You've heard it all before, but.....

..... in the past couple of weeks I have found SL to be more wobbly than ever - my objects are going 'walkabout', buying things/transactions only sometimes works, login fails nearly daily and it takes me a good half an hour or more to realise that I've crashed (I'm still in world!) and anything I've edited or played with on my land hasn't actually 'registered or held'.

Now I could rant and rave on here, but I do plenty of stomping around my RL house each time it happens so I'll save you all from it and continue to let my RL family suffer (all heart, aren't I?!?!).

My questions are:-
Is anyone else finding they have the same problems?
Could it be because (please don't shout at me for this one!!) I have been too scared to use the latest viewer after serious problems occurred last time I rushed to do this?
If these problems are now a part of everyday SL life and I have to learn to accept them, does anyone know of a good anger management class I can attend?!? (OK, it's not quite got to that stage, but I do find I'm getting more and more wound up about it!)

Any (gentle!) advice please would be very much appreciated as I fear it may just be me (oooh, maybe I should look out for a paranoia class too!). Many thanks in advance.

Twirly

I do sympathise and yes my recent experience has been exactly the same, any purchase is a heart stopping moment, will I get it or will I have to send notes to the retailer and hope they are nice enough to replace it?

I find my use of SL is declining rapidly which says it all really...

I only download the mandatory viewers, I feel far safer that way. I figure that most of the glitches have been dealt with.

I've been lucky with this viewer so far. Only had a couple of days where I had crashing issues. Like everyone else I got the warning blue windows about not rezzing or building anything and so on. I just visit with friends on those evenings.

When everything goes bonkers, I really feel bad for anyone who had an event scheduled. I know then that there is a lot of gnashing of teeth going on all over the world.

On days when I've not been able to login immediately, I go do some RL stuff or look through my Printscreen pictures which are begging to be sorted. I think I have 200 to go, lol. I took many pictures during the last days of GT Myst:Uru online. I usually try again in an hour or so to login.

The only weird thing I've really noticed lately is what a friend called 'I think you're seeing paths when you put your cursor on the top or bottom tool bars'. He thinks I might need to reload the viewer if in the morning I still get this with my cursor. If I put my cursor on my Communicate button, it says inside a white rectangular box '/panel_toolbar.xml/communicate_btn/flyout_button_main'.

I guess I will have to just see if this is still happening tomorrow.

I think the glitches are our versions of the bus leaving early before you get to the stop, or the gas prices at your regular gas station just went up again. They are the bumps in the road.

Awww thanks you two for your replies and sympathy!!

I'm a 'good girl' in the way that I do all my RL chores first and finally settle down to play SL only to find it's borked in one way or another (and that truly is v. v. annoying!), maybe I should just switch my priorities?!!

In the meantime, I think I'll have a 'heart stopping moment' (I hope you didn't copyright that phrase!!) and upgrade to the latest viewer.... oh no, the heart palpitations have already started!!

If anyone out there hears of any genuine SL progress to fix the recent major probs, please feel free to make my day!

Thanks again,
Twirly

Yes, I agree, it has been an absolute pain in the bum just lately. And I'm not one to complain about the Lindens too loudly.
The one major problem I have, is that the majority of my skirts will not appear..!!
I have a huge amount of quality clothing that I simply cannot wear. I've done the 'appearece' thing. I've relogged, done all the 'usual' things, I think. And still, I have a limited wardrobe. It's almost like my hips won't carry skirts anymore. (
If anyone has a permanent 'fix-it', I would be terribly grateful.
Thankyou,
...Oli.

Cinders, I had this as well, and was able to turn it off..it's in preferences somewhere...I am not inworld, but will check now..

edit: it's under "Advanced" - go to "UI", and deselect "Show Name Tooltips"

Not permanent, but there was a post about this a few days ago...apparently, they have come up with new workaround:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-2778

New workaround: Take off all HUDs before wearing system (slider) skirts.

Zen Linden posted two items.

Zen Linden 09/May/08 09:56 AM - edited

Hi folks,

So I finally had some time to look at this again. I think it's a rendering issue where we weren't setting glColorMask to the proper state during the baking of the skirt texture (or for any of the other baked textures for that matter) and this would also explain some of the randomness. I've also found that wearing a HUD exacerbates the problem, which would make sense if we're not cleaning up well after hud rendering.

I'm testing a fix right now that looks promising, and will let you know how progress goes.

For now a workaround might be to take off any HUDs you have, put on your clothing, make sure it bakes, then put on the HUD.

I apologize for how long this bug has been around. It seemed to occur starting in 1.18.6, right when we started not cleaning up glColorMasks well.

and

Zen Linden 12/May/08 11:52 AM - edited

Fix is committed, but I don't know if it will make the 1.21 viewer or not. We'll have to see how the QA process goes. I'll keep you posted.

Two points:

When this fix is introduced, you may still have a disappeared skirt when you try it on the first time as it will still use the old, borked, baked texture at first. Hit ctrl+alt+r for a rebake and it should look fine.

Also, if anyone is running open source, I could post a patch if you all want to check out the fix and see if it works for you. Let me know if anyone's interested.

Sorry this took so long to look at. Once we get our crash rate down, I'll be able to hit more of these type of bugs.

I'm on the latest regular viewer and I only have problems when there's some kind of known, across the board issue. I'd say probably 90% of the time that I'm in SL...I don't really have any issues. I'll get the occasional freeze while turning.....or maybe a failed teleport.....but over all, it's pretty smooth for me.

I'm really curious how my move will effect it. The only difference will be I'll be hooked up to my sister's DSL rather than the high speed cable I've got at my house now. I'll have the same computer......so how it behaves with DSL is going to tell me a lot about what is really effecting performance with my operating system. My graphics card has been ideal for SL (and I didn't plan it that way, my fiance got me this computer for christmas 06, and he had it geared for regular pc gaming).

Anyway, I feel for you.....I know how utterly annoyed I do get when things are borked...but I usually just go do something else. If I see a post on the blog about in-world problems....I wont even log in until I see it's been resolved.

the problem with taking off your HUD to get your system skirt to rez is that there is a further problem with HUDs disappearing from inventory when you take them off. It's randomly happening also, but enough to spark a thread and a JIRA.

/327/2c/256520/1.html

First, I will say that the past few months have been very rough and unstable in SL.

However, I don't really seem to experience a lot of ongoing problems. I don't have items moving around, I know almost immediately when I've crashed, I'm not experiencing lots of transaction problems (and I shop a lot), and I seldom ever have login problems except for a minute or two right after crashing (waiting for the server to catch up to the fact that I'm not there).

What I notice more than anything, is that when the grid/servers start acting up, I start experiencing a lot more lag and will have problems rezzing items, changing clothes, and attaching things.

I will also add that 99% of my inworld time is still via the Nicholaz viewer and the 1.18.5.3 LL release. Though the viewer version should not matter for all of the above problems except crashing and possibly some of the lag issues.

The most 'permanent' fix (until they fix it) for this would probably be to return to an older viewer. Wasn't it the 1.19.1 version that started this problem? If so, the 1.19.0.5 is still supported by LL and there is also the Nicholaz version mentioned in my previous post.

I second that, except that I've been using the Release Candidates pretty much since the first Windlight version was made available.

Yes, it's annoying when attachments fail etc due to asset server issues and the like, but overall, my SL experience is a positive one.

Maybe I'm just lucky, but I just don't seem to suffer SL problems to the same degree as some people who post here. Although I guess that forum users generally represent the vocal minority in all matters SL.

I'm utterly jealous of those of you who don't experience the problems... anyone wanna swap RL's?!?!? My extremely annoying <insert appropriate swear word or two here> things have been going on for a couple of weeks or so now, whilst I can handle the odd down-time and even a crash or lag a day, these issues seem almost permanent at the moment.

But like some of you have said, I too won't be complaining too loudly about it... I'll just keep stomping around in RL and slam a few doors for added effects until a new fix or two appear!

Ty all for the responses.

I'm using 1.18.5.3 with Nicholaz's BE-W patch, and BE-V before that. Aside from the increased SL downtime, my user experience has been pretty decent, without the problems many people are seeing.

And, yeah, I wouldn't advise removing HUDs in order to wear a system skirt, especially if you're Basic. It sounds like Premium and Concierge Residents have had fairly good luck getting their HUDs restored via Live Chat, but Basics don't have that option. Would you rather rebake a bunch/find something different to wear or lose several thousand L$ worth of animations, etc?

If you have Sine Wave anims, I'd also recommend grabbing their free AO and setting up an account on their site to track your purchases so you can get replacements if necessary. The site didn't pull everything I own, possibly because the dances were in my HUDDLES, but it allows you to add to the list. I also took in-world (not downloaded!) snapshots of everything I have to confirm purchase of the items I added. The site *should* track any future purchases as well.

http://animation.sinewavecompany.com/ao_add_page.php

Note: I wore the AO to confirm my av identity and get the link, but didn't actually load any animations into it as the instructions indicate.

Thanks to you all.... I'll attempt to 'play' with my settings/viewers etc. when I feel confident

Btw, it just happened to me again (gggrrrr!) - I was altering (mucking up!) one of my houses and an hour or so later I attempted to upload some of my new textures when I had the dreaded fail message - it was only at this time that I realised my last hour's effort was a complete waste of time as I'd actually crashed.

Please, please.... does anyone have a tip as to how I discover I've crashed before I've wasted my brain cells/time on projects? It's sooooo annoying as when I log back in, I have to start over again and as I'm such a slow,non-logical, novice builder, I don't think I'll ever actually finish anything!

Twirly