Objects disappear when I zoom out?

[Lilyphilia]

Hello, I have the latest version of Firestorm and lately objects dissapear the more I zoom out of my house :o this is really annoying is there anything I can do to stop my items from disappearing? Thanks x

[Rolig Loon]

That's normal.  Look in Preferences >>> Graphics >> .General to see what your draw distance is set at.  Normally, 128m is a decent distance.  Your graphics card will render objects that are closer than that and will ignore anything farther away.  That not only saves you visual clutter, it greatly cuts down on your lag.  If your draw distance is too short, though, you'll see a lot of "nearby" things popping in and out of view as you move toward or away from them.

There are three other wrinkles worth considering too. First, all objects display a different Level Of Detail (LOD) as you view them from a distance than when you view them up close.  That's to save your graphics card from having to draw small things with great detail when they are really too far away to see very well anyway.  You can adjust your own LOD setting in Preferences, to make your viewer less sensitive to the shift to low LOD, but no matter what setting you choose, things far away will have less detail and will sijmply disappear at some distance.

Next,  it takes your graphics card longer to view soime more complex objects, like mesh and sculpty objects.  Even when they are within your draw distance, those object can be sluggish or fail completely to rez.  That's very annoying.  If you know where they are, you can oten coax them to rez by right clicking where they ought to be.  You can also try toggling Wireframe mode ON and OFF again with CTRL + Shift + R.  That's annoying in itself, but it can make slow-rezzing objects appear.

The other thing to know about is Firestorm's "progressive draw distance" feature.  Progressive Draw Distance is a method for increasing rez times when you TP to a new location. It works by dropping your draw distance as soon as you arrive, and then gradually increasing it. In this way, initially, there are few things around you that need to be rezzed in, and also not much data to be sent from SL servers. As the draw distance is stepped up, more of your surroundings become visible and start to rez in. This feature is very useful if you experience slow rez times, particularly in busy locations.  You can adjust PDD in Preferences >>> Firestorm >>> General