1.6: Another bugfixer release, please... NO NEW FEATURES.

Yes, 1.5 was supposed to bug fix a lot of stuff, but it really just made things worse.

Can we PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE have a point release that does NOTHING but fix old, outstanding, critical bugs?

There are real doozies that are becoming tiresome to explain to Live Help users 40 times a day.

Teleporting program? Relog.

Bouncing around on the ground, like you're swimming? Relog.

Lost an item while crossing a sim border? Relog.

Got any sort of problem? It's not your fault, it's the server's. Relog.

Some folks are having troubles connecting for more than 15 minutes before having to relog.

Some folks are getting stuck in Sims due to being permanently partially disconnected.

Building is broken, again... packetloss is making prims jitter about uncontrollably.

Any sort of sim-to-sim movement is basically rolling dice to see if it succeeds or not. If it doesn't... well, relog.

I don't want any new features if it means that we're going to break something ELSE.

Please, for the sake of new players at least who don't have patience for a broken program, fix the bugs.

LF

Amen

Is there an open bug tracker somewhere, or at least a bug registry so that we know whether they're aware of a bug or not?

I notice that there is no official Customer Relations Officer here to confirm that something is a recognized bug, as on the official forums of some popular MMOGs. We need a known bugs repository somewhere to make up for that lack.

Haha.. Live Help members now know what Lindens deal with. Where can I sign up, again?

*chuckls* glad i didn't get picked.

Could always flesh out the known bugs page on the wiki.

Yes, _please_. I suggest that 1.6 can be a major bell weather or the Lindens direction, will they pick up the gaultlet and fix bugs? If they do that I will even be nice.



As you can see once again LL has taken the easy way out, get others to field user problems instead of fixing the problems. Yeah, when the complaints got to large for LL to handle they farned them out.



Linden Labs does not do this, they seem to be far above this sort of dialog. It seems to be corporate policy to not have any two-way dialog with the users. I proposed that LL create a forum where they would have a presense and the SL users told me to go to...well you know where.

Doesn't anyone here live in SF? We need someone to drop in to LL HQ and tell them point blank --- come to the forums and talk to us.

It's entirely unsatisfactory as things stand.

I'm assuming, bravely, that they actually welcome improvements, and simply don't realize how useless their current approach to customer relations actually is.

If things come to a head, we can always get in contact with Mitch Kapor. He is unlikely to feel happy about his investment being compromized through the company ignoring its customer base.

That's for LSL bugs, mind. If you're thinking of reporting some UI problem, it's outside the intended scope of the wiki.

That's because you're wrong. Lindens posted several times today. They do almost every day. And no one told you to go anywhere, they just told you that you were wrong. Which you are.

Not sure which thread (nor which forum) you and Bran are referring to. I'd love to see some actual dialogue between Lindens and the community --- can you give us some example message links please?

/120/d1/23550/1.html

/13/b9/22623/1.html

/120/fc/23522/1.html

/111/8b/23518/1.html

These are just four of the threads I stumbled upon on the 26th. A Sunday. A Linden's day off. Four from a single day they AREN'T working. I'm fairly certain I'm also missing at least one.

Just because you guys aren't reading the right threads doesn't mean that they aren't here, listening and posting. If they were posting any more, they'd be taking time away from doing real work.

I hope they fix the freakin' sound engine. Queued sounds have been hosed since 1.4.0 came out in June.

JUNE.

It is going to be October this Friday.

They did the same thing starting around late November 2003 I think. They kept introducing new features and ignoring old stuff that was broken. Finally they stopped doing that in January or February of this year and started actually fixing more of the outstanding bugs. I am hoping they get back into a real bug fixing cycle very soon.

They should just dump the whole release concept and develop incrementally. One bugfix per week is better than 12 bugfixes in 3 months, that just so happen to introduce new bugs to fix.
A patching system would be really handy for that. I am sick of downloading the same old data every other week.

Eggy has a good point here. While I understand that's FAR EASIER to support a large community of users who use exactly the same version, I can't understand why we can't have a patch instead of downloading the full version.

There is a reason for that, certainly - LL is assuming that everybody has read the necessary specifications for playing SL, and this means broadband.

However "broadband" is not always "broadband" Let me explain my case. Downloading the full version uses HTTP (first I thought that it also used the fabulous streaming technology of LL...), and some poor users like me have to go through transparent proxies which throttle down HTTP traffic according to levels of usage.

Well, when 1.5.4 came out, despite having a 2 Mbps downlink, I was downloading the full version with 1.5-2 Kbps... cool huh? Meaning waiting several hours for the whole game to download.

There was nothing wrong with the network or with LL servers, despite having probably 5000+ users downloading the same thing at approximately the same time. I used a server in France with no bandwidth throttling, and the game was downloaded at 200 KB/sec (1.6 Mbps) in a few minutes. Just to make sure that nothing was wrong with my provider, I logged in into another computer connected to the same provider, and sure enough, downloading was achieved at 100 KB/sec (800 Kbps) in less than 10 minutes. So the problem is just with myself being a handicapped user

Can I still play SL? Of course! LL's UDP-based streaming technology works flawlessly across my three (!) firewalls at home (I don't know how many my own provider adds to that number), and I can go up to 900-1000 Kbps easily, when needed. It's just TCP, and specifically HTTP, that is severelly handicapped to me.

I'd suggest the Lindens to switch their upgrading policy to use patches (probably never more than 1 or at most 2 MBytes in size) or simply to use their streaming technology to feed us with the new versions...

Ohh... Gwyneth... 2mbit? 3 firewalls? Are you married?

LOL Eggy....

1) Yep, 2 Mbps on cable, for € 34/month or so. No traffic or time limitations, BUT you get throttled down on packet priority when using it too much, which is my case. No added delay on the packets, but they're just dropped away. This means I get 250-300 ms ping time to most LL servers, but can get up to 70-80% packet loss on a bad day.

2) Firewall on cable modem; firewall on Wireless Access Point (runs embedded Linux and you can get it for € 75); firewall on Macintosh computer That's triple NAT, and, despite some obvious delay (probably some microseconds), SL works flawlessly with that setup!

3) Not married in RL, but commited, taken, living with, and quite happy! (SO also plays SL and is probably more addicted than me) I'm still free in SL, though (LOL!!!)

- Gwyneth (a geek and proud of it... uh... well probably I shouldn't be proud of it! Still, my SO doesn't care about that, so I guess it's ok )

What's your ISP? The most I can get here on the continent is 1mbit DSL. The most we can get through cable is 640kbit! BTW Gwyn.. I am single in SL as well... *purrs*

Thanks for those links to some of Andrew and Haney Linden's postings, Mole. I drilled down and searched through their recent postings, and it turns out that neither of them posts to Feature Suggestion regularly, just once in a blue moon. Dialogue in New in SL really doesn't advance the state of the art much.

I know I'm really bad at driving this forum search system, but judging by people's posts, nobody else seems to see any dialogue from Lindens about long-standing issues like camera nastiness either. If they're posting, they're doing it elsewhere.

And methinks they posted a lot on that Sunday precisely because it was their day off. If you touch code, I've got the feeling that posting is prohibited. In any event, the technical dialogue isn't working, that much is clear, and there's nothing like a formal features tracking system for moving ideas from the community into the SL framework.

Seconded!

And the server should not go down for updates, that's old technology.

Well, all the issues Lordfly mentioned har hardware/networking issues on Linden Lab's end. Since they just moved to a new CoLoc, it would seem they are on ball here. That was a BIG change for them and shows their commitment to getting this stuff fixed for us.

As for the next client, knowing how team projects of this sort are handled, there will be bug fixes AND new features, as there should be. Team programmers specialize in certain sections of the codebase (Havok implementation, LSL, networking, etc) and bugs in each category get assigned to them. The people who have fewer bugs to fix will add more features. Sometimes fixing a bug creates an easy feature addition "while they are in the neigborhood" as it were.

Given the fact that the QA Engineer position at Linden Lab has been listed as open for wholly 2 months now, I'd say bug-checkers are overworked.

Perhaps they could hire some more developers, too. *grins*

Good point, Hiro. Haven't thought about that, but you're right.

More developers? Or a different way of developing? Check this thread for some suggestions on how LL could try to deal with stuff...

While LL is fairly receptive with user feedback, there's a lot of factors besides user input that developers need to concern themselves with.

> Given the fact that the QA Engineer position at Linden Lab has been listed as open for wholly 2 months now, I'd say bug-checkers are overworked.

Well, the key carrot for doing QA in games is to become a level designer, but that doesnt really apply in SL, since theres not really any levels to design.

It's not really a big deal since we, and Linden, know what bugs are out there; simply there arent sufficient developer resources to deal with them.

Azelda