SL beginners: there it was — gone!

One of the mysterious things that happens to people from time to time, is that they lose track of something they have rezzed or attached, and can’t seem to find it again. This is particularly true of pose balls, many of which have a “hide” function which causes them to turn transparent when hidden or used. As reported previously, the best way to locate transparent things is to use highlight transparency (click view to drop down the menu, then highlight transparency and everything transparent shows red).

Sometimes things disappear because you have put them underground, and when this happens, it is useful to know that you can switch off the different types of rendering in world. So, while in SL, look at the top of your screen to see if you have the “client” and “debug” headings available. If you can’t see those press control and ALT and D and you should see the headings appear.

Usually to find things that have gone underground, you will need to remove the surface patch. You can do this by clicking client at the top of the screen and then going down to rendering in the drop down menu. That makes a new menu shoot out to the side, and clicking on types shoots another out to the side. and you need to uncheck surface patch by clicking on it. Instantly the ground will disappear. you won’t fall through it — the ground is still there, you just can’t see it for the moment.

Not being able to see the surface patch, means that you can click on and retrieve anything you have dropped beneath the ground inadvertently. While you’re there, you could experiment a little. Being able to block certain types of rendering means that it is possible to take pictures from above sims and block out the avatars or the builds. Remember to put it all back again though, or SL could get quite confusing.

If you find that an attachment has suddenly disappeared there could be two main reasons for this. The first is that at present there is a big which causes attachments to appear to move to your… bottom area… when you cross a sim border or tp. It doesn’t happen all the time, and when it does happen it seems that it only looks that way to the avatar concerned, and not to observers. There is a cure for it, which is either to relog, or to detach and reattach your attachments.

The other possibility is that you have inadvertently detached or moved your attachment. The first thing to do is to look in your inventory, because when you have something attached, it is highlighted in your inventory.If the item isn’t highlighted, you need to right click and choose to wear it, to reattach it. DO NOT ATTACH the item, because if you do it will reset the positioning. Wear things that are meant to be attached, always.

If you have moved your attachment inadvertently, the solution is more difficult. The best thing is to find a pose stand — they are often out in shops or malls — and then click on the attachment, choose to edit, and use the positioning bars to drag it back to the right place. If you are unable to do this, and the object is transferable, find a friend who will do it for you.

If something you own has vanished, then it should in theory return to your inventory, either to the folder it came from or your lost and found folder.  Sometimes it will return to the trash, so you should always check that.  Currently, if someone does a parcel return and you are not in the sim at the time, there is a possibility the items will be lost forever.  In theory that should not happen, but be aware that it can.

What does NOT happen is that items which belong to you return to their creators.  Often people IM creators asking where their bed/chair/gadget went as though the creator had magically called it back home or it had migrated back to the creator’s inventory.  That doesn’t happen.

What does happen is that things can be coelesced in your lost and found folder, which means that if your landlord returns all your furniture at once, there may only be one object in your inventory, called “object”.  You can tell if items are coelesced because the icon in the inventory looks different.  One object alone looks like a box, a group of objects coelesced together looks like a pile of smaller boxes.