What Is NOT WORKING in SL?

More Like Lag city. I was there the other day. That sim is buggered.

Info on this stuff getting fixed on Philip's and Cory's blogs.

Anyone finding builds/prims out of place or missing..some things reverting to the way it was 2 days before?

Very strange stuff going on.

Well sort of I have to say. I read Cory's new blog earlier and it seems like it's going to be a slow road and, really, it only basically deals with the asset server, not with general system-wide lag and packet loss (although I'm sure there will be some improvement there). Nothing is really said about the numerous other bugs that are evident in the world today - scripting bugs, building bugs etc. Philip's blog touches on it but he's talking months.

As for the rest of Cory's blog, well, forgive me if I'm wrong here but he's talking about new features, which I thought Philip said were on hold until all the bugs are sorted out at the last town hall. Should they really be putting effort into New Art Tools and Rendering System and a new UI, or should they ensure that the base they currently have works. I know Cory says that many bugs are compounded by the UI, but I find that difficult to understand when it's only really fairly recently that many of things have become broken (since 1.4 onwards).

At least there's a plan, but I wonder how much is hot air and just how much they are going to stick to no more new features until bugs are gone. Cory's blog wanders into territory that makes me think they won't.

Yup, as a builder, I see that quite often actually. Not to mention.. LINKED prims seem to whack out on their own and misplace themselves WHILE linked. It's getting very very frustrating, plus when you want to duplicate a prim, the original almost always reverts back to how it was.


Annoying!!

Just thought I'd toss my 2 L$ in,


I have no problems and enjoy every moment of my time in SL
*runs*

Just to give people more of an idea of what is going on here. As Philip stated in his blog, we are putting pretty much all of our development effort into scaling and fixing bugs. Scaling issues can be very subtle, but it is very important to consider all the systems in SL when having this discussion. Cory mentions the asset system because that is the cause of most of the high-visibility bugs in the system right now. Teleporting problems right now are not a 1.5 bug - they are an asset server issue. Issues like "the script won't save" and "I never got the inventory" are also asset server issues. We are testing fixes right now that significantly reduces the load on the asset server - and since we do learn from our mistakes, we don't want to release these fixes until we know they won't cause more problems.

Moopf brings up the observation that it looks like many of the things in Cory's list look like features. Welll, yes - but they are features designed to help us scale. For instance - right now the UI system is so difficult to edit, that it takes a programmer a lot of time to change anything. It can be much easier, and instead of taking hours to get a checkbox to work or fix a bug in the permissions UI, it will take minutes. The time savings gets passed on to the testers, and over all, you get more bugs fixed much faster. The rendering improvements Cory mentions are likewise needed. For instance, the map is composed by an ever increasing number of textures. A few months ago, we found that we would crash whenever we viewed more than 256 sims on the map - this was fixed, but there is still a limit to how many sims your computer can handle - we need to fix this before that limit is hit, and people crash every time they look at the map.

Finally, probably the most subtle (and the one I am most familiar with) is the art tools for the content team. We are constantly putting more land online as we get more users. This takes time. If we do not have enough time to put land up, the supply of land drops. As the supply drops, demand increases under the load of ever more consumers. Prices rise, and you get markets where a new user can not afford to buy any land. This has happened before - we have had times when the content team could not put land up - we moved to a new colo and made other arrangements to deal with this and land prices have stabilized again. In the future, we see a bottleneck in our own productive capabilities - there is only so much 4 people can do (hey, apply for the Artist 1 job ). So we are doing 2 things, getting more than 4 people, and getting tools that reduce the current blockages.

These are just a few examples of things that need to be done so we can scale and make sure everything works. We know you guys are frustrated, and we will be releasing fixes as fast as we can make sure they work. That being said, I can only quote Philip - "We will be focusing all our near-term development efforts on fixing bugs, adding tools to improve customer service and track down problems, and adding hardware and software to scale our systems."

ben

I hate to make the THERE comparison, but its more fun to use vehicles in There. Less lag, and smoother operation make for a more enjoyable journey by dune buggy, flying machines, etc. As for teleporting in SL, is it really necessary to teleport to a central hub? Then, you have to do the superman flight to finish your destination. Why can't we just go to specific coordinates exactly?

Thank you for your explanation Ben but, with all due respect, your post makes me understand that LL are charging for a system that they know currently doesn't work properly be that due to bugs or network infrastructure, and that it requires an awful lot of remedial work to get it into a system that doesn't have asset server problems, doesn't have building problems and is generally stable. And it isn't like the system wasn't stable, because it was. So, we've paid our money every month, whilst the bugs have increased and the stability has decreased, and for the most part very little has been resolved and, in fact, got worse. Yet we've seen an influx of new features.

Am I to understand then that, previously, LL's policy has been to concentrate on and rush through (please don't say that hasn't been so) the new features and pay cursory time to the bugs and stability issues, knowing that the problems were getting compounded as the number of players increased? It really does sound that way.

I know that LL is a relatively small company and resources are, obviously, more limited but I feel that for the money that is being charged, the stability and useability of the system have come second place to the new wizzy features, and that can't be right.

You know, the fact that it's got worse, that bugs haven't been fixed, that major updates have been rushed through, that new bugs have been created, that lag has increased, that packet loss has increased etc. is exactly why I'm packing up shop at this weekend and tiering down. The core of SL has been left to crumble for the sake of some new features and only now, months later, have you finally worked it out and thought you'd better make a full effort to sort it out.

Do we have a time scale on these changes, so I know when to expect that SL is useable again and, at which point, I'll gladly return and tier up again?

Moopf -

The changes Cory notes to attachments should significantly reduce the load on the asset server, thus making the system much more stable. It sounds like they want to have a preview up next week so we can make sure we haven't missed anything. I would suggest participating in that will give you the best idea on what has been fixed and what has not. Right now, as far as I know, that is the big one thing that is not working. The other improvements Cory lists are there to make sure none of the other systems which we think may have scaling issues in the future, don't. We will miss you while you are gone, and work hard to get you back asap.

ben

Ben,

Where is this list of Cory's that is applicable to attachments? -- I haven't seen this, is it publically accessible?

Gee Ben, if LL had been listening to it's customers a few months ago it could have been well on it's way to resolving all these problems, even possibly avoided some. So now that SL problems are at a crises level LL finally shows some concern, I'm not impressed. But we also hear that it will be 2005 before things are fixed, not good.

Personally I quit playing two weeks ago, as soon as I finish selling off my land I'm out of here. If LL ever gets things working well I will be back. Anyway, I have been a lot happier and a lot less frustrated this last two weeks.

Not working for me:

LL not announcing Thurs. Town Hall meeting in the

Linden Forums > Announcements

and the BLOG discussion of important SL issues

Please LL - announce all Town Hall meetings in your Announcement Forum and keep all LL discussions here on the Forums.

moopf, people still laugh at me when i state that we're paying to participate in a testing and development phase of second life. "no no this system is in production" they say. i argued the point for several months before giving up. there's no formal timeline; but i estimate we're in about the phi or chi phase.

they're to the point of creating flexible, automated creation and management tools and revising the system to handle more than unimaginable growth in the future. it seems to me that, since january, these two things (and havoc 2) have generated more questions, wonder and confusion from the community than all the other concerns combined.

it's got to require an enormous amount of recoding and scripting on their part. but it's "completion" should settle the grid, and the company, into a fully functional,hugely scalable system, and easily maintainable system. enjoy your time away. i mean that sincerely. come back in a few months and see how it all works out. i'm sure you'll be pleased. i keep telling myself that.

LAG.. Oh evil Lag.. Why Must you Tortue me so?!




The world would be a much brighter place with out lag However, I know this is not possible and I will just have to continue to suffer with my ever so hated lag...

Get rid of the reputation system and SL would be in pretty good shape i think.

And lower the max per sim to about 20.