Why so unstable?

Sorry if this has been posted before...

I'm relatively new, only about 3 weeks in. I have a good machine and have never had any problems with any other games. Why am I constantly getting booted while trying to teleport or just getting dropped because i move my camera angle around a little.

It's getting to be frustrating, and I like it too much to want to leave, but is there anything I can do to help?

Unfortunately stability hasn't been a high enough priority with this platform, but apparently that's going to change. A lot of the world is server based whereas with most online platforms a lot of the world is client based, so it's a different scenario to the norm.

Aside from the fact that this is sadly the reality for a lot of us, we need to know a little more. Describe your system specifics a little more, what sort of graphic card do you have, how much RAM, have you updated your graphic card drivers lately etc?

And welcome to SL after all.

These sound like two different problems. I've noticed that teleports have been rockier than usual lately, but for frequent complete disconnects, it sorta sounds like a network problem. Might be worth rebooting the router, just to see if it magically helps.

The problem with moving the cam sounds very much like a graphics driver problem. It used to be that we could just say "load the latest drivers" but nVidia's latest introduced a bug that doesn't play well with WindLight (at least)--although it should just look strange, not crash, so I'd still recommend making sure the latest graphics drivers are loaded. (Also, if by some chance you're using the WindLight "first look" viewer, you might want to get things stable with the release version first; WindLight is great and all, but probably not the first thing to try.)

To get much deeper, you'll probably have to give us more details about the client machine and possibly the network. There's also a "Technical Issues" forum, /111/1.html, that might give more expert advice, or have some relevant info in existing threads.

Second Life is a unique game. It's one of the few games that uses streaming to load content into the world.
This is necissary to allow a user content created world, that is ajustable whenever you want it.

Pro's : Freedom, hard to hack.
Con's : Streaming needs a good internet connection from both LL and you, Streaming requires MANY servers, to save all content.

If one of those servers has a problem, you might experience problems(it depends on what the server is used for)
Second Life is based on a very old game engine, which is constantly edited to keep up with today's standard. but old engines have more bugs to fix as their less easy to work with. but building SL on a new engine takes even more time(although it would increase the gameplay immensely)

I just hope LL isn't like my brothers when I was a kid, They would work on car engines in the driveway, but it always seemed they had parts left over when they put them back together. They used to give me $5 and send me to the movies when they worked on Dad's car.

When working on computers, this is how it is supposed to happen. If you don't have at least a couple of screws left over after you're done, you did something wrong.

You could say, LL is trying hard to solve the problems they encounter. The problem here is that they need to balance bug fixes and new content. too many bug fixes, and the game would get terribly outdated, too many new content and the game would be unplayable due to bugs.

If I was leading person in LL, I would set a team aside to work on a new engine. Sooner or later the old engine can't keep up anymore, and the economy of SL will see a dramatic decline, thus resulting that LL will lose the major source of income. eventually leading that LL will have to stop working on Second life and shut it down.

Currently Philip Linden(which is in charge I think), has some strange ideas how SL should be run, he's facing the huge problem that growth needs more people, but that costs too much money. thus he's trying to increase the economical side of SL, while neglecting the fun side. this makes me worry, as he's forgetting that people come here for the fun in the first place.(this is an opinion, I can't really support this one, as I have no clue what's going on in LL, thus it is based upon speculation)

One word: Features. Features are new and shiny and, evidently very fun to work on. Fixing bugs is probably neither fun nor exciting. So we get new features instead of stability. Its really that simple.

Right, SL poses some unique challenges. But we don't all crash on every TP or when moving the cam around. It's not like the OP should expect this. We just don't know enough yet to be much help.

I was tempted to ask if the OP was using an ATI card with Windlight. And.. I'm going to have rings the sky regardless, because I rolled back my ATI drivers from 7.12 to 7.11. CoH seriously CHUGGED with those drivers and SL's plain client ran just fine on them.

First off, check your draw distance. Most older ATI's seem to handle 128m just fine. Also, uncheck the VBO, which sometimes creates problems with older drivers for some cards. Didn't have a problem with it myself until the last couple of Windlights.

The disconnecting while teleporting has been reported a lot recently, so it might an LL-side issue, but if you are on a wireless network, you may want to consider going wired. SL is sooo bandwidth heavy that wireless tends to flake out.

I have been finding sim crossings to be much much less reliable in the past week or two and especially so the last few days, with just an excessive time in the dead zone, or bad handoff, or failed teleport error messages, or in many cases SL crashing. I don't know if there might be a connection with the reported problems or not.

look at it this way

if the server was stable, no glitches any where then we`d have nothing to whine about

I'm running an Nvidia 7900 512 meg. And I am actually wired with DSL. (hate wireless) 2.8 AMD atholon and 2 gigs of ram. Should be sufficient in my mind but it's pretty bad, sometimes I wont be doing anything but watching the screen and it will crash...

Oh and yes my drivers are all current.

I stopped even going in-world because it was so unstable. Now I go in about once every three weeks just for the heck of it. And every single time,I am booted,freezed etc... It is so frustrating. I really like SL.I wish it ran better for me.

Wissler, that system ought to run SL pretty well. There are still a lot of details that can cause you grief.

Are you running Norton antivirus? Get rid of it. Symantec products are an invasive resource hog.

Check your running processes and background programs. Turn off anything you don't need.

Run several antivirus/antispyware checkers and try to make sure your computer isn't infected with any malware. Aside from its nefarious purpose of stealing your information, it also steals your CPU cycles.

Check temperatures, of your CPU, motherboard, and graphics card. SL drives them hard. A hot computer is an unstable computer.

Who's your internet provider? Comcast in particular has a baaaad rep.

Try the Nicolaz viewer patches. They run more stably than the stock viewer, for many people. See http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

Where's your SL cache file? I got improved performance and stability when my Resident Geek moved it from the default location (C drive) to a separate high speed RAID 0 array.

Do you have the latest Microsoft .NET Framework updates, and the latest QuickTime player updates?

I found crashing when teleporting at one stage was due to me hitting my download limit on my internet plan so my ISP would throttle me back to 65 kbps, near diallup speed.SL would run great for 2 weeks before I hit my download limit then bad again for 2 weeks till it renewed.

well a differ location for the cashe files does speed things up abit.

A little bit of advice running Quick Time slows Down fps ( that why i don`t deal with it No need to watch movies on sl these days ). If you don`t need it dont install it .

Microsoft .NET Framework updates might help some. But if the game is stressing nothing will help/

I dunno why you'd suggest that... sl certainly doesn't make use of it (seeing as how it's not even installed on this machine)

a few things,
an overtextured area can overwhelm some video cards (tons of huge load size textures like 1024^2) and is likely to be the cause of the 'swing camera n crash' problem.. it could also be spiking your bandwidth (so you want a decent sized cache). crashes on TP have been rare fro me for awhile but when I do get them it's usual that I arrive THEN crash. so I suspect for me it's a combo of the above 2 effects.

if you have a router in between you and the modem (most dsl modems seem to include these nowadays, but not all) try it without the router in the loop... I've had weird crashes where the resulting flood on the router would diable it (quick reset, older router). if you have one that's built into the modem try setting your computer in the DMZ and see if it acts better. if it does find out how to configure it to not be in the DMZ but still pass all the SL info cleanly.

other running apps can cause problems too, yahoo and msn eat ccpu resources (and hide most of it under explorer) other things like file sharing apps, servers etc will eat up cpu time AND bandwidth... general rule is the same as the lights in the house, if you aren't using it, turn it off.

I can't recommend the Nicholaz Client strongly enough, more fixed bugs, less client crashes, and runs much cleaner. easy to install (just copy a few files to your SL direectory). it uses all the SL supportting files, so you still need SL installed, it's just a cleaner front end for it all. you can find it at http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/