I think everyone knows about ‘Region Crossing’ problems. If you drive, sail, fly, walk fast, or ride trains in Second Life®, you know the problem. Cross a region border, and you might rubber-band, freeze for 5 to 10 seconds, get dumped out of the vehicle, or end up as a zombie at the bottom of the Blake Sea and have to relog. Cross a region corner, your odds of a problem are worse. We’ve lived with this for years. While it was much worse in the past, it is still a problem.
The forum thread How to fix border crossings? started in July as the usual “why can’t SL just remove borders” debate. It turned into something more useful: a running log of an actual fix. Here is the TL:DR version.
In the thread participants sorted out several different failures people lump together:
- Double crossings. Corners, and fast diagonal moves near a border, start a second crossing before the first one is done. That race condition has been the big killer. It caused vehicle ejections, system disconnects and lost vehicles. – There are scripts in the marketplace just for this so you can find your vehicle after a crossing crash.
- Hard failures on single crossings. Your avatar can’t move or stand, and you have to teleport or log out. Animats pinned these on sim-to-sim communication during the handoff, not on the viewer. Whichever, you were stuck.
- Cosmetic losses. Animations, camera position, sounds, controls and exit velocity get dropped. Good vehicle scripts already detect the crossing and reset all of that. They shouldn’t have to.
- Viewer ghosts. If an object or avatar leaves while it’s outside your view, your viewer may never hear about it. It looks stuck at the border. Right-click it, and it disappears. That one isn’t a sim bug.
- Appearance rebuilding. Mesh avatars arrive in pieces, with attachments and rebakes showing up after you do. When clothes are left behind… it isn’t always a BAD thing.
What Got Fixed, and Who Fixed It
Pepper Linden did the core server work:
- A server-side check that blocks a second avatar crossing until the first one is complete. The server knows when a crossing is really finished. LSL doesn’t. This took out most of the race conditions and the double-crossing failures (see page 7 for more).
- A fix that times out and removes avatars left behind after their viewer disconnects. The first fix exposed that problem.
- A fix for clothing and body parts lost during crossings, tested in August (page 6). In general this is a good thing…
- Bugs found with animats’ train test rig and fixed using simulator logs.
Leviathan Linden is working on making avatar crossings faster, which shortens the time you look broken in transit. He’s also the one who announced the main grid rollout at the Simulator User Group.
animats, the resident behind the open-source bike scripts, was the main tester. On Aditi (Preview Grid), his train ran more than 5,000 double region crossings over two days without a failure, first with one avatar and then with two (page 6). He also flagged a bug in the zero-compression code for UDP ObjectUpdate messages. Several third-party viewer developers noticed it too, and Linden Lab reproduced it. Midnoot, Extrude Ragu, SarahKB7 Koskinen, Kokoro Academy students and others put in test time.
Simulator version 2026-10-21 is live on the Blake Sea and was scheduled to reach the rest of the main grid this week (page 8), basically by the end of October. The rollout is happening region by region. On Heterocera’s Robin Loop, Electra, Burns, Neumoegen and Oslar had the new version, while Grote, Vine and Imperial did not yet. The nasty SLRR corner at Telea, where the corner sits between the rails, was still waiting for its update. (Who built that railroad?)
- Mixed versions. Awalphaomega posted video of a bad failure: the avatar crossed and the vehicle didn’t. Donovan Michalski checked the spot. It was a crossing from Giyeok, on 2026-10-21, into Annyong, still on 2026-09-28. Two regions on different versions may explain it, but nobody knows yet. Expect some weirdness until the rollout is complete.
- Load. Most of the testing was on empty beta regions. Busy Mainland and Bellisseria regions are the real test.
- Unconfirmed fixes. I haven’t seen confirmation that the ObjectUpdate compression bug or possible event queue message loss has been fixed.
- Content problems. The server can’t fix bad builds. Roads and bridges need prims that reach 3 to 4 meters past the border to hold vehicles up during the handoff. Kama City still has a barrier that pops up in the middle of the road.
My take: crossings are being worked on at a root level with resident help, not just scripted workarounds. Crossing aren’t seamless, and 32-bit, fixed-size regions mean borders aren’t going anywhere. But “safely crossable” is a step up from “pray at the corners.”
Go try crossings. When it breaks, file a bug report with your avatar name, the time and the region names. That will give Pepper something to work with.
There is hope.