SL is Dying on its feet

Is this an ad? I have this craving for motorsports.

Just think of it as slow-mo-torsports.

oh noes it will fall on my head

eh...

1.10:

a) Ruined avatar lighting unable to match colors between skin and attachments (because some people's noses were 'too shiny')
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b) undocumented complete overhaul of level of detail snuck into point patch, every single sphere/cylander/torus object in game just went 'back' 8-9 years to about the detail you saw in 1997's half life, even at MAX slider detail, residents told 'no ones really complaining yet'
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c) all major shader improvements shown in beta, pulled from the SL client because it made some unsupported video cards more than 5 years old, hiccup sometimes.

d) all legal verification of new accounts thrown out the window, previously even the 'phone number' registration was laughed at as exploitable by the vicious people who have done most of the SL attacking

e) lack of any reasonable tools/means to protect from c, even the islands could not keep up with a directed attack anymore.

f) callous announcements and 'features' added to lindex, rather disasterously, causing big hardships for land owners and content creators trying to make ends meet, loss of >10% value in a single week.

and thats about what sums up the last 2 weeks...

im not sayin the worlds over, but the world just took a huge number of steps backwards, and i just don't really see anyone really taking on the burden of really adressing and trying to move foreward with these issues, theres really no denying that.

Naw. It's still Alpha

There's nothing wrong with pointing out problems - my biggest pet peeve right now is the FUBAR'd inventory. However, declaring that a bug will cause SL to "die" is outright silly.


That's actually not true, and I had proof. At the time SecondLife flipped to 30,000 residents (I created account #30,000, my charity alt, Flip Assia), I had 58,000 unique avatar name/key pairs in my avatar key database.


That's the nature of software. The same could be said for Microsoft Windows updates, Linux distro updates, MySQL Server Updates...

eltee, I feel your pain and know that there's been a bumpy road recently. However, I think its far too easy for people to constantly focus on the negative instead of the positives. I know Jennyfur loves the new lighting, and I know I'm having a blast watching what people are doing with flexiprims.

Those making an argument for rollback would do well to read the post 1.7 "revert" threads; its simply not possible. Think about all the content that it would break, and the tens of thousands of hours work that would be lost to content creators?

Regards,

-Flip

No, that is the nature of very fragile code. Stupid case in point, opening and closing Preferences will cause audio to start streaming? How do you even introduce a bug like that?

The biggest "sky is falling" issue is not that the code is very flaky, almost intolerably machine specific, and that ancient bugs aren't addressed. It is that the asset system is decidedly non-scalable and yet they keep trying to bump subscriber numbers. I've seen LL do some pretty daft things, but I find it hard to belive that the concept of "more concurrent users will cause a worse experience for all" escapes them. I think that they are telling CNET the exact opposite is pretty good indication that they do understand the scaling problem.

I don't think that anyone can consistently deny that performance (most notably texture downloads) have gotten progressively slower over the last 1.5 years at an almost painful rate.

Actually, with this latest major update, texture downloads have been faster than I've ever seen them...but then obviously that's my fortune as it were.

Same, and my overall performance has improved. I'm only on a 2 year old G4 laptop as well.

I am fairly new. This is my first update. I see lots of good things in it. For me personally I am willing to put up with a couple of weeks of ironing things out. It is worth the gains.

Now if it happened too often... or major problems don't get ironed out soon, that is when I would start having issues. I think it is unrealistic to expect these types of updates to be seamlessy perfect. There are alot of users out there with a lot of different expectations and priorities.

Point out the problems then give SL a little time to fix them. There is a serious lack of patience around here. (and where the heck is an angel smiley? I need one to pretend to be all innocent and stuff.)

beta? Hell this is more like Alpha...

I am not pleased with any of the recent additions to SL. Only thing i like is the browser thing that isnt fully functional yet.

a.) My inventory is horrible...

1.) Anytime my inventory loads EVERY folder opens and i have to wait for the whole thing to load before i can close them
2.) I crash a lot when doing things in my inventory.
3.) Ive reported about 7 bugs.

This is a feature that was just thrown upon us out of the blue without any testing. Please either fix what you broke or change it back.

b.) I cannot make use of any of the new local lighting or shaders.
c.) The Prims disapearing all over the place freaks me out, expecially when im currently trying to build a sim!
d.) The Age Verification/Payment removal thing makes all methods of Security and privacy Obsolete.
e.) The effect the updates are having on Luskwood (the leading brand of Furry Avatars) is pathetic. Please stop gimping these people...
f.) I dislike how if i leave a area in the same sim, and come back i have to re download the textures cuz they turn into holodeck grids again.
g.) We need bug fixes not new feature (unless its privacy/security/group/IM related).
h.) In the Future TEST ALL CHANGES BEFORE THROWING THEM ON US!
Have a good day...

Maybe this needs to become a standard cliche: "Imminent Death of Second Life Predicted."

(For the record, I've been seeing "Imminent Death of Usenet Predicted" ever since I was in college, nearly two decades ago. Usenet's still around...)

No get it right it's ALPHA!! NOT BETA!!

That has been exactly my thought. The removal of credit cards for sign-up struck me as more indicative of someone getting ready to sell it off than any other single move. However, given there has been the 11 million infusion of investor money, I'm not sure they could sell it off if they wanted to?

Here's a thought: Maybe with everything working poorly and looking bad, all those free unaccountable sign-ups will look at it once and then quit.

coco

P.S. In my shopping around, I have noticed a larger number of sims than usual having FPS's of like 5.

Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that you seem to have the notion that there is absolutely no testing going on beforehand, and that LL is just throwing raw code at the world, how many different combinations of hardware and software do you think there are? I don't have the knowledge to give anywhere near an exact number, but it's a pretty freaking large value, with at least seven or eight digits, and that's just looking at Windows machines, ignoring Macs and Linux boxen.

How, praytell, do you expect them to test even just a majority of those configuration possibilities? IBM can't do it, nor Microsoft, and either of them probably have more lawyers sitting around playing solitaire (well, ok, maybe not so many idle at IBM, with the SCO lawsuit at the moment) than LL has in total employees, let alone active coders.

Obviously, going solely by these forums (the active members of which aren't even one percent of the total SL population), not everyone is having problems, so it's unlikely that the code is inherently broken, or else everyone would be having issues.

But, hey, I hear jumping to conclusions and running around screaming while waving one's hands in the air is great exercise.

You forgot "FILM AT ELEVEN!", Erbo.

as a vision for SL, I had otherland more in mind than the metaverse.

D'oh! You're right, Noh. Maybe that should be "MPGs at eleven"? Or "MOVs at eleven"? (What format does SL produce its movie captures in, anyway? I've never gotten that feature to work...)

Otherland's a hell of a lot more interesting. Plus we can live forever there.

I really hate this as the default behavior to, however, you can go to MODIFY FILTERS and uncheck the box for showing all folders. It doesn't stick between sessions, unfortunately, but if you remember to do it before a search the old behavior is restored. Making the persistent would be a HUGE help.

That being said, I think everything on your list is an annoyance which can be addressed fairly easily. You've got complaints about the software, as do we all; but I think its daft to relate annoyances with a company dying. Why doesn't anyone proclaim from on high, "zOMG Microsoft is so clearly dying! Despite their record profits, the fact they have a ton of security flaws and really stupid bugs in their flagship operating system means they're dying!" It simply isn't true, and that's what I'm trying to point out.

You can point out an annoyance in the current version of SL without getting hysterical about it (and you never have, Yiffy <grin>; neither has Introvert); that's why I use the exagerrated "zOMG!", to help remind myself that metaphorically and literally, "its not the end of the world". Its an annoyance that will get addressed.

Regards,

-Flip

I know you live in Philly, or immediately outwith. Remind me to buy you a beer sometime for these posts.

Noob question: Is there software (in game or otherwise) that tests fps and lag time? Does Linden report these type statistics anywhere?

The Invendory Glitches have nothng to do with my PC, thats LL's falty coding at its finest. Also i'm a reguler Preview Grid tester so i usually know whats being tested and whats not. This wasnt. :/

Just an interesting observation. I left SL for an extended break - not because I didn't enjoy it but because my FL got too hectic (guess that's the San Francisco pace). I have been logging in much more in the last 2 weeks. I have to say as a fairly critical user, (I get the most satisfaction building while in world), that for the most part I have been happy with the performance. My logins even to the resource intensive city sims is very fast. The lighting changes have allowed me to run with Local Lighting enabled and still get around. I crash less and relog less. Of course I am comparing this with when I left which was at the release of 1.6 or so.

I have bugs - but I have had to workaround bugs since I joined March of '04. I hold a technical career - so i guess that's why I don't mind dealing with them. I never expect perfection from software of this magnitude - especially one that is so bleeding edge.

I used to feel the pain of this stuff when I was in world as often as I was when I joined. Spending 8 hours a day in world. Perhaps stepping away was really good to put it in perspective. I just roll with the disappearing prims in selections, chunky lines on curved edges, and strange inventory behaviour/crashes because I know when I look at my desktop background I always have two choices. Log back in or not. It's yet to prove to be so frustrating that I have deleted my account (which is always an option).

For all those who think SL is on it's way to doom - choose option 2 - just log out. No point being here if it isn't enjoyable, you could always spend your money on something that does bring you satisfaction. I know SL isn't on it's deathbed and for all the bugs I have experienced - many of the real annoying ones in the past haven't cropped up since I returned. Software developers continue to release updates - and soon enough there will be fixes or improvements to these recent issues.