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.
