Flying and loss of control

Yesterday I started flying around. After a minute my controls stopped working and I kept flying in the same direction. Eventually I flew out over the water and went off into never never land. Couldn't stop, turn, drop, etc. This may have been a lag issue, or a one time incident. I'll try to duplicate it again tonight.

It happens to me all the time :/

The lindens put in something to keep you from walking or flying off the edge of the world, but it doesn't seem to work when that particular error happens.

I get that sometimes too. Its a common bug.

It's lag.

It happened twice last night. I don't think it's lag, because lag issues don't last this long. I wonder if it could be that I lost connection with the server? Like before, I was flying and I lost all movement controls. I flew off the end of the world, could not land, turn or even stop. Eventually SL crashed.

LOL Susan... I happened to me like 8 times last night... something wrong.. i'm sure they are working on it!

Does it ever recover, or do you have to quit and restart? Once I recovered, but it seems that once I'm out over the ocean, it's game over.

This used to happen to me a lot from home and when I tried to log back on, I had no connection to the internet at all. Do you experience that? In my case it was losing the connection. So I called SBC, my DSL service, and they tweaked my settings and it hardly ever happened after that.

I was never able to recover without logging.

It may be that the reason that it happens is that when you lag, you inadvertently fly out over a sim that has crashed. When you enter a crashed sim, that same loss of control occurs.

Whe this happens, I can always log back in immediately.

What is a crashed sim?

Dang, it got me again at 1 minute after 10pm, and I couldn't get back in

I look forwards to next weeks update - lotsa bug fixes I hear

Hey Susan,
I've had that bug too. I've only been able to recover by relogging.

Sim = Computer/Server = A Named Square on your minimap.
For example, the welcome area Sim name when you log in is Tahoma.

If (god ferbid) the tahoma server went down, you have a crashed sim. Crashed simes usually do not appear on your map. Usually all I see is water and from my xp you lose control of your av like you describe.

That makes a lot of sense, I didn't realize what a sim was before. The transistion from sim to sim seems to be seamless. Do different sims run on different physical boxes? I'll have to pay more attention the next time I'm flying around.

Interestingly enough, since my DSL was hooked back up -- by SBC no less -- I've not had another fly out into the void problem (yet, knock wood). Before I would have it almost every time I flew over a sim line, which really put a cramp in my explorations.

Before calling your provider though, you might try this little trick: turn off the modem. Both the power source as well as unplugging it from the jack. Leave it that way for at least 5 minutes. Reboot your system. Then plug the modem back in. See if that makes any difference.

#!

"Flying off into the void" happens when the Second Life program has lost its connection to a simulator (server). We try to detect when this happens, but with version 0.2 we have not been very successful.

The reason you fly off into never-land is that SL, if it hasn't received an update from the simulator, extrapolates your position based on your last velocity. So if you were flying forward when you lost your connection to the simulator, you will continue to fly forward... forever.

The most common cause of this is a problem in the handoff as you move from one simulator to another (from one box to another in the map). This case should be more reliable with 0.3.

A common problem is your Internet connection getting dropped (look at your modem's connection lights, make sure it is on and blinking with data transmission).

If you have a "network access translation" box (a device to let multiple computers share one DSL or cable line), this can also cause the problem. (The box will sometimes automatically change the port, part of the address SL uses to communicate with the simulator, without informing either SL or the simulator.) We're working on this problem internally.

The best thing to do, if you've been flying into nowhere for more than about 10 seconds, is to log out and log back in. After 10 seconds it is unlikely to recover automatically.

Thanks for your patience,

James

James, thanks for the very informative response. It makes sense and clarifies what I've been seeing. I'm paying closer attention to flying over sim borders.

Is there a specific port or ports that I could forward to the machine playing SL? I'm using a Cisco 678. It doesn't usually change port numbers on me, but if SL closes a connection and opens a new one, the router will most likely assign it a different port.