Sim Phantomed Sim!

This week I was minding my own business (literally) with Haley Salomon when suddenly we both plummeted downwards and splattered on the ground! My store was built on megaprims that stand about 50m above the raw ground. Picking myself up off the dusty ground, I looked around and saw nothing but bare land!

Immediately, I thought that somehow my land, store and all my objects had been taken away by an evil land-baron-trickster-bot, or perhaps in an insufficient-sleep induced stupor I had marked the parcel for sale at a fractional price. But no, the truth was even stranger.

I looked up to where my store had been - and it was still there! Somehow both of us had simultaneously fallen through the floor, all the way to the ground. Bizarrely, we apparently were standing on the ground in the middle of a solid megaprim cube.

Having no other obvious course of action, we flew back up through the "solid" cube to arrive at the store's normal floor. Upon casually striking the "Stop Flying" button, I gently set down on my store's floor once again.

And then plummeted 50m to splatter yet again.

Somehow the megaprim floor had become Phantom - and I could freely pass through it. A furious investigation ensued, where I checked the phantomness (is that a word?) of the remaining floor cubes (phantomed). Store walls (phantomed). Any objects nearby (phantomed). Everything was made phantom!

Perhaps, I thought, it's only my objects. I rocketed over to my neighbor, Aspasia Arliss's park and approached her house/temple/not-quite-sure-what-it-is, and being the clumsy oaf I am in a laggy sim, proceeded to fly right through it! All of her objects were similarly phantomed.

Returning to my store, and gaining a slight bit of psychological stability by positioning myself mostly on the floor (see picture above), we set about figuring out how to report this unbelievable turn of events to the Linden Mandarins.

Suddenly, I squirted upwards out of the floor to resume standing normally on the now solid floor. Other objects were also suddenly non-phantomed.

So what happened? A SL Client problem? No, it happened to two of us at exactly the same Second Life second. Did I dream the entire scenario? No, check the picture again. Clearly it was a sim problem of some sort - and fortunately a temporary one at that. It does a business no small goodness to have arriving customers plummet to their death mere seconds after they arrive.

Moral of the story: When you hear a big "Splat", it isn't always due to avatar operator competency challenges.