My Own Little rant

I really do appreciate the efforts LL make in our behalf but this upgrade to 1.6 made something very clear to me. It seems as if they are rushing ahead with new features that I am not sure everyone wants while leaving the old problems behind for us to live with. For example I think the number one priority should have been to fix the dwell before blasting ahead with 1.6 as it is killing a lot of us off. It also would have been nice to see a lag/freeze reduction before 1.6 and maybe even improving clothing making in appearance.

I know I am living in a dream world but I don't believe in fixing what isn't wrong while not fixing what is wrong.

It's always a balance, deciding between innovative features that could give people new abilities they'll love and fixing existing bugs that have been a problem in the past. LL has worked hard to maintain that balance. If you have specific requests for new features, please be sure to post them in the Features Suggestions forum.

FYI, the recent issues with dwell were unexpected, and have been fixed:

/3/47/40226/1.html#post440915

You make good points, Susie, and I'm rather shaken by some of the instability of 1.6 myself -- related lag issues and other things I've pointed out in my past few posts. Of course, I love the fact that Lindens definitely are NOT happy with these problems either, and they're actively working to make SL a better place for all of us.

The problem with "solid foundations" in a digital world is that with such transcience and rate of progress, some "old bricks" may soon need to be replaced because they're crumbling on their own, to be replaced by new standards. Hence the need for subsequent versions of software and update patches and replacing Havok 1 with Havok 2 -- hopefully!

Not to mention the whole human element of unpredictability and fear of th unknown. We're all in this together, so hey, when we got problems, we can work together to solve 'em. The responsible thing is to continue communicating, and I'm thankful we have this forum to do so in.

The problem is that lag has loads of causes - it can be the server, it can be your computer, and it can also be your internet connection.

I lost a lot of lag when I upgraded my ADSL. Other people have lost lag when they added more RAM.

I'm not saying it's never the server's fault (and hence something that the Lindens could fix) - but often we can help minimise our lag at our end.

Lots of people will be getting lag with streaming video. This is streamed directly from the provider to your computer. If you are lagging with this it's most likely because you haven't got the bandwidth.

Hi Roberta. The point I was making has nothing to with lag. We all experience that all the time on the Internet.

Robin Linden stated at the beginning of the week they were working on it and even though it shows 0 it is still being calculated so you will at least get the dwell money ....as it is now we are all even at 0 and honestly most people are playing with the new features and bugs to be concerned with it at the moment

Hi Talen. My post wasnt about dwell or lag per se. I only used those as examples of something LL might want to try to make better before they go charging off into the future. I guess I wasn't clear enough.

Lots of us here in SL have RL jobs in the software industry. In that industry it is typical for major releases to be primarily about new features and capabilities, and minor releases to be mostly about bug fixes, stability and performance. LL follows that model, and as 1.6 is a major release there are plenty of new features and user-visible changes.

I'm not saying that's the right way to go. In fact I agree with you. SL is barely playable for much of what I want to do, and 1.6 did little to improve most of the major problems. I do like the new friends/CC distinction and I think the new build tools will grow on me, but I still can't build w/o stuff jumping all over the place and border crossings are still a joke.

I hope that LL can have some discipline and spend the next few months doing 80% bug fixing, performance and stability work, and only 20% on new features. I know I yammer for new features as much as anyone, but I'd happily wait for them if I knew I'd be able to fly my Morpheus around without crashing or losing it at every border crossing.

Except for text prims. We need those right now.


[edited cause it's late and I can't type worth merde]

Agreed 100% Second Life as it stands needs fixes much more than it needs new toys and even though I do agree the foundations are decidedly solid, the rafters are VERY shaky.

geez and I thought dwell was a nice generous bonus not life and death situation, guess i was wrong....oh and btw it IS a dream world, try to relax and enjoy it eh?

Hi Das. I am glad to hear you think that Second Life is all a dream. Most of us are alive and kicking but you can dream on if you wish. Dwell is not a nice generous bonus granted to us by the Lindens. It is the result of hard work and now many clubs and businesses are being destroyed by the Lindens with their focus on making chat bubbles and other such nonsence.

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I'm with Suzie on this one.

It's not about our computers. I had SL working fine on my computer, with my existing graphic card and DSL line. I had to go through many months of constantly tweaking things like drivers to get it to that point through several patches.

So it is hellaciously annoying to now have to go through crashes lag and lock-ups again. It ruins my business, it ruins my game play, and I just have to start wondering once again why I am spending these resources when everything I do can be so easily disrupted, and disrupted for days and days.

I hate it when people rant on about my computer, my connection, my drivers, my whatever. I had them working more or less, but *the patch changed that* so I frankly refuse now to *once again* go and try to look at my drivers, BIOS, bandwith, settings, blah blah blah. It's just *one too many times* having to do that, and I've only been here six months.

In my experience, lag ALWAYS comes from the SL servers. ALWAYS. Why? Because when I'm on a brand-new sim the Lindens have put on their best server for, I whip around like a knife through butter, nary a problem. As soon as I cross into an area with one of their crappier servers, I start to see lag and even crashes.

In this tekki-centric view of the world, the customer is always to blame and always has a crappier computer than what is technically superior. But this attitude of the customer always being wrong has to change.

What I do know is that this company is "on it" and is doing lots of important feedback and correctives. What I am not hearing from them is that I and my computer are to blame. Instead, in threads like "Crash-gasm" I'm hearing intelligent Linden workers trying to reasonably sort out why *some customers* have problems, by looking at what their computer specs are, but recognizing it isn't so much those specs per se but those specs *in combination with the patch* which after all is the new factor in the equation.

I wish some players had that attitude too, that what has to happen is that problems be solved, and your mind has to be kept open to the idea that it is the company's patch, and servers, which could also be changed, instead of endlessly sending the customer back to change his drivers.

it would be nice if a bug fix only dot release were done once in a while.

I don't crash, my computer is superior to many other systems. The last couple of days I have crashed at least 10 times. You do the math.

Mar

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I'm with Suzie on this one.

It's not about our computers. I had SL working fine on my computer, with my existing graphic card and DSL line. I had to go through many months of constantly tweaking things like drivers to get it to that point through several patches.

So it is hellaciously annoying to now have to go through crashes lag and lock-ups again. It ruins my business, it ruins my game play, and I just have to start wondering once again why I am spending these resources when everything I do can be so easily disrupted, and disrupted for days and days.

I hate it when people rant on about my computer, my connection, my drivers, my whatever. I had them working more or less, but *the patch changed that* so I frankly refuse now to *once again* go and try to look at my drivers, BIOS, bandwith, settings, blah blah blah. It's just *one too many times* having to do that, and I've only been here six months.

In my experience, lag ALWAYS comes from the SL servers. ALWAYS. Why? Because when I'm on a brand-new sim the Lindens have put on their best server for, I whip around like a knife through butter, nary a problem. As soon as I cross into an area with one of their crappier servers, I start to see lag and even crashes.

In this tekki-centric view of the world, the customer is always to blame and always has a crappier computer than what is technically superior. But this attitude of the customer always being wrong has to change.

What I do know is that this company is "on it" and is doing lots of important feedback and correctives. What I am not hearing from them is that I and my computer are to blame. Instead, in threads like "Crash-gasm" I'm hearing intelligent Linden workers trying to reasonably sort out why *some customers* have problems, by looking at what their computer specs are, but recognizing it isn't so much those specs per se but those specs *in combination with the patch* which after all is the new factor in the equation.

I wish some players had that attitude too, that what has to happen is that problems be solved, and your mind has to be kept open to the idea that it is the company's patch, and servers, which could also be changed, instead of endlessly sending the customer back to change his drivers.

Wrong, the bugs are not a "problem in the past" they are a problem in the present.


OK, the truth is that fixing bugs is not fun, not exciting, new features are fun and exciting. LL does what is fun and exciting for them, we have to take what they dish out.

It is about press releases and bragging rights for Philip. Consider the following press releases:

1) Many SL bugs have been fixed.
vs.
2) Many SL new features, streaming video.

Unfortunately this is pretty much par for the course. There are bugs that haven't been fixed in 2 years (4 objects ghosted on me yesterday), and LL does frequently seem more interested with putting out features to tune SL to the tastes of the broader audience than with stabilizing the current system. It has been said many times in the past that LL's current stability vs. new features decisioning is just skewed. One wonders what percentage of the devs are 100 percent focused on the current...or 2.0.

The "it's your computer" thing is a copout. My machine has excellent 3d hardware, is up to date, and I have no problems running autodesk products, numerous developer apps, and a variety of other "high end" 3d games and environments. The expectation appears to be that you build a machine solely for SL and tune it every time there is a new release. LL could sell you SL specific machines and I'm sure you'd still have trouble. Take a look at the advertised system requirements...you'd think anything attached to high bandwidth would work.

I can't say I completely agree with statements that "new releases always incur bugs that's typical'. While to some extent this is true, we're not talking about a menu that drops down funny or a twitching body part, we're talking about widespread crashing (I crashed no less than 7 times or so yesterday), and other breaks serious enough to render the product nearly unusable for many. 1.5 was a disaster, 1.6 is proving frustrating since I crash all the time. Just flattening my land yesterday (terraforming already being tedious) was dreadful. We don't play this game for free, in fact many pay hundreds to participate, myself among them nowadays; this is a PREMIUM service, by far the most expensive one I've seen, and no other online game of any kind has ever consistently been so broken by the devs. And as somebody that does work in development, I can tell ya, if I consistently put out breaks of this nature to an audience with people paying that much money to use it, I would have a lot of explaining to do and would be seriously anxious about my job. I know it's sophisticated stuff, but it's a public service offering, not a lab experiment. The "SL will always be an experiment" thing is just unreasonable. With that mindset, SL will always be entitled to intro new problems and inconvenience users.

Hey, you know, my payment system is experimental and is currently not working correctly. However, I'm aware of the problems and am working diligently to fix them, please work with me. In the meantime, feast your eyes on the upcoming 2.0 payment system features! You get a smiley face with every payment and the text on the check will render clearer then ever. The past 2 months? Well, mea culpa.

It's simply what you can expect, and after seeing it for so long, I really think the matter just falls on deaf ears. LL will continue putting out broken releases and patching them incrementally over time until they reach a modicum of balance. Future state simply appears to be higher on the agenda than current, and saying it's not true has just become kind of a running gag. LL knows there is no serious competition at this stage, so if you don't like it here's some pacifying forum posts, but ultimately, if you're that unhappy, hey nobody has a gun trained on you, you're free to go. And, they're right.

So, until there is a better option, or you just can't stand it anymore...file those crash reports and just try to be optimistic that one day, after downloading 20 meg patches every other day for a while, you'll log on for 5 hours and nothing will go wrong.

FYI I recently got a whole group of people, all Flash and 3d developer types, to pay 'n play SL. I didn't manage this by telling them it sucks, I said very good things (I respect SL, just not the way the Lindens have dealt with me in the past). EVERY one of them, after working with it a bit, said the software is beta quality at best, since they all crashed constantly and so on. Telling these people, "well, you don't know what you are doing" would be a big mistake; these are exactly the kind of people you would expect to be valuable contributors to the SL content portfolio. This is also not the first time I have tried to get serious media developers interested in SL, but the instability just keeps getting in the way.

People are complaining about crashing more...

and yet, with the new version, they've fixed ALL of my crashing issues.

They spent a lot of time optimizing the backend this release... faster asset servers, faster inventory handoff, less sim crossing issues, more efficient streaming of stuff, and so on.

I dunno, you win some, you lose some.

LF

in 1.6 i haven't crashed at all (yet hehe), never had any problems logging in, haven't lost any inventory, lighting and av all looks the same to me, not being able to free drag prims is ultra rad and all around no new bugs other than what was in preview that i reported and they were all annoying build stuff not real problems.

i did see 2 av ghosts tho. not good.

Here's an interesting and BRAND NEW feature LL could add....

The ability to drive a vehicle, over the road, form one bloody region to the next, without having to get off, dig it out of the road surface, drag it fully into the next region and get back on again...

Just a thought!

Version 1.7, havok 2.0, etc.

LF

.... due any aeon now!

Please...don't say Havok 2.0. I mean talk about crying wolf. LL should probably have never brought it up in the first place. I also dread the breaks taht will be introduced with integrating the product, and since maybe 1 percent of the overall populace is really interested in complex physical development, maybe it's just not worth it in LL's eyes. And who knows, maybe they're right.

I mean, Havok 3.0 is probably due soon.

Better sim performance is high on everybody's agenda.

Ever had your home sim grind to a crawl because of a poorly-designed physical script?

How about some kid's physical cut torii chain?

Awkward vehicle collisions?

These things lower the quality of SL for everybody, not just the physics tinkerers. Havok 2.0 has a better fault tolerance for this kind of stuff.

LF