Fix. The. Patcher.

Sorry, it is absolutely unacceptable that you must download the complete install every time there is a new patch, because there is a bug in the patcher and it cannot deliver the update to you as it should.

Fix it.

Thank you.

given the amount of times you have to reinstall the client, its easier to just download the whole thing anyway

Meh. It is functionality that is supposed to work. They need either to fix it, or remove it and just go to the 'download the new client in full and reinstall every release'. Grr.

woah there, Cienna. If you took the attitude they should remove functionality til it works, there wouldn't be an SL to log into

But after you reinstall you get all those damn newbie messages. "You have just used sit. You can sit on many different objects. Wanna see how long I can talk down to you? Quite awhile, watch...where were we, oh yes, sitting..."

Lol. I know that one. I reinstall so often they almost never go away.

'You have just paid money'. uhuh. Thanks

'You have just teleported'. reeeeally?

'Torley Torgeson just bumped you. To abuse report...'. Hehe. Yeah. Lets do that.

A non-working installer is usually caused by other software (firewall and antivirus) interfering, or by too many files in your Windows "Temp" folder.

You can always download the latest release at http://secondlife.com/download.

The download on the website and the autoupdate download are exactly the same size.

!!! LOL !!!

I'd like to chime in that the autoupdater hasn't been working for me for the last few versions of SL either. It did USE to work at a time. Disabled all Internet security, went bare-bones, cleaned Temp folders, uninstalled and reinstalled cleanly -- still did not work.

What has changed?

Well I must say that luckily for me, I have never had a problem with any patches not working properly. I am at work at the moment and hopefully I didn't just jinx myself for when I get home...

Hi Lee. I no longer run my firewall or anti-virus when I'm SLing... and I've got over 80 gigs open on the drive, with the temp file being cleaned out by a regularly running task.

Any other thoughts on why this consistantly fails for me after an update?

Aside -- I hear that the patcher isn't really a patcher, that the entire install package is delivered. Is this true?

Thanks!

Not convinced sorry. Windows temp directory has been cleared, firewall on a different box and disabled anti-virus. It still crashes.

I'm using windows 2000 if that's of interest.

Cienna: Again, the updater and installer at the website both do the same thing: remove the existing Second Life installation and install the new version. Both are the same size and take the same size to download. In both cases (and even if you completely uninstall SL yourself), all your inworld stuff like clothing/inventory/etc. are not affected.

So yes, you're downloading the entire client again either way. But it's 18MB. The patches for another game I play are larger and more frequent than SL's updates. ;^)

In some cases one can simply make a copy of the settings.ini file, install, copy the new one for security, overwrite the new one with the old one and spare themselves the warnings. It is easier to do that to describe.

Those warning flags are set in the settings.ini file like this:
WarnBalanceDecrease FALSE
WarnFirstAppearance FALSE
WarnFirstBuild FALSE
WarnFirstInventory FALSE
WarnFirstLeftClickNoHit FALSE
WarnFirstMap FALSE
WarnFirstOverrideKeys FALSE
WarnFirstSandbox FALSE
WarnFirstSit FALSE
WarnFirstStreamingMusic FALSE
WarnFirstTeleport FALSE

If, once you get yourself all warned up fully, you copy all the warning flags from the settings.ini file, you can do an install, then paste the warnings stuff into the fresh settings.ini file and avoid the warnings. Probably do it with a dos command or whatever they call dos commands nowadays. In Kris's case, might want to get a keyboard macro program to run the append warnings flags command with one keystroke.

Thankyou SueZanne. Most helpful. I shall do dat! I already have to replace my skin files and stuff, so yes, I should automate the whole thing and do the settings at the same time.

Lee, you're totally right about the sizes.

But you're missing the point. There's a bug. It needs to be fixed. End of story.

It's fair enough to help people overcome temporary problems until bugs get fixed, indeed it's more than fair enough, it's positively excellent. Great kudos to you and to LL!!

But issues like this really need no equivocation or fudging. "Bug noted, thanks, our bad, I've passed it on to devs for urgent resolution. Meanwhile, here's a workaround, ....."

Hi, Lee. Sorry I wasn't clear... let me try again... the patcher is not working. Period. It crashes consistantly with the error I captured in the above screenshot.

Whether or not I can download the client elsewhere is irrelevent to the reality that the patcher is not functioning as it should.

That is what I was posting about, what I'd like to see fixed. Either that or just take it out and make us go to the website every time, instead of fighting with broken code and THEN having to go there anyway.

Thanks!

But not always. You might say that my problem is that the installer doesn't crash. Instead, it installs...and installs...and installs...

I've not yet been able to install any non-Preview version of 1.6 without having the updater get caught in a never ending loop. I've tried the following sequence several times without success: uninstall; delete all SL folders; empty the Temp folder; disable ZoneAlarm; download the installer; install to default location; start the client and try to connect. And every time, I'm faced with a forced update.

I've had the same problem with some, but not all, of the 1.6.x Preview releases. And, of course, I'm not trying to install the main grid client when Preview is installed; only one or the other at a time.

Confirmed that the updater crashes constantly for me, too - started just a few releases ago (1.5?). Downloading manually works but it's annoying to have to open a new window, browse to the download page, etc.

Looks like a simple case of a pointer not being checked for NULL here. At the minimum a more useful error message might help.

As I understand it, we're having an ungraceful exit because another program (antivirus, or firewall) is actively messing with our autoupdater. It's hard to accomodate for that when it's someone else's utility doing the damage.

Would it help to know which anti-virus software etc we have installed? This seems to be more of a problem recently than before.

I could set up a poll if this helps. FWIW I have AVG Free Edition, and no firewall on this computer.

I have SL installed on 4 machines. One machine is running AVG Free Edition while the other 3 run McAfee. The AVG machine seems to have the installer bug. The McAfee machines run the installer with no problems. Anyone else here running AVG?

I use Symantec AV Corporate Edition, with or without it loaded makes no difference, the updater fails with a 0xc0000005 exception. The next loaded module is ntdll.dll. If that was a problem, I would assume it would manifest itself more often than installing SL. I also killed SpyBot Teatimer. There is not really much else running here except a few IM clients. I keep it running pretty lean. This really needs to be worked out.


Justen

Very good point, Lee. I think people would do well to remember a couple things here:

1. Replacing the client instead of patching it means cleaner installation.

2. SL is a very tiny program. Re-installing the whole thing is trivial. In fact, of all the programs on my entire machie, the only things smaller are office programs, browsers, media players, a few hardware-specific bells & whistles, some communications dohickeys, and a few other really small miscellaneous things like Winzip, plug-in managers, etc.

To put things in perspective, taking a quick glance at the game boxes on the shelf next to my desk, the last three World of Warcraft patches have been 56MB, 128MB, and 50MB. Final Fantasy XI required a 6GB update when I first installed it (I still say that was the worst $50 I ever spent), the last Knights of the Old Republic patch was 25MB. Guildwars patches tend to be about 15-20MB (roughly the same size as the entire SL client).

As for the updater not working, sorry to hear some people are having problems with it. I personally have never had any trouble with it, other than having to create a new firewall rule for each new instance of it, so I can't comment on that.

Yes I am, but I've never had any problems with installing updates.
If it matters any I have the settings on medium where programs have
to ask for server rights& internet access.

-Sun

AVG is anti-virus not firewall. If you are running AVG you probably have an icon next to your computer's clock with is a square split into 4 squares which are yellow, black, green and red.