Beatrice Voxel Sims share a lot of data already, but the physics engine is entirely excuded so far.

Since the size of physical things is limited to the max link distance, there is no need to load the entire neighbour regions objects. I'd suggest the distance of 34m, like the llGetObjectDetails command uses already.

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.