To ROAM or not to ROAM?

Ok, read all the pro-ROAM stuff, thought I'd give it a try...

First impressions:

Hardly user friendly - took me about ten minutes to get the free trial period to work...

The subscription charges are a bit eye-watering...

First four attempts to use aborted either because ROAM couldn't find the target sim (sounds a lot like TP...) or fell over because of a bad sim crossing (which is my main reason for trying it, my land is isolated and the only two entry paths are bedeviled by bad sim crossings, and home is on my partner's land...)

Speed is OK - faster than flying, no problems with stupid floating buildings rezing in my path, and a fair autopilot. BUT, not a patch on real TP. and if you get shot down by a bad sim crossing, well, what's the point?

Second impressions (after an hour or so's testing):

It's definitely beta, and by no means flawless. Consequently the subscription fees after the three day trial are just not on - especially at the prices involved. A month's free use while the bugs are sorted, maybe. Paying to beta test? *hollow laugh*

While SL TP can be infuriatingly unreliable, I can't see this as being THE SOLUTION... It's too buggy, too expensive and can still fall foul of the TP hub to landmark flight issue - bad sim crossings. Until LL sorts that out, I can't see a great future for ROAM - sorry, but I have to tell it how I see it...

Nice toy, but I can think of better things to spend L$399 a month on!

Doc, I had the same experience, but I'm going to try to go back to the drawing board on it because I figured I was just tired and distracted and gave it an unfair test -- I gave it Portage.

Did you give it Portage? I notice you have some property out that way too.

The Portage area has exasperated me for months. There's some kind of broken sim seam there. No, Jauani, this isn't because I haven't learned to fly or because I need flying lessons in taking off attachments etc.

I have tenants who also try to get out there and can't -- if they set it to home, of course they can. It's a very beautiful and wild area and I love it, but that sim seam thing is broken.

You can tell not only because you can't fly to it, but because as you fly, you see strange things like optical illusions. You see land on the mainland that is say, red and brown for owned and for sale, and then it shows up again under water where the Linden water is, though it can't possibly be for sale. It looks as if there is a hidden world under the water, it's odd. It reflects in a strange way which tells me that the chewing gum and paper clips holding the servers together down there just are not holding.

This is the sort of thing that is almost impossible to bug report without sounding like a loon, but those of you who have flown out there know what I'm talking about. Even avoiding the seams and hugging the cost in the square around the void, you see those illusions and have trouble getting there.

lol my first roam attempt failed cos of a ship above me where i was roaming from solid object stopped me

Doc is your entire post about ROAM or did you slip into describing Second Life in general under "Second impressions?"

Maybe - but the issues are linked - SL TP isn't good. And bad sim crossings are my personal nightmare, ROAM might have glossed these over a bit, but fails to, so they got mentioned...

No choice but to give it Portage, I'm in Tompson, the only other route in (Honawan) is nearly as bad as Portage, so... Anyway, Portage is the route ROAM choses from any mainland location not in the SE mainland.

I've only been on about the sim crossings out there for a month or so. Obviously nothing is being done (except deletion of my posts on the subject...) and a Linden has told me they tried it (once!) and got through, so it must be OK!

Of course it works - occasionally - how else could I have got in to buy the land LL now takes $75+ a month in tier to own? The problem is, as you too have observed, that most of the time you can't get through those areas... And complaining through official chanels gets an auto reply with no follow up. Make waves and you get told there isn't a problem and your post on the subject deleted.

Frankly I'm not too worried at the moment, I have an alt out there and just fire it up on another computer and get it to TP me in when I want to get there.
The land market is currently plumeting, so I'm not eager to sell, so the fact that buyers can't get there is hardly an issue, and it's a lovely quiet place to play. Drop by and say hi if you can ever get through when I'm there.

However, when the market lifts I'm going to have to get something done, even if it means stepping outside the SL framework to do it.

Still, it's good to know I'm not alone in tilting at windmills!

Sancho! My horse!

Doc,

I'm so happy to have fellowship in the Portage issue. It's been a lonely battle for months. I was there at its birth when I bought on the auction and I had to set myself to home there to sell it. I'd ask Lindens -- hey, how come you have sold me land that I can't fly to???

Those who buy there and also set to home can't understand what the issue is -- obviously they log in there or get there in a jiffy. I wish "set to home" was something I could turn on 15 places, as Cocoanut suggested. Makes you wonder, if they can have "set to home" work so great, why they can't extend that all over.

Every time I've discussed this with older and more knowledgeable people, they simply tell me there's something wrong with my game. It must be my computer, or my connection, or my graphics card, or my "inability to fly".

You're absolutely right about Lindens. They fly there fine, the one time they try. Of course, you wish they'd fly the 100 times *you* try to see the 95 other times they can't fly. Or maybe it's because they're in California right there on the servers, and everyone else is patching in somehow.

I don't believe these sim crossing issues are my computer's issue or my ISP's problem. Why? Because I notice after some patches, they disappear! Even Portage disappeared for a glorious time then came right back. Ditto the crossing to the new continent.

Well, we could post up in Hotline to Lindens I suppose but at this point, I have one tenant who set himself to home and I will just tell whoever rents the new house to set to home and they won't notice the issue.

ROAM is one of those things so monumentally useless that, like NEXCOM, it's bound to succeed

So much for a "quiet beta roll-out" haha. I'm beginning to think ROAM needs its own forum I kinda grit my teeth every time I hear ROAM mentioned in forums, I wasn't really prepared for this much attention this soon.

The purpose of the beta program is to get people playing with it, try it out, get feedback on how to improve the experience.

One of the things we've been noticing is that your proximity to LL's servers seems to make a big difference on sim crossing reliability. For Rathe and I, sim crossings are quite reliable. But! We're both on the west coast.

As a side-effect, Roam has sort of become "optimized" for our link reliability, I think. I'm trying to work with beta testers (UKers in particular) to try and find some general set of parameters that works better for folks who're connected across the pond.

Right now, we're trying to err on the side of "not making you relog". You might notice some transports seem to abort a bit prematurely - this is kind of a safeguard of trying not to send your avatar into the oblivion. It might be that this setting needs to be changed. I'm looking forward to the weekend when the UKers and I can be in SL simultaneously to get some better debug cycles working.

As for Portage/Thomson, I've just run some tests, and it seems to ride to and through there just fine? I couldn't find any examples of any "broken seams/optical illusions", or any other problems. If you can characterize the problem more precisely, please drop me a notecard, and I promise you I'll look into it.

No Prok, there definitely IS an issue there, and in Honawan, I have three different computers, two Macs and a PC, all with different specs (obviously) and different graphics cards, all suffer the same issues, so it's not hardware related.

It isn't the connection, otherwise why is it not an issue for me elsewhere in SL? I have sim border issues elsewhere, occasionally, as we all do, but nowhere as consistently as trying to reach Tompson.

Not only that, my partner and friends have the same type and frequency of problem. In fact personal TP is the only way we can get together out there.

As for 'inability to fly', well, I don't have many problems flying elsewhere!

And have you ever tried walking in? On the two occasions I did I got frozen on the Healy/Lemon border and stuck underground on the Portage/Tompson border

In fact I have found not only the local sim crossings to be thoroughly borked, but the local telehubs have a nasty habit of freezing me on arival too... Certainly I'm not going to bother with any further purchases in the SE mainland area, no matter how cheap, because my impression is the the whole area is somewhat flawed and I forsee problems selling on.

Meantime I have Tompson virtually to myself, plenty of space to go mad in, few nusiance callers and a fast sim - almost like having my own private sim on the cheap (relatively).

i am considering about building a simmilar system as part of my "glove" system ,stay tuned ^_^

Based in the UK.. as some of you know.

I have not had a bad sim crossing yet. Tried Taber to Calleta, Calleta to Grignano, even tried Taber to Fairchang Island (OK that one failed but there is no way to fly it either)

I was testing it before the update.

Will continue later with tests. Love the product.

Blame it on Torley!



Ah, I'm UK...



Well the Tomson border hasn't been a problem with ROAM Francis, though there IS a consistent problem with another sim border which happens to be on the route from Io to Tompson - it has failed every time so far - sorry, didn't note the sim, but I will, and I'll let you know.

ROAM's problem with Tompson is that about 50% of the time it says it can't find it! Another frequent fault is saying something along the lines of 'you can't get to Tompson from here'...
I'll run a few more tests over the next day or so and let you have more details. But I'm afraid my comment about paying L$399 a month to beta test something still stands under the present circumstances.

Hmmm I'm mixed on this.. I think the scripting it must've taken is amazing, as someone who can't script for toffee

But it is definatly still in beta and I don't think I'll be signing up at the fees its asking at the moment for what it does. 3/4 abort at least once for me.. And it lags me out for a while afterwards.. But its good for flying to events more than 1000m from the telehub while I'm on the free trial

Francis,

I am on the east coast in Miami and have not experienced any sim border crossing issues going all across the grid. The only issue I have experienced is lack of responsiveness - I would put in a destination and then nothing would happen after it said it was searching for it. I attributed that to the system weirdness yesterday - I'll keep trying it out.

I do agree, as amazing as the device is, that it is a bit too beta to be asking a subscription fee for use until the issues are resolved.

Francis, just curious, does it also depend on the quality of the client computer? My old machine could barely keep up with SL and thus had really high ping times even though the connection was pretty fast.

Roam is a really cool device I could actually move around in the world when the TPs were broke and it is much more useful than Nexcom. For short trips it's actually better than TPing and the subscription thing isn't that bad it's less than a dollar a month.

What specific error message do you see?
- Unable to reach 'Tompson' from here: This means that you're on an island. ROAM cannot bring you from an island to the mainland, because there is no flight path.

- Unknown destination 'tomson': check your spelling. It should not be possible for the system to say that Tompson couldn't be found.

- No message: Raaah mailserver!

Poor Rathe has been working late trying to find a good solution. We're experimenting with different mail relay/queueing strategies to try and appease SL into processing our messages in a timely manner.

Shack, I think it's a combination between processing power of your machine and your network performance.

One thing we have noticed is that if you go to Preferences->Network and turn your "maximum bandwidth" down to 50, SL will blatantly ignore that number, but provide you with more quick sim crossing times I think this comes from both your network being a little less jammed with packets, and also giving your machine fewer computations to deal with.

Regarding pricing, those numbers reflect the referral bonuses that we pay out. (10% for referring someone, 10% for every person that person refers.) So if you sign up 3 people, and they sign up 3 people, you're ahead of the game

I laugh when I say this, but it's absolutely true. The first people to make a profit from ROAM is not Rathe or me. It's the referrals!

We had this problem in the NW corner of Teal/SW corner of Slate. The Slate land was (still is) banned to all non-group members. Walking into it caused an inevitable client crash. Kelly looked at it for over an hour and finally determined that nothing could be done other than asking the Slate owner to unban the land. It's still sitting there banned, unused and owned by someone who very rarely logs in. What a waste. Anyway, I thought the ban info might be useful.

Awww man!! And here I thought Torley just loved me!

hehe.. Seriously though. Great idea to do this! Affiliate marketing in world is something I expect to see catch on. Especially for those looking for "jobs". But that's a whole other discussion.

PS: Can't wait to be able to log in and try this device out!!

You could say exactly the same to Philip Linden about Second Life itself.

So basically, it's a pyramid scheme.

I have always thought that actually - the land tier fees are quite high for the constant problems of the past year. It is sad that year 1 of SL was far more stable than year 2 - it is supposed to be the other way around.

Francis,

I would love to see multiple destinations added to ROAM. This way you could set up several waypoints, and take a tour.

The system is very cool indeed, I will most likely subscribe. Great work.

Actually, it sounds more like a legitamate Multi Level Marketing business. Or even more so like an affiliate marketer/referer as seen on the internet. Not sleazy like a pyramid scheme. And there really is an honest difference.