Amusing Mistakes

The recent thread on IM caps reminded me of an amusing experience which led to my IMs being capped... well amusing in retrospect. At the time I was quite chagrined.

I had been working on an autonomous physical vehicle - namely, a ferry boat. It was to travel back and forth between two docks in two adjacent regions. There were some inconsistencies in how it was behaving, so I decided that if it got itself lost, or if it got stuck for more than 10 minutes, it would send me an IM with its location. It was also set to derez if it sailed offworld. At the same time, I didn't want to announce a shiney new ferry service then have the ferry mysteriously vanish on me, so I set up one of the docks to rez a new ferry boat, should the first one be long overdue (and therefore assumed to be lost offworld).

After watching it and riding it back and forth a few times, I decided it seemed to be going well, so I logged off for the night.

In the morning, I woke to several hundred emails, all from ferry boats telling me of their predicament. I logged on to find the region suffering enormous performance issues - sim FPS around 1, time dilation about 0.01! It was impossible to move. What I discovered was this:

In my absense, the ferry boat managed to get itself wedged against the secondary dock -- not the one with the rezzer. After a while it gave up and IMed me that it was stuck. The primary dock determined that the first ferry was overdue and therefore lost, and rezzed a new one. "We've lost contact with #1 -- take over!" the second ferry made one trip and got stuck against the first ferry. After 10 minutes it gave up and sent me an IM. The first ferry, after a 10 minute nap, woke up, found it was still stuck, and sent me an IM. Then the dock determined that ferry #2 was overdue and therefore lost, so it rezzed another one. "We've lost contact with No's 1 and 2. Take over!" the third ferry made one trip and got stuck against the first two, so it sent me an IM. Ferrys one and two woke up, found they were still stuck, and also IMed me. Then the dock determined that ferry #3 was overdue and therefore lost, and rezzed another. "We've lost ferries 1 through 3! Take over!" The fourth ferry made one trip and got stuck...

After 6 or 7 hours of this, there were dozens of ferries clogging up the entire corner of the region, all hopelessly wedged together, every one of trying to move, every one of them IMing me every 10 minutes, while in the neighboring region, the dock was sending out a new ferry on a regular basis to go see what was keeping the rest of them. In my mind, it is something in between a cartoon and a Monty Python sketch.

The region had crashed several times but every time it restarted, it returned to the same predicament - dozens of physical ferry boats wedged together. Ultimately the only way to fix things was to disable scripts, collisions and physics for the whole region, then cam over and delete all the ferries.

(this was in the days of Havoc1 by the way - under Havoc4 the wedged ferries would have been bounced clear and probably the situation wouldn't have developed in the first place.)

So my learning experience through all this, was to make far fewer assumptions about how autonomous physical scripted vehicles will behave, that it's easier to have them derez themselves when they get into trouble than try and fix their situation, and that IM-to-email can get capped if there are enough of them! (This is also about the time I started wishing for an llEstateSay function... i.e. to allow reliable simple instant communication between objects in different regions.)

And my question: Anyone else have any monumental -- but highly amusing -- goof-ups?

Cheers!

-Atashi

no, I think you win.

/me hands you a sticker

Atashi - Thats a brilliant story



Oh yes - Creating an SL account was the first goof-up.

Many others - but I'm not telling you lot about them.

Bravo!

a true LOL

great story I sure can't beat it!

A tenant of mine managed a similar thing once. She was trying to create "survey helicopters" which would fly around the grid looking for objects or particular people. She placed a server in her house which rezzed a new one if an older one stopped reporting in. Unfortunately she forgot to allow for no-script parcels. I wouldn't have known except that I got an IM from an irate landowner stating that one of my tenants was "griefing" them because several hundred survey helicopters were frozen at the edge of a no-script zone on their land. Oops.

As for myself? Umm.. well... when I was a newbie, I'd heard about things like ROAM and other teleportation services (because this was the days of Telehubs, when you couldn't just teleport anywhere!), and I decided to see how they worked. I already noticed that if you sit on an object, and it changes size, you don't get unsat from the object even if the new object is too small to sit on. So I scripted a cube which waited to be sat on, became the smallest possible cube, and then slammed itself along the X axis with several thousand newtons of force. Yes, it was physical, and it wasn't phantom. I stood on someone's roof and sat on it.

Immediately the cube shot off at an impossible rate, clipping several buildings as it went. This caused it to begin to rotate and gyre, giving the effect of my poor avatar apparantly clinging on for dear life as she, resolutely welded to the kamikaze cube, crashed through several sim crossings, several houses, a mall, club, and a church, before finally the network could take it no more and I heading into something like a 1024 X coordinate in unrezzed sea before my client crashed from the network underrun. When I finally got back, I had apparantly come to a halt against a solid object, but I was laughing for the next 5 minutes.

There was one time I was working in someone's sky workshop trying to figure out how to make a merry-go-round rotate nicely. I started with llTargetOmega, but that lacked any sense of speeding up and slowing down, so I tried making it physical and using a rotational impulse. Of course, it failed because of friction with the floor. Ok, I said, and made the rotation impulse really really hard. The merry-go-round (or rather its base, I hadn't built any real structure for it yet) was promptly lifted off the ground by the centrifugal force and went crashing off the edge of the sky workshop. I still have no idea where it landed, and it didn't even get returned.

Oh, there was a boules game I made once too. Several days after I'd finished testing it, I got a system message that one of the bowling balls that I had idly thrown during the test game had gone out of range of the "game over, de-rez everything" message that the game controller sent, and had somehow wandered its way across the entire grid and fallen into the void sea. That must have been an epic journey; I should have attached a travel bug.

Also, although this one's kind of lame, as a newbie I tried to make a follower and used a thin plywood cuboid as the test object. Unfortunately, I forgot to make it phantom. It "followed" me, crashing into me and knocking me upwards. Because it was still following me, it crashed into me again, and kept going until I nearly orbited myself.

When I was a fairly new resident I rezzed a couple of roaming daleks on Parrothead Gamers Island but they zoomed off in the direction of the campers and gamblers and I was left shouting apologies to all the worried people and hoping nobody would get cross. This was in the days when gambling was still allowed and most campers weren't bots.

Yes. My first "steady" bf in SL. We were close to doing the partner thing until he introduced me to his rl wife in sl and suggested a pixel threesome.

Yeah, I made a similar mistake that still keeps haunting me. I decided to build house rezzers to display the various houses that I make. I used modified Builder's Buddy scripts to do this. Each time a house rezzers every object in the build issues chat as it rezzes and then moves into position. I thought is was OK since I would only hear it when I was close to the rezzer. NOT! The scripts use OwnerSay which the Owner hears no matter how far away they are, and if I visit the sim first, I can still hear the chat in every other sim that I visit. IT fills up my screen with green chat every time a customer visits the store and rezzes a house.

It took so much work setting up the house rezzers that I still have not gotten around to redoing all of the scripts in order to silence that OwnerSay line.

None of these are amusing. Good day.

My incident involved a "gelatious cube". I rezzed one and blasted it with a way overpowered weapon, pieces flew everywhere, what fun. Rezzed more and blasted those also. For weeks after that I was getting pieces of my cubes returned to me from places all over SL. that and irate IMs because of the weird noises they made when they became stuck in or near somones home. Some of the pieces literaly ended up on another continent.

My first SL business was renting out skyboxes. When I needed to go up to a skybox for whatever reason, I used a carbon rod flying attachment, which goes incredibly fast. So fast that you can even be through walls before the system has a chance to stop you.

One day I rented a a skybox out to a guy. Five minutes later I needed to go up to a different skybox and I used the carbon rod. Unfortunately, I took off at the wrong spot and before I knew it, I came to an abrupt stop with my head and shoulders through the bedroom floor of the guy who just rented it five minutes earlier - and I was facing the bed. There they were, the guy and his girl stark naked and hard at it on the bed, and there was me stuck in the floor and staring at them.

It still makes me chuckle when I picture it - high in the sky in a skybox, stark naked on the bed with a girl, when this head and shoulders suddenly appears coming up through the floor and staring at them

Another time when I was very young in SL I was working on a sculpture of colorful easter eggs which spiraled up into the sky. A kind land owner had allowed me to set it up over his land, as I didn't own land yet. I still had a lot to learn about building in SL. I was pleased to find by experimenting that if I set the eggs to phantom then people could fly thru them without bumping. So I tried experimenting with some of the other settings. I had a group of 40 or so eggs selected when I clicked "Physical". I had not idea what it would do, and ended up with eggs falling and bouncing all over the neighborhood. I tried to fly around and clean them up but didn't find them all. I had eggs returned to me for weeks afterwards.

I remember doing stuff like that with a carbon rod, in the days of telehubs. Just a few days ago I did something similar, flew into a large prim as it was rezzing and found my avatar stuck inside a prim, actually inside of it not between prim walls but inside the faces of a solid prim itself. Prims above and below it prevented me from getting out without teleporting.

You owe me a new monitor

I'm still laughing over the image of that.

Ok. I owe you a monitor - but I'm not telling you where I live

My problem is that all the crazy "oops, I just orbited myself" stories I could tell are about things that I was deliberately doing. For example, I believe I was the first avatar to get over two billion meters altitude...

I purchased a premimum membership for a whole year! Boy was that silly!

One Christmas, I made a bucket with coal in it. I wanted a bucket of coal that could be dumped, so, having no knowledge of bounding boxes, or how SL physics actually works, I managed to pack a couple dozen small black oddly shaped prims into the bucket.

The people I sent them to SWORE it was a griefers trick.

Then there was my first subway car. It somehow escaped its tracks and orbited the grid for months. I never did manage to catch it.

I can't beat OP, however just recently I was building a quick POC auto configuring sit teleporter, and rebuilding it after I lost my work to a random power outage... trying to blaze through to make up lost time, cut and pasting script segments... I get to the point I want to test the current setup, pop over to my friends sim, drop the script in, click.... nothing happens... well that's odd, then I tried to move... then I got redmapped as the sim lagged out....ok maybe it's coincidence, I logg back in, go to my favorite sand box, toss in a few ownersays just to be sure, and click....

... followed by a never ending stream of ownersays scrolling past my screen, and an unresponsive sim that redmapped a few moments later....

went somewhere else to test, same result, though I did finally figure out the cause of said error, and report it... I'd have never known if I hadn't been in a hurry and pasted one line into the wrong place in my script....

Note To Self: don't rush, pay attention

Just send it to my house...oh wait...not telling you where I live either...errrr.....

/me ponders this dilemma

I have *got* to quit drinking Pepsi while reading these forums.

/sighs and wipes off the monitor again

Um...

I can't top Atashi's Replicating Ferry, but I did manage to remove my hair the first time I attempted pixel sex...

And I've told this one before, but...

I bought an animated lipstick and compact. I found myself in a crowded mall, and thought I would "freshen up"...so I went to the folder with my cosmetics in it, and clicked "Replace Outfit".

Poof! I'm bald and naked in the mall, putting on my lipstick...

How embarrassing!

Pep (Bald! What could be worse?)

A woman without lipstick is never naked.

That sounds like a great proverb...or advertising copy...or...

....I should go to bed, it's getting late.

(That *was* a funny story, though, Lindal )