test grid closed

Anyone have a clue why the Beta test grid has been closed for so long? 4- 5 days so far. Dont know how anyones supposed to get any work done without it. I sure as hell aint gonna upload my anims to test out on the main grid for 10L a pop.

You know, that is not really the point of the beta grid. There is talk that the beta grid may be down for a while now. You may just have to find an alternative.

The last post in the blog about it said work was concluded on the 16th. It's still down. I make clothing and use the test grid to try textures without cost. Hope it's back up soon.

Even if that's not the point, it still makes the job of any new SL business a lot harder. I just opened a skin store, and I had to spend about 10-12000 L$ just on uploading, while a month ago it would've been about 500L$ altogether. That's a significant difference imho.

Perhaps, not directly, but everyone there working on their projects is still testing the system out. Since existing features routinely get broken during updates, every person there has a chance of detecting these different problems when they occur.

I use it to build a lot too. Many times I go there and test out different ideas that I would never spend the money to experiment with on the main grid. If the ideas work, I bring them here, if not, they didn;t cost anyone anything, and I spent time there testing out basic features while I was at it.

In any case, whether you feel that is an 'appropriate' use or not, without the beta grid, there is no firstline defense to prevent serious bugs from reaching the main grid.

According to the SL blog, concerning the beta grid and the regions affected by last weekend's maintenance work: "[UPDATE] 1:23 AM PDT 09/16/07] The maintenance work...has concluded. All affected hardware is back in service and hosting regions again."

The beta grid was actually down well before the announced start time. Contrary to the statement quoted above, it has not been accessible since.

There have been no blog updates concerning the beta grid since Sept. 16. Why doesn't LL tell us what's going on with the beta grid?

It is not an unusual occurence for the beta grid to be down for a week or longer sometimes. Quality Assurance uses the Beta grid to debug upcoming simulator updates. Milo gets the update past the alpha stage and then plugs it into Aditi and sometimes it still takes extra time to get it to a point where it is fit to be called a beta test. As bad as we see some updates and even worse new beta versions, that is nothing to the raw code that he has to make his way through to get one half-way stable to test. Unfortunately the bug hunters are usually so busy that they rarely have time to update the forum as to beta grid status. Just one little thing we have to live with.

The beta grid will be back online this Thursday. Now that is IF and only if they aren't too busy doing a patch for the newly discovered security hole.

Well its still down. Guess ill have to just postpone my work till its back up whenever that might be.

I suppose it has different purpose for everyone. For me its a great way to upload an animation 20 times to tweak it.

There are several forms of beta grids, so Alpha testing on Aditi should not be an excuse!

And that stupid preview window for uploading textures only gets the seam alignment correct about 50% of the time. One could try the 3rd party programs like SL Clothing Previewer that does a decent job... once you figure it out, but it can't replace the 'live' avatar.

I use the beta grid for texture testing too, and while I'm at it, I've reported many bugs having to do with the appearance editor and build tools. So, I'm doing dual function there.