Something that creeped me out..

It was night time in second life, and I was chatting with some random people at the "Plum welcome area". Well, I decided to fly around mindlessly for awhile to kill some time. After about three minutes of flying around aimlessly I got out of the vehicle, then picked it up and teleported back to the Welcome area. I noticed some guy with an avatar that resembled Shadow from the "Sonic" series. He started yelling at me that I attacked his friends, except the fact I hadn't "Attacked" anyone. I don't even know how to attack people, I started like 3 days ago. @_@

Anyways, after a while he/she said something like "one more thing out of you and your gone" and I thought to myself "Well gee, what's the worst he could do?". I then continued trying to reason with this insane little hedgehog person and all of a sudden the screen froze. The client crashed, and both windows behind that went with it (Both having several tabs in them.)

I mean sure, Firefox backs up the tabs and windows and it takes like 10 seconds to log back into SL. It was just pretty creepy. I didn't really think he could do anything. I've had my share of crashes but he/she knew exactly how to trigger it and while it's not hard to believe that kinda thing is possible in a game like SL, it's still annoying.

Few questions:

1. Is this something that a lot of people can do, just crash somebodies client because of a fight or for no reason at all?

2. Is their a log for previous chat that I can perhaps view? I didn't catch the persons name as I didn't suspect any actual trouble, and I would like to know if I ever see Him/her again.

3. How did he/she do it? I understand the advanced properties of some scripts and while I've never run across one that could overload/crash other users I could understand if it was possible.

I would submit an abuse report on this person. If you have logging enabled in the client preferences, take a copy of the log and submit it with your abuse report.

How they did it? No idea. But most people wouldn't know, either.

I didn't have logs saved, but thanks for pointing me in that direction. They should be saved now. Aside from that, I don't remember the persons name so their isn't much I can do. I don't mind much though, it was a small inconvenience. I probably wouldn't report it anyways. Lol.

We aren't supposed to be able to crash each other's SL viewers or do other damage of that sort to each other. I have read recently of a report by 3Ring Binder, I think it was, of being forcibly "logged out" by another user, and I think I recall reading about a way to use a distorted megaprim or sculpty or some such to crash other people's viewers. So if something like that happens again, it would probably be good to file an abuse report or file a jira issue, in hopes of helping to bring the problem to LL's attention and thus increase the chance of getting the technical problem fixed.

Welcome to SL, Jimmy - you sound as though you will be able to take the occasional silly event like that with a laugh, which is excellent.

Rule number 1 of Second Life Experience. Stay away from the trailer parks...i mean....welcome areas.

Oh, alright. I figured the chances I run into a person that's randomly angry at me and is capable of such an action would be pretty low, but apparently I just had bad timing and it's not as common as it led me to assume.

By the way, this forum is quite refreshing. The several forums that I have participated in over the years have had a lack of proper grammar and punctuation. All these capital letters, commas and apostrophes are a lot easier on the eyes.


Thanks again, I do hope this doesn't happen often. =)

Get over to the Undying Thread - the big one with *lots* of views, with a title that starts "just ignore and let this die . . . ". With your attitude you will fit in very nicely. But watch out for the ladies there; they don't take prisoners- or actually, they *do*!

Don't bank on it! Without constant care, attention and supervision the forums descend into teh pits of (intentional and otherwise) txt, yoof and streetspk (pace Jumpy) and don't hold your breath expecting more than 10% of participants to know the correct form of its and it's or your and you're . . .

Pep (And that's just those with English as a first language)

your browsers crashed also? maybe it was just coincidence..not sure why your browsers would crash..maybe your computer burped for a second causing things to crash..stranger things have happened..

Welcome, Jimmy! You experience sure isn't typical of SL ... a bit more typical of the welcome-areas, though, which seem to be infested with pubescent nincompoops with anger management problems.

The crashing experience is strange and, at best, an unlikely experience. Without a confirmed case of re-occurrence I would not assume that there is a viewer crashing weapon out there. It is theoretically possible (there once have been textures that crashed NVidia cards), but unlikely. If something like that does exist, we can be sure that the Lindens will do their utmost to prevent it. If they don't get much else right, they are pretty much on the ball in that regard.

Having said that, I usually found it good practice to just TP away when confronted by an obnoxious resident.

PS: I just learnt that "Euromat" is the "European Gaming and Amusement Federation", dealing with casinos, gambling, and the like. Am I the only one who finds it somewhat whimsical that the Lindens are offering such a last name?

Sure, there are a handful of known viewer crashers. For some reason, they seem to take awhile to be fixed in the official viewer. I don't have any idea how many of the publically available viewers have implemented fixes for the well-known ones, but preventing deliberate crashes is one of the specific aims of a publically available plugin pack maintained by LordGregGreg Back: http://code.google.com/p/par/ The intention is that, being GridProxy plugins, you can use them no matter what viewer you use.

unless you disabled it in your preferences, I think logging is enabled by default. check your sl preferences for the exact location and name, and whether or not it's enabled.

good luck, sorry your start here was so rocky.

ps FWIW I've been in SL ~4 years and never been viewer crashed by someones direct action, but I am aware of a few possibilities... entire sim crashes are a different story and I caused a few accidentally myself =X

well, i've been here almost six years and it's never happened to me : ))

but, then again,, i dont wander around either.

lizzie

it was a weekend..you were in an info hub and it sounds like you had a lot of stuff running besides SL..

SL is a demanding program..i'm not sure if the memory leaks are fixed in the regular viewer or not..i just know high traffic areas used to crash me more than anything when i used the regular viewer..
if all that stuff crashed at the same time i think it was your computer saying..listen i need to take a break fora second..
i've heard of people having their system reboot every time they crashed SL..
most cases from what i remember them being told is it was a memory problem..

I've found crashing sims to be much easier than crashing clients. There are ways. (^_^)

But... browsers? (O.o)

Jimmy, I don't know how it happens, but I believe it is possible. I have had this happen in another game I play called Mabinogi where there was stiff competition for certain resources and it was all too easy to piss someone off.
My game crashed everytime I accepted an IM (which they never typed in, just sent for me to accept) from my "competition". I reaccepted a few times each time I came back on to see if it was repeatable and it was before my bags were finally full and I quit accepting these IM's that never had any content.
Just out of curiosity, was it similar for you? Were you in IM with this person?

Actually, the only times SL lagged for me was when I would get a random invite to this place that looked like a mini mall with naked people running around and several adult shops. This area would give me Heavy motion lag and wouldn't allow me to teleport out so I had to log out and choose to spawn at my "home". Other then that, I get a little motion lag every time I fly in a certain place.

As for the browsers in the background; Their was DeviantArt in one window and I was viewing several pictures so their were several tabs, and Youtube in the other window browsing videos. Not usually something that would crash, but I have had a few experiences where Mozilla will automatically crash if a completely separate program (Like Windows Media) would stop responding and I would force close it.

Regardless of the several mishaps that have happened so far, SL actually seems like a solid game in comparison to other things that I've played over the years. The only thing so far that's actually frustrated me, is when I was trapped in some weird object at the "Weapons Testing" area. I was stuck in it for a good five minutes until I decided to teleport out. Well, actually I believe I logged out because I didn't remember to use those Landmark things.

I wouldn't say I had a rocky start in this game, I actually spent the first 3 hours laughing while trying out some Free avatars in the starting area. Monkey that looked like a balloon, Hobo diving suit...It was an Interesting start to the game. Lol

This is a bit trouble some. I have Jimmy Euromat who is 5 days old saying a Shadow avatar at plum crashed him.

I hang out at plum when my friends are there. and as far as i have seen i am the only shadow avatar around there.

I have never met you, or crashed you, or crashed anyone in a very very long time.

But I feel like you may be trying to deface me... or maybe it was someone else dressing up like me, im not sure, but I don't like it. Please get some logs if you can.

If you think this was an intentional crash, the Par plugin pack has tools that can protect you from them. I think there is only one crash method that I havn't been able to get enough informmation to fix so far. So give thoes a try.

Unless you yelled at him about attacking people, he wasn't talking about you.

Hi, Jimmy, and welcome to the forums.

Someone have a gold star for his first post? Seeing as how Maureen's on vacation?

And welcome to you too, GregGreg. I'm sure you're not the Shadow we're looking for. Play nice, you two.

This is the second time in a week someone has seemed to have their viewer crashed by someone else. If it happens again, I'm going to start wondering if there is some new exploit floating around the weapons makers. ("Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

Anyway, you've already had excellent advice...stay away from those Welcome Areas. There's lots more, and lots better, places to explore in SL. I just wanted to say Hi.

Gold star is only for that thread. Which I didn't realize at first when I got a star for my 2000th or whatever post when I posted for the first time in that thread.

You obviously missed the announcement that I was temporarily elected Thread Mother, but stars, as Lexxi has pointed out, are only awarded to those who post in The Thread . . .

Pep ( . . . to which I have already invited Jimmy)

assume it's all enemy action till you know otherwise. people will call you paranoid, but you'll live longer.

I read that there are textures out there that can crash a client.

sure, lets go with that.