Warning: Emerald and Shapes

From the Emerald people:-

The full thing can be read at http://modularsystems.sl/index.php?option=com_myblog&show=emerald-warning-dont-lose-your-shapes-.html&Itemid=23

There is a current thread that seems suitable for this but it's important enough to a fair number of Emerald users that I thought it worth its own thread as not everyone will be reading the other one.

Luckily I have many a copy of my shape in each of my outfit folders and I've also given a copy to my utility alt.

Wow, that's a bad one. I'm pretty sure I have copies of my shape, but I'll make a back-up folder to be certain and pass it around my alts.

They call that "Semi Serious"?????????

My opinion of the Emerald team just took a nose dive.

Any bug that causes you to lose your shape is beyond "Semi Serious", its a fucking show stopper and Second Life ender for many people without a doubt.

What the hell.

Thanks for posting this Phil.

Dow Corning declared bankruptcy after being sued for problems with their breast implants. Perhaps the Emerald team should take note, lest they repeat history.

They need to stop distributing the viewer until they can figure out the problem instead of allowing it to be still be downloaded and possibly destroy some unsuspecting persons only shape of themselves in SL.

I find the entire label of "Semi Serious Bug" to be a gross understatement and reflects the piss poor judgment of the development team or at least some members of it.

This is kinda ironic.. LL operates the same way all the time. People still lose inventory items and it has been years since that bug has been going on. No show stopper there. Why should Emerald be held to a higher standard than LL?

What is interesting is people would rather risk losing a shape than switch back to the standard viewer (me included).

In fact it's pointing at a pretty nasty SL bug, it seems to me, if a viewer can make a shape go missing from the database.

If only this would destroy all no-mod shapes; that I would consider a feature.

[EDIT MUCH LATER: It appears from a post in another thread, that this is actually just cache corruption, not loss of inventory from the database, the link in the OP notwithstanding. That would make more sense to me, and obviously wouldn't be an SL bug. Not even a "semi-serious" bug in Emerald, seems to me.]

So the Emerald viewer team should not be held to any standards? Or just not higher standards than LL???

Whatever, that has to be absolutely idiotic and i can only hope you are asking it as a way to play devils advocate and don't really feel that way or see the problem in such reasoning.

Is this the first sexist bug in SL? Or even a vanity bug?

Pep (Since it will only affect those who wanted to show off a little jiggle. )

Thank goodness I have a few backups of my shape - I'll send a copy to each alt when I log in later today. Hopefully they get this one figured out quickly.

Because there is no lower standard?. I don't use Emerald myself so I can dispense with any hysteronics, but the reason 3rd party viewers exist is for the situation you describe. LL doesn't fix things that cause many players major angst, even after knowing about them for years in many cases. So, I don't fault the Emerald people for the bug, hey have identified it and announced it, so hopefully the will fix it. And definitely, if you don't have a backup of your shape, make one. I have several, including having the slider numbers on paper.

The Emerald team is focused on making new features available to SL users. They are prototypers, NOT product developers. I expect that they test their viewer to the "engineering test" level; I'm sure they have good automated test suites. But they do not have the resources to do anything like the Quality Assurance process required by most companies, including LL. It would be unrealistic to expect Modular Systems to find all "Do No Harm" issues before releasing a build.

And that's appropriate for what Emerald is, a 'first look' at what is possible. I keep seeing small glitches that, as an engineer, give me the willies -- but I don't freak out because I know they'll be gone and a new batch will show up the next release. It's fast-moving code.

What scares me about Emerald is not the viewer, but how widely it's caught on. All sorts of folks are on Emerald who shouldn't be using a prototype viewer. No copies of their shapes? These are naive users.

It only affects those that want to SEE a little jiggle. The jiggling is totally client side and does not affect how people see me, but how I see others.

So this mostly affects the pervs.

Maybe that is a statement on how many people feel about the LL viewers more than anything else.

Yup.

LL has a major viewer release coming up, full of all sorts of stuff that is nowhere near as useful as what the Emerald folks have cooked up. The wise project/product manager would delay LL's viewer release for 4-6 weeks and shovel in some of the easier-to-test features. We'll see.

At the very least, I think it is a statement about how many people really want more features in the viewer -- which we have been telling LL for quite some time.

While this bug is a non-issue for me, it does remind me of why I have boxes in three different sims (mainland and private island), each containing a copy of my shape, my skin, my eyes, my hair, my glasses, and a couple other items i would dearly not like to lose in some sort of random SL mishap.

It's a silly little backup, but at least it gives me some (but not complete) peace of mind that I won't someday lose "me" due to some corruption.

That does not seem to be made very clear on the Modular Systems web site or in the viewer.

At least they are altering people to this bug on the web site and on the login screen.

Still a dreamer, eh Nika.
Like I said, I don't use Emerald, but maybe it's high time LL starts putting some of those people, and some of the other 3rd party people on the pad and using their ideas, or at the very least, take their freely given suggestions under advisement. We remember how they basically ran Nicholaz out of town, refusing his fixes with the explanation that there was no way the issues could happen so there is no fix needed.

Is this kinda like the thing with silicon bags back in the eighties?

Clearly I worded my response wrong. You can't expect a viewer to be better than what LL's servers can handle. No matter how good Emerald is SL will make it look bad. As in this case. In no way should SL's code allow a viewer to remove a shape from inventory unless the user deletes it.

I assume the Emerald team was under the impression it was not possible for this to happen so they didn't even make an effort to QC it.

Of course there should be standards but if you hold a viewer to a higher standard than what SL is capable of providing then you will be disappointed because no matter what the viewer can do doesn't mean it will do it in SL consistently or reliably (thats why it isn't in the official viewer already). When it doesn't work then you are up in arms over an issue that isn't the viewers fault because you hold it to a unrealistic high standard.

Hold it to a high standard sure, but be realistic. It is a 3rd party prototype viewer. LL would add the options if they could get those options to work properly. You should expect issues with options that LL viewers don't have because LL probably has not finished the code to properly utilize those options.. Clearly LL has not polished the Avatar physics code or Emerald would not be having this issue right now. Thats why avatar physics is not in the official viewer.

At least Emerald acknowledges the issue and immediately warns you about it. When you login it is right there on the login page "[EMERALD] WARNING! don't lose your shapes!" with a clickable link. How often does LL do that?

Considering I made my shape I have permutations and copies of it..so.. not a huge deal. Destroying factory cookie cutter shapes? A feature to me.

Now, I use the physics- not because I'm a perv, but because its more natural. Unless you -really- have plastic cups glued to your chest, then they would move when you dance etc. I have the physics set not to 'blackeye syndrome' but to normal natural movement. You can really only tell when dancing (as in rl) or when up and down (floating, or doing the horizontal mumbo). And its certainly not 'bam black eye.'

And Lyla, you say 'LL would add the features if they could get them to work reliably.' Or at least close to it. Truthfully, they'd add it even if they couldn't. LL likes to add shineys to viewers before focusing on server and load impact.

Avatar physics, as well as alterring the -basic- prim you rez out as default are 2 of the few 'shineys' I've really cared about recently. HTML on a prim, and web in viewer are less than nec. in my mind. Just run a window beside it..

By "destroy" what do they mean?

Do they mean "deleted from inventory"?

Or do they mean something like "Oops, if your breasts jiggle in appearance mode and you save, then what's saved is trash"?

Or what? What are the details?

Correction to those who said that it only affects those who want to see a little jiggle:
The chances are that it affects a lot more people than that. For instance, I read about the jiggle and wanted to see it, so I set the checkbox to see it. I failed to see any jiggle at all, and forgot about it. Since then I have not been one of those people who want to see a little jiggle, but I didn't bother unchecking the checkbox, so I was in a state of my shape being at risk if I ever chose go into Edit Appearance. Yes, it's only a risk to those who turned it on at some stage, but it's not only a risk to those who actively want to jiggle.


I'm with Briana on it. Many people's shapes can't be replaced without buying another and, if they hear about the jiggle, and turn it on, they are at risk. It's much more than a "sem-serious" risk, imo.

As to whether or not the Greenlife people should be held responsible, I don't think so. I think they would be wise to include a disclaimer, though, and maybe force an acceptance of it.

In another thread, I posted that Greenlife are making too many changes to the standard viewer too quickly and. as a result, some of them are broken. They are racing ahead much too quickly - something that LL doesn't do with viewers. It seems to me that they are not doing it in as solid a way as they ought to, and this risk is a result of it.

For me, the biggest single advantage of Emerald is the free, temporary uploading. I like the double-click to TP, and that's all there is in it for me. It's full of new features - too many of them, too quickly to be solid. From now on, I'll use the standard viewer unless I want to upload stuff. This risk has caused me to think that there may be other unknown risks, and has modified my view of the viewer.