What happened to the map? Is it important?

When I joined in July 2007, just about all I used was the map. I used it to look for interesting places, and look for green dots to meet. Does anyone remember how the map worked then? It was great! It was like Google maps: really quick and truly interactive. I used to explore it for hours.

I stopped exploring like this because at some point in the past year, all the functionality of the map went away. When you zoomed out just a little, all the land disappeared. You no longer could tell what the SL "globe" even looked like anymore. When you talked to someone about continents, or compass directions, nobody knew what you were talking about anymore.

I went back today to try to find that new continent in the blog, so that I could check out the new public works hiways. I noticed that the map functionality is partially back under this latest RC viewer. It functions like a July 2007 map, except it's just so slow, it's hardly interactive or usable. There's no way any noobie is going to use it or have fun with it like I used to.

Why did the map functionality disappear so drastically? What would it take to restore it to it's previous 2007 glory? (This looks like it was a step in the right direction). Does anyone besides me think that the dismal map function could be contributing to the decline in interest and excitement for land, and the overall apathy for exploration and social interaction? (See Anya's thread). Am I just too much of a geography buff?

Thanks for listening,
--Avion

The map has been borky for over a year.
It's entirely random in my experience.
Sometimes the detailed level is entirely grey for days on end, sometimes for hours.

I use Map all the time. When it goes grey on me, I just give up exploring/land-window-shopping. It's one of the things about SL that make me swear out loud in RL.

I assume that traffic to do with presenting Map is low-priority and just gets dropped under certain load conditions.


Add: Generally it performs well within its design. Mostly I find it usable and useful.

Sling,

Are you saying that it works like it did back in summer '07 when it's not borked, or it works well enough for the way you use it? I really have no idea whether maybe it's a problem on my end.

Did the zoom / detail functionality just return with a recent update? I could have sworn that for about 6 months, you could only see detail on high zoom. For me, it made it nearly impossible to tell where i was in the SL universe.

I agree, I also assume it gets low priority. That's one reason I wanted to ask, to see whether very many people care. I might just be odd, but if the map had been like this when I joined, I might not have even become interested in owning land.

To me, without a familiarity with the overall SL universe and ability to spatially wander, SL is less like a virtual world and more like the world wide web: just a bunch of random, unrelated places that you can only find through Google.

I think you've put your finger on what's happened. The vast, vast majority of SL *is* now like the web in the sense that it is disaggregated sites that a search engine of some sort points you toward. The map works quite poorly for that kind of setup -- it does, however, work reasonably well for the mainland areas. What might be desirable could be to have a separate mainland map that can have greater functionality than the map for the huge space that is covered with islands and separate island estates.

This is probably just stating the obvious, but the Map does paint a bit faster and move a bit smoother if much of the content is turned off. Especially Land for Sale--it takes a long time to paint all those little extortion plots yellow and plunk "$"s on them. Well, at least in my neighborhood.

It's still not speedy enough, though, to be really cool. In some ideal world, I'd love to have the map open to some intermediate zoom level and go driving the roads. But even in my "suped-down" junkwagon that tops out at 27kph, the textures are loaded for rendering about a sim behind me, and the Map is just fuzz whenever I look. (By the way: do others observe that when one searches for a region in the Map, almost invariably that region is the last one to fully rez?)

Also, the whole idea of SL geography is an acquired interest--and one acquired, I think, only by Mainland landowners. And of course we're getting to be a fairly insignificant minority, at least in sq.m. terms. I've rezzed the NCI maps, plus a scripted region map on one of my parcels along a someday-railroad on Heterocera. Numerous times I've brought visitors to look at it after they've asked "Continent? SL has continents?" And not just newbies, either.

I'm pretty sure that if more people were aware of Mainland geography, adfarmers would have been eradicated long ago. Or, equally true: had adfarmers been exterminated earlier, a lot more people would know about Mainland geography now.

The map got borked in April 2007. It stopped showing anything east of the westernmost tip of Satori. It's like it's not taking pictures beyond a certain level of detail.

It works at all zoom levels for me -- most of the time.

I sometimes go through days or hours when the close-up level goes grey and utterly unusable.
It can go from perfect, to grey, and back to perfect during the one logged-in session.
It can be grey when I'm located in one part of the grid and perfect when I try from another part.

I put it down to the same sort of borkiness where my Friends list becomes a list of "Waiting" (sometimes for days), whereas at the same time other people report no problems.

It sounds like you are simply unlucky if it's grey for you mostly, or maybe it's something to do with your Net connection, the weather, static in your underwear, the price of oil, butterflies in Asia, or localised grid load.
It certainly does not seem to be a concious decision by LL to do anything with the Map functionality.
It's just plain flakey as far as I can see.

If we knew the network and server paths that the data took before being rendered by the client we might be able to suggest causes.

Oh, I see what you mean. And that might explain why so many of the SLURL-based maps used for the auction page don't populate (e.g., http://ld.auctions.secondlife.com/Scripts/ListingInfo.asp?LotNo=79465937 ... a spot in Fosse, for which I can't get a clear in-world Map, either).

Has this been jira'd?

[Edit: after about 15 minutes, the in-world Map for Fosse loaded after all. Whatever that means.]

For me, at least, it was the other way around. My whole experience as a free, non-land-owning noobie avatar was map-based. I couldn't believe it: truly an actual universe! It was so cool to pan around these continents, and private islands too, I just had to be a part of it. It wasn't long before I wanted to put money into it. And not long after that I started buying land. Of course now that I do own some mainland, it's difficult not to appear biased.

But if I had come here as a noob and had no way to find anything except by Googling around, I just don't know if I would have been hooked. I was dazzled by the graphical and spatial universe in about 10 minutes. It took me about 3 months to start understanding search. And for the most part, after a year I still don't get it, and don't come close to getting excited about it.

In the release candidate I can't get the map to show me more than a patchwork of sims. It's drawing some of them, so the functionality is still there. It just never finishes filling it in. And it stops drawing anything at all periodically, and I have to move the map the get it to resume drawing.

For anything other than the most nearby sims it seems to be borked, and it draws those much slower than it used to.

Regular client is working for me - a bit slowly, but it does work.

I see Satori and Fosse and sims around them just fine on the in-world map...

I think it's okay inworld, albeit slow, but the slurl has definitely been borked since April 07.

You mean this one?

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-93

Yes! I find that infuriating.

--
Aes

I'm going to try remembering some of the names of the sims NEXT to the sims I usually look for on the map, and search for them. Then when my real target rezzes first, I can just scroll over.

Ahem... well, I used to use the map as a way to find new places to explore. Can't do it now because theres just too much.

I also tried to let the whole map rez to take a whole world picture.
Every... single....sim.

I got 1/2 way or at least 1/3 of the way done & SL crashed from running out of Memory. The whole map ate up my RAM. Thats with everything shut off too!

I never try to load up the whole map any more. It actually crashes my router from having too many connections opened.

In the old days, in the before time (about a year and a half ago), the map had several distinct "levels", so when you zoomed out past a certain point, instead of showing each individual sim picture, there was a grouped picture of some set of them, and that meant it rezzed much faster. That worked nicely for the mainland areas, but it left the islands blank if you zoomed out too far.

At some point, I guess they decided showing the islands was more important, so now the map tries to load in the full texture from EVERY SINGLE SIM if you zoom out. Very bad design if you ever want to see the whole world on any sensible computer. But that is where we are. As for the SLURLs and the maps for the auctions, those broke so long ago I can't ever remember them actually working. So sad.

Fix is probably to delete all the yellow land and condense the rest so it's 1/4 the size

Did the map ever show all the continents?

I still haven't figured out how to find out what continent a given sim is on, including the one where I live. NCI has some maps up that I tried to puzzle over. I saw the continents, but not individual sims on the continents. When I try to zoom out far enough to see all the sims on whatever continent I'm on...everything turns into tiny little pieces of...nothing.

I'd give up forever the ability to zoom out and see the big picture if only LL would restore things like Places to the map so I could see what the heck was around me of note at any given time. All those checkboxes sitting there doing nothing for the past year plus.