Hi Oatmeal Linden, thanks for the reply. As you can see from my screenshot this is not expected behaviour. In fact it makes any landscaping work to many of the terrain landscape style prims, like that of Skye completely useless.

Forcing users to not use the terrain at all and, as been suggestion, flatten it, hide, but land prims from another user and cover the sim in them. - obv not expected behaviour either : )

I dont know how many, but I suspect there are a large number of in world users that are charging for services like this.

That could be a lot of unhappy users when they findout how awful their sims look on a mac ( for example ) : O

I have not seen it change between sim restarts, I see the difference, like in the screenshot from mac to pc

What we are talking here is someone can build at a certain level, say a beach, and then another user sees grass terrain instead. Obv not expected : )

From speaking to other residents that are not happy and only just found out this bug exists, I have heard it is because the perlin noise is not being provided as a static (const) value for a region.

I dont know if this helps to resolve the issue?

Many Thanks,

Rob

Rogaman Resident: The random generator does cause some issues, and if you have permissions to adjust the terrain limits on an estate, you can sometimes work out how to keep your beach sandy. :-)

It may never be entirely perfect, but you may be able to develop a suitable workaround to achieve the desired effect.

Please look through the information in that wiki article, as I have found it explains the issue best in the resources I have found so far.

Oatmeal Linden Thank you. But have you seen the screenshot?. This is not some subtle difference, This is huge.

And caused because on a PC it chose to place this terrain blend in a different position to that of a mac.

Not some minor difference, this is huge and makes the whole texture terrain feature useless in second life, right?

Thanks <3

Hey there Oatmeal!

I've got to jump in on this one because there are crickets in here but this might be both one of the most viable bugs to fix and one of the biggest detractors for people looking to build and explore shared, immersive environments.

I implore you to champion this fix and can attest that it will go a long way to improving the user experience, especially as Linden Lab gears up to partner with a growing list of community projects who are building sims with new users in mind.

I've been designing regions for eighteen years now and a huge part of the process is blending between mesh terrain pieces (rocks, cliffs, beaches, false land to connect the two or allow for believable hidden underground cave systems or structures) and Linden terrain.

To the best of my knowledge, the majority of players are using Windows, and across the numerous windows machines, different third party viewers and friends' computers I've seen my environments through, I've been very satisfied with the consistency with which the work appears to different users (graphics settings and monitor color not withstanding) but I was shocked when I recently saw the forum thread which lead to this feedback: I had no idea non-Windows users were seeing the exact same world so differently, and the difference is not minor, it completely wrecks the appearance of years of work for everyone who isn't using the same viewer as the person who built the sim they're exploring, lending to the false impression that environments inworld are poorly crafted, dated, and simply not worth the time.

Second Life has improved massively on a visual level throughout its lifetime, but there are still plenty of tells that it's built on the back of something first written in the early 2000s. Being able to compete on some level, at least as far as fundamental visual tools and standards go, with contemporary platforms and game engines has rightly been a huge part of Linden strategy over the years, from the implementation of mesh, the Environmental Enhancement Project, and of course PBR and the advanced lighting model.

As a creator and a resident I've been delighted by how much closer to AAA fidelity we're now able to accomplish, but make no mistake - terrain integration as a facet here isn't trivial, it's absolutely critical to the success of this mission.

The use of the random perlin noise generator is not the issue I have with this situation, but rather that there is no shared constant in the results between Windows and Mac clients.

People viewing an environment on Windows builds will see the same random generation as each-other (unless they've tinkered with terrain texture tiling in their viewer preferences, in which case the discrepancy is on them) so why is the Mac build handling such a fundamental part of the world differently?

Worth exploring further: how the same environment appears on Linux, and what steps Linden Lab can take to unify the experience cross-platform. Whatever device you're accessing the world from, the experience should be as close as possible, and there's really no rhyme or reason to having the numbers run differently system to system.

If our meshes appeared a different size to people on the non-Windows build, or if texture scaling on an object was mismatched by the same - if avatar appearance varied this much from client to client, it would be just as much as an issue: this is a big one, it's the skin of the world itself.

I'm going to include some material below that shows my terrain blending work, so you can get an idea of how terribly the current implementation can wreck an environment unless sim builders abandon Linden terrain all-together and make their whole landscape completely out of mesh, which immediately nullifies the realtime user creation that sets our platform apart, makes it cumbersome to modify as needed, becomes resource-inefficient, troubling for hitboxes, land impact and pathfinding, and is just absurd when this should be relatively easy to solve clientside.

Here's an example of how an environment with blending can look: the part that comes up highlighted in teal is Linden terrain, the rest are rock and terrain meshes which have been designed specifically so the bottom of the texture blends neatly into the land

Here's a before/after of just the blending skirt, without any other foliage in the scene. I hope you can see why many of us find precision in this step essential:

I'm proud of the work here, but environments like this are completely cut short by the system to system discrepancy. Here's more of the asset/terrain integration:

And here's the most important illustration of all (the difference between Windows and Mac)

Dirt: Mac

Grass: Windows (intended visual)

Oatmeal Linden Correct me if im wrong, but if the terrain behavior is bound to a randomizer, should it not be able to implement a tool or feature of some sort to actively change the layout as in painting the terrain to create better effects, even if its just within the limited texture selection?

Oatmeal Linden A solution to this issue is outlined here:

Mirror Mondegreen: Thanks!