Terrain Texture Changing Each Visit

[Mike Crosley]

Why is it when I terraform land to accomodate the highs and lows in the terrain textures, when I return the highs and lows are different?  This requires entire parcels and often entire sims to have to be redone and costs literally hours of work each time.

 

Can't LL get anything right?  Do they have a QA team?  They really need one.

 

Does anyone know why this happens or how to avoid it?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

This is a feature of the randomising effect that is part of the texture blending - this ensures a more natural blending of textures.  If you have estate rights you can change the texture limits to eliminate it, but for most of us it provides a pleasantly ever-changing landscape.  Read more about terrain textures here.

[Qie Niangao]

On the other hand, some of us hate terraforming with great care only to see it look terrible when painted differently the next login.  It's especially a problem on Mainland, where one has no control over the textures.  There's a jira.

[Mike Crosley]

Hitomi, if you see your land textures appearing one way...and you terraform to make it the most attractive blend of texture and land shape, then you log in again and see the textures appearing completely different, I'm sorry, but that is NOT A FEATURE.  Calling that a feature, is like calling a Crash "An efficient way to log out".  That's just crap.

Again, why don't the textures appear in the same pattern every time you visit?

[Hitomi Tiponi]

I realise it may upset some - and there could be a good reason to make it optional (i.e. use same randomising setting).  But some of us do like this feature, which it really is (as described by Torley) even if you dissapprove of it.  Q said it was pretty low down the requirements list (but he is an ex-Linden now), but if someone wants to present a change this may change their ideas.

As  I said before if you have estate manager rights you can change settings to make certain effects more likely - I did that with our sim to make the mountainous corner more likely to get rock textures and the rolling hills to retain their grassiness.

[Qie Niangao]

The effect is disastrous on the Atoll continent, especially near the water line.  It's difficult enough to terraform any graceful transition between those manilla-folder-colored scrub and acid-psychadelic coral reef textures, but to have it all scrambled the next day... well, that's why one sees so many of those gawdawful sculpty fake beaches, trying to hide the transition.

Although this doesn't rank up there with heavy bugfixing (nor even Estate Windlight settings as exchangeable assets), it should be mind-numbingly simple to implement.  It's one bit of information about the sim: randomize or not.  If not, the viewer uses some hash on the sim identity (say) as the seed, thus generating the same "random" texture transitions every time for that sim. 

It's kind of a shame they didn't just bundle in this trivial change with the much more extensive Windlight settings work; they didn't, so it becomes yet another feature requiring changes in both sim and viewer.

[Peewee Musytari]

It is annoying but has always been that way. You only need to get a friend to send you a snapshot of what they say to realise that everyone sees completely different terrain all the time, everytime you TP in and out or relog it changes, unless you have the same texture in all 4 levels.

I used to have a sim with sand and grass and a tenant that constantly complained about green patches in her sand, it didn`t matter how many times I fixed it they would keep coming back, I swear the stuff was growing lol

[Phil Deakins]

It's a bad piece of design, imo. Like you, I started a thread about it when I first came across it. I have land that's part rock and part grass. One day I decided to arrange the undulations to match the rock, "worn" grass, and grass textures, but the next time I logged in, it had all changed, much to my annoyance. It's a bad piece of design thinking. Such bad design thinking is what I expect of LL in more recent years, but not when this was done.