely far less than what the V7 viewers need. Sadly the upcoming viewer releases won't reduce that load, but I hope they'll find a way to do it in the future.

So I agree with you completely, it wasn't the best idea to go for PBR like this, especially since its visual implementation is poor as well, lacking key features and there are still orbital bugs that they didn't fix and they keep saying it'll happen sometime "soon". I love the improved visual quality in those aspects that really improved, but there are a lot of aspects (for example water reflections, specular tinting, projector lights conflicting with shadows, broken and too bright transparency highlight, broken alpha layer order) that became much worse and no ETA on when they will fix any of these.

Wol Euler But in many cases it makes sense, to legally build something solid (non-phantom) until the sim border. Let's suppose there is a solid castle wall built around an entire region, right until its borders (which is legal). If you walk against the wall from inside the castle, you are bounced back, no sim crossing takes place - so far correct. However, if you walk from outside (a neighbor region) "against" the castle wall, the sim crossing takes place (though it should'nt), the wall swallows you and you get stuck, being unable to move. From outside the castle wall appears to be phantom (though it isn't) until you cross the sim.

My request is to fix this lack. The wall should be solid in both directions. Sim crossings from outside against the wall should be prevented as well.

KarlRichard Resident On that, I'm sorry, but it have to be your responsibility to avoid to cross where you see the wall ending at sim border (also, you can see where the borders are, in the minimap: at least Firestorm allows that). You may tell that you could be forced to cross there by a lag spike, and ok but, in such case, LLs can't do anything anyway to prevent that (apart optimizing the grid, of course, which seems a lot lazy to answer since a couple of months)

Elwe Ewing Well, obviously they can, why should they track this thread otherwise. I also suggested a solution.

Navigating by minimap to prevent sim borders is not a very natural user experience. The 3D world should behave natural and consistent. Sim borders should not be an exception as far as possible, and in this case it is possible.

KarlRichard Resident even if I totally agree to your point (the "natural" part) and I personally think it shouldn't be US to keep watching the minimap, but SL to "be nice" to travellers, nonetheless "this is SL" so this is the way things goes here.

In the last year I've been in OpenSim too and, there, is not unusual to see 1024 x 1024 sims (my sim, there, is one of them) or even to fly or sail into 4096 x 4096 sims (yes: no cross-sim for 4 km).

As it's years I'm telling LLs to implement OpenSim's "megasim" feature in SL (at least in public sea-only zones), I'm not going through all that again here. Only consider that OpenSim software is open source, so implementing megasim in SL should come at very low cost.

If you also sail in games like Valheim, you'll have 250 square km maps without any cross which try to crash you: instead of implementing PBR I believe such things could be evaluated by LLs.

KarlRichard Resident It's a bot that tracks some of these suggestions, when it's not Oatmeal or another Linden. Then it will be one of these Lindens who eventually updates it once they read and evaluated it. So tracking doesn't mean anything. If you get a "Planned" tag on something, it's a strong maybe, and if it's "In Progress" then you can cross your fingers but I still wouldn't hold my breath in that case either. Only when it's marked "Complete" you can be sure they were really able to do it.

The castle thing is a solid point, I give you that, and it reminds me of a place at Southern Nautilus that had this problem. They had a wall next to a pier along the region edge, I could dock outside of the wall but then I couldn't get in realistically, only in this Matrix-style through-the-wall manner that is so so bad. Whatever. But it was really stupid at that place. They could have avoided that however if they hadn't built a wall right there, only like 10 meters further in the other region. When someone builds a place, especially at water and considering water traffic and docking, they can take this into account and design the place accordingly, so I'm not convinced that this requires a big update to the physics system.

The idea to block the crossing altogether along an object lining the border might sound good at first, but let's say I have a 10 meters tall rampart with a wide wallwalk or platform that can be used for docking, but it's too high when you're on most boats that exist in SL. If you're on one of your own ships though, you might make it. So then the viewer should also get the object's max altitude and compare it to your avatar's and only let you in if you're higher? Or only apply this restriction when you are sitting on an object? Or not even apply this to avatars but only to objects (vehicles)? But what if the vehicle is phantom anyway (maybe a ghost ship by design) and is supposed to go through anything? So many factors that add complexity to this.

And it doesn't have to be a wall, but a pier can become problematic, too. So the pier is against the region border, either perpendicular or parallel but it's touching or too close to it. However you can leave the boat outside the region and jump to the pier in the other region. It works on the way back too, not realistic but it works. Blocking the crossing altogether would prevent this.

AlettaMondragon Resident You mention an important point here. This is no reason to leave the physics gaps each 256m though. Both can be solved. But it is important to regard your point in the implementation: Shapes reaching over sim borders have to be cut right on the sim border. This ensures that overlapping objects don't block protected water sims.

KarlRichard Resident That is exactly how it is now. The problem, which we dicussed in the group chat before, is the lag as there are a lot of things that have to be arranged during the handoff and by the time your viewer gets the data from the sim, you're already there where the solid object is. It happened to me too, when I was testing terribly unoptimized FS builds last year, that I ended up in piers because my viewer locked up for a minute or longer, not necessarily on crossings but anywhere.

The other thing is what I mentioned in the group, when I see the wall or cliff on the other side of the region border but I enter, either I want to stay outside or go through the object, but I take the chance whatever happens. Going in faster with a vehicle or jumping when on foot helps because the higher speed results in higher interpolation, so you end up further ahead in the region when you enter. This is quite reliable if your viewer and internet connection are reliable too, unless there is a serious issue with too much lag in the regions you move between, you get used to how fast you have to cross to be in the right place when you enter.

I'm not saying this is convenient, but the better solution would be if they managed to eliminate the errors on region crossings or at least minimize them, so once you know what to expect when crossing, you wouldn't get outliers like hanging up for 10 seconds or more. That's not only server side by the way, since V7 most of that comes from the viewer when it thinks your cache or VRAM is full and it tries to discard and render textures and objects like crazy as long as its Bias counter is at 4. And this often happens when you cross into a new region because if you use 256 or 512m draw distance, it lines up with the region borders. If you set a different draw distance it can help, but then you will notice you might get stutters and hit piers or anything in the middle of a region.

AlettaMondragon Resident The lack of physics on sim borders IS such en error. If you try to walk over a sim border where there is a wall on the other side right until the sim's edge, the sim crossing should be prevented and not take place at all. No simcrossing in this case -> not being caught in an object -> less lag & less chance of crash & prevention of bad user experience.

AlettaMondragon Resident I was considering to agree with KarlRichard Resident but yours is a GIANT good point to say no, also considering that, many of the times, residents even blocks the sea/sky ways in their sims, in mainlands, not considering the covenants and it seems very rare LLs does anything about that.

Elwe Ewing Aletta indeed mentioned an important point to consider, but not to panic. Both can (and imo should) be solved together. (see above)

KarlRichard Resident Personally I like the ability to get through those walls when I want to, but it's not the point because it's not the wall's fault anyway that this doesn't work. You have probably noticed how you get yanked out of your watercraft and from the region if you happened to cross regions into a banlined parcel but the crossing happened because you didn't get the necessary data from that sim before entering. And when you're in, the simulator realizes your avatar is where it shouldn't be and it ejects you instantly. That's the exact same problem, so yes, blocking a crossing along an object on the region border is generally a good idea, but it would fail just like when it's restricted access (banlines) on the border. If you're lucky your viewer gets the data before crossing and you get stuck and you can back off and go around, but if you're not lucky, you get a free flight back to the region you came from or to several regions further. That's not a good user experience either.

AlettaMondragon Resident Now I see, so you do like those physical gaps on sim borders to get into walls. Well, that's your personal preference then. Some players enjoy using the bugs of a game.

Banlines could be handled in a similar way, so that they prevent an unnecessary and unhappy sim crossing. Nice idea!

Btw, the physical shapes of bordering neighbor sim edges could be cached on the simulator where it has its own physics anyway, so physically those edges are treated as if they were on the recent region. So no additional lag for preventing those unhappy sim crossings (which cause a lot of lag by plenty of collisions).

KarlRichard Resident It's not a bug, it's a design flaw and one that is inevitable in SL. I could do without the ability to get through walls because it's rather for fun while doing strict, only walking (no tp, no flying, no vehicles) trips, but I do want to keep those "safe sides" of roads and waterways along region edges where overhanging objects can't be hit.

What I'm not sure if you understand of what I said here and in the group along with other people who explained it better, the problem with these things in the first place is that you get placed from one simulator to another, just like when teleporting but keeping your physical attributes like velocity. And the vehicle goes through a similar process.

When would you request the collision physics data from the other region? For example when you get X meters from the border, request the data for objects within Y meters from the other side of the region edge? (If such a thing is possible, but if it was, the problem with banlines on region edges wouldn't be a thing either.)

Then there's another thing that makes it much more difficult to calculate the position of physics shapes: convex hull shapes in linksets. Some objects have "bad" physics shapes on their own that don't behave like they should. If you highlight those physics shapes you either won't see their highlight or they will bump elsewhere. They can be much larger than the highlight or a completely different shape. I think this is because the creator uploaded it with a concave physics shape and didn't convert it to hulls, so when set to convex hull, it confuses the physics engine completely. The same thing happens quite often with linksets where the physics shape of each link is convex, but together they are concave, and boom, invisible obstacles everywhere around the object. The simulator apparently has a lot of trouble dealing with these distorted physics shapes, so I doubt it could send accurate data of these to other simulators and the client when you're about to enter. This means you could still end up stuck in such obstacles.

Another thing is that to make sure you don't cross into something solid, the crossing could be halted until the predicted position of arrival is somewhat verified as clear, but then we'd be stopped on every single crossing even if it's 100% clear to us, visually, that we're clear to cross, for example to an empty water region. So that wouldn't be an improvement either.

Add (reached text limit):

This is a patchwork platform with features built on bugs with core elements from 1999 so there are quite a few limits that they won't be able to overcome. However, if SL ever has to come to an end altogether and LL decides to build a new one from scratch, sure, I hope physics would be more consistent there.

AlettaMondragon Resident Yes, I understood what you mean, but I still disagree. Obviously sim border crossings are a lot quicker than teleports. The crossing agent (and vehicle if any) is already known to the neighboring region as child agent (and child object if any). This is not the case for far teleports.

Regions do have a lot of info about objects and agents on neighbor regions already. Not only visually. If they are at 34m or closer to the border, for instance scripts can access information about those child objects and agents by the llGetObjectDetails command.

So anyway a region "knows" (the simulator has it in its memory) close objects and agents form neighbor regions. Just the physics info has to be added and used. (Maybe it is already there but not yet used.)

KarlRichard Resident In my experience that "34 meter zone outside the region boundaries" is very unreliable and I am always amused when it actually works on an object that is stuck on the region border. And it has nothing to do with physics, physics framerate and calculation, so it is still obscure to me how this could work even in theory. However if they decide to try it, I hope they'll set up a test field for it on the beta grid and we could see if it fails as we expect or if it could work as you expect.

I think it would be just easier if people didn't build walls, cliffs, towers, etc along their region borders, but obviously some people like to ruin their own waterfront view. Or maybe they derendered those things and left them there for everyone else? I wouldn't be surprised.

The other thing I only realized now: What would happen when you're going through a tiny region corner waterway with a watercraft that is larger, so the bow is sticking out of the region border? If it collides with the large objects in the next region before you could turn, it's not only that you couldn't make the crossing because you would keep bouncing back, but a sinkable ship will sink immediately if collisions happen with objects in the other region.

AlettaMondragon Resident I totally disagree. In my experience the 34m zone is very reliable. It has to do with objects which have a physics shape as well. I mentioned that the physics could be included at that point and accessed by the physics engine. As an rl IT professional I am 99,9% sure that this is feasible.

It is utter nonsense to rely on all people "not building along region borders", since that will never ever happen, as you probably know. Instead physics simply should work without gaps.

KarlRichard Resident So then how would you navigate narrow region corner parts of waterways without bouncing back, getting stuck or sinking?

KarlRichard Resident IT professionals aren't software engineers. There's a clear difference between development and operations. This is coming from both an IT professional and a software engineering student. :/

A lot of what happens when regions cross borders relies on handing off the physics from one region to another. During this handoff there are many reasons why physics will suspend while that handoff is taking place.

There are a lot of problems to consider from an architectural perspective when implementing systems like this, but I do agree. One has to assume the behaviour is a bug first, . It is a very real and very possible thing for someone to grief a system where you are "bounced back" on region crossings.

When you cross a region, you have NO control of your vehicle. Being additionally at the mercy of the physics engine is an issue I don't think many would like to have when making that crossing.

Light Snacc Ok smarty, as an rl software engineer I'm 99,9% sure that fixing the physics gap is as possible as you can look from one region to the next one.

In a very early (maybe testing) state of SL I guess you weren't yet able to look from one region to the next one. In the further development this supplement had been added. The physics supplement for simborders is still missing though. My request is to supplement it.

And this supplement would also prevent sim crossings where the way is blocked by an object on the other side of the sim border.

KarlRichard Resident

"Ok smarty, as an rl software engineer I'm 99,9% sure that fixing the physics gap is as possible as you can look from one region to the next one."

Weird how you resort to such an attitude. Also then why don't you build an example of your solution on your offline grid and show the results to LL?

"And this supplement would also prevent sim crossings where the way is blocked by an object on the other side of the sim border."

And it's weird how you avoid my points and questions about this, too. Quoting myself:

So then how would you navigate narrow region corner parts of waterways without bouncing back, getting stuck or sinking?

The idea to block the crossing altogether along an object lining the border might sound good at first, but let's say I have a 10 meters tall rampart with a wide wallwalk or platform that can be used for docking, but it's too high when you're on most boats that exist in SL. If you're on one of your own ships though, you might make it. So then the viewer should also get the object's max altitude and compare it to your avatar's and only let you in if you're higher? Or only apply this restriction when you are sitting on an object? Or not even apply this to avatars but only to objects (vehicles)? But what if the vehicle is phantom anyway (maybe a ghost ship by design) and is supposed to go through anything? So many factors that add complexity to this.

And it doesn't have to be a wall, but a pier can become problematic, too. So the pier is against the region border, either perpendicular or parallel but it's touching or too close to it. However you can leave the boat outside the region and jump to the pier in the other region. It works on the way back too, not realistic but it works. Blocking the crossing altogether would prevent this.

You also wrote this: "Vessels that have a damage system responsive to collisions (to make sailing more challenging) use to sink immediately when hitting these sim edge builds"

If the point of the collision damage system in those vessels is to make sailing more challenging, then why don't you just take the challenge and avoid collisions as you should?

AlettaMondragon Resident My impression is that you are trying to talk this thread to death. Your true intention you already admitted: you simply like to get into objects on sim borders (see above). That's why I avoid your "points" (=half knowledge, whataboutism and nonsense). "Don't feed the troll."

KarlRichard Resident Hilarious. You're aware that the same way we can cross into or through solid objects we can teleport into them as well, so what is so wrong about it? You didn't suggest to block teleports into cliffs as well. My main point was that I didn't want to introduce new obstacles on roads and waterways that aren't prone to them with the current physics system. That is what would sink your ships even if you didn't cross regions accidentally or carelessly. If you can't handle this conversation in a civilized manner, the only thing I can suggest to you is: learn to sail.

KarlRichard Resident I don't think anybody is trolling you here, and to be honest the reason I made the comment about how you went about your career is supposed to point out that arguments from authority are a bit fallacious.

My problem with your proposal is a few:

1) You simply can't know how easy (or hard) this would be to implement without talking to Linden Lab, firstly. This is a similar argument for why people say "well why can't we do it here if they can do it on OpenSim?", different codebase, plus foresight. I'm not sure why you speak so confidently on it's feasibility in this case.

2) When crossing a region, there are reasons it is to not be at the mercy of the physics engine when crossing a region can take so much time, especially when multiple people are seated on the vehicle. An object attempting to prevent that crossing with physics can be a much worse issue than making the crossing and intersecting with the object (I understand that for collision-based damageable vehicles like your own this may not be desirable, but not everybody uses these). This isn't whataboutism, it's a real issue residents can face in the mainland with what you propose.

3) Things like position data don't take a lot of resources to store (even though there's a reason why it's 34m ahead in all likelihood and not the entire region before it), physics models can be anything from "kinda simple" to hilariously complex. Now a region must not only store all physical assets that exist in the region, but all physical assets that exist. All so that what, sim crossings have more predictable physics in mainland?

4) Aletta is very much right, building nearby the region border in itself is asking for trouble. As I mentioned earlier, sim crossings are essentially giant handoffs of assets from one instance to another. This is a very intensive process and is both demanding on the server and client to perform. An update like this could encourage more of this and would mess with vehicles that already make this assumption in their design.

Light Snacc I fully understand that you agree to the obvious nonsense of your other alt, since this is how trolling works.

KarlRichard Resident I'd really appreciate it if you didn't make such baseless claims. One check of my profile would dispell any notion that I'm dogpiling with two alts.

Light Snacc You should see the other thread where he demanded LL to show him all the relevant code, then he would make his suggested feature in 20 hours of work if he could, but if he couldn't, LL should have made it for him. And he gave them a deadline to accept his offer.