No dancing for you honey!

This has me wondering enough to make a thread to see if anyone else is experiencing it or someone has a solution to this. Here's my trouble:

As a fairly new player (and after exceeding my monthly trading limit, don't ask), I figured I could earn a little extra cash when I'm not playing by just letting the computer run and plant myself onto some dance pad. After the first few attempts I disabled the idle/logout thing, naturally. So there I go again to dance over night and eagerly return to my computer to get all the cash from my hard work, but oh, what is this? Everything appears to be fine at first, I can still move around the camera, I see a certain amount that I should have earned (it's not nearly enough), but I can't do anything. I can't stand up, I can't move. So closing the game is what little remains, which I promptly do and upon relogging I find myself at home. In my wonderful living room where I left to the club before. It's as if nothing of that club part ever happened. I don't have more money, I'm not tired from dancing, I'm just that. Ready to go (again). I obviously went back in time, or worse, I never really left for the club at all. Maybe I'm getting senile, I think to myself and retry the next night. But the same strange thing presents itself to me the next day. And it turns out that it would go on like that every single time I attempt to get that little pocket money.

I can't for the life of me understand how this can happen. I'm not used to online games that keep running as if nothing happened, give me the impression that I'm still on by letting me move around the camera and show everyone happily dancing around me, but actually seemed to have lagged me out a long time ago. And then logs me back in right before any of that every happened. This is scary.

So what is it? Anyone else experienced that, and is there a remedy?

You crashed...

Yeah. Thank you for this mindblowing information. I will just tell SL to not crash next time.

LOL

Thats what you get for trying to earn 27 lindens by leaving your computer on all night.

I wonder how much your RL electric bill increased by you doing that? Probably cost more to run the computer than you made (or didn't make) on a dance pad. hehe

And all the while, your dancing zombie slowed the world down for the rest of us.

Don't worry, my tone may sound a bit bitter, but I have a big smile on my face.

I remember when I first started, I tried the dance pads and after a half hour, I decided to spend $3 USD and buy $1000 lindens...its soo much easier....AND it gives you more time to play with poseballs.
woo hoo!!

It sure isn't worth it in the end, that is true. What you probably missed is that my monthly trading limit is used up. That is just a weeeeeee bit more than 1000L

Why does this slow things down for the rest of us? If I don't dance, someone else will. These pads are there to generate traffic on a particular sim and is fully intended by the owner as far I know. Unless you're on that sim, things shouldn't slow down for you. Even if you were, as I said someone else will be dancing anyway.

Everyone seems to be very ignorant about technical glitches. I have to say the SL crowd is extremely easy to please in that perspective. I like that to some extend (better than everyone bitching around), but the degree of malfunction most people are willing to take is quite confusing. I'm probably one of them myself. I'm so confused.

Basically, SL is "event driven". You only get information exchanged withthe server when something happens, and if nothing's happening it just keeps going since.. well.. that's normal. This saves on bandwidth (and lord knows they need that). If you lose the server connection the client stops getting events, but it keeps showing you what's there, because it may be what's supposed to be happening.

After a while, if you keep sending commands to the server and nothing comes back, it tells you that the connection has been lost.

PS: I'm not defending this design, just explaining it.

PPS: To explain why people are hostile about camping balls and chairs would take a lot longer than I'm able to spend, but trust me, it's fully justified. SL still hasn't recovered from the social and economic changes these tricks have led to.

Isn't it strange that I don't get any message, no error, no game exit, no freeze, just a normal looking game that doesn't respond anymore? If I at least got some connection lost message, or the game would log me out, anything at all. But no. It just sits there, plus if I relog none of all that ever happened! How would you explain that.

Patrice,
What happened to you is called "Red Zoning". It's happened to many people.

Essentially your PC lost almost all or most of it's connection to SL. You can move around in a circle (really you are moving your camera around). You are unable to chat or IM anyone. No one seems to respond to you. You appear to be connected, but if you move your cursor over the bandwidth box (upper right corner, right side) you will see zero bandwidth.

When you red zone there is still a tiny bit of a connection... enough that you can see the world. But not enough that your PC can interact with it. To others in world, you appear to freeze and remain frozen until you simply disappear (when you gave up and hit control-Q, and the sim finally recognizes that you really aren't there). There is no error message or log out message.... you simply lose your connection. It frequently happens while someone is AFK, but sometimes while you are active. (i've watched the bandwidth drop on me till it hits zero and stays there)

Why does this happen? No one is really certain because there is no one answer. In some cases, it's a laggy parcel. In others, it might be a bad connection Not necessarily at your end or linden end, but somewhere in between.

What can you do? Very little, really. You can minimize as many of the various causes. remove laggy attachments such as the Multi-gadget & Xcite, excessive bling, etc. Avoid laggy places (too many hi-res graphics, too many scripts running when they don't need to be, etc). Maybe increase your bandwidth by upgrading your connection. Even then, it's still known to happen.

There's an old saying:
"God grant me the strength to change the things that i can change,
the courage to accept the things that I cannot,
and the wisdom to know the difference"

Honestly, there is little that we can do prevent red zoning, so the wise course is to accept it as a fact of your SL experience, take measures to minimize it, and enjoy SL during those times when you are at your PC.

Patrice,
What happened to you is called "Red Zoning". It's happened to many people.

Essentially your PC lost almost all or most of it's connection to SL. You can move around in a circle (really you are moving your camera around). You are unable to chat or IM anyone. No one seems to respond to you. You appear to be connected, but if you move your cursor over the bandwidth box (upper right corner, right side) you will see zero bandwidth.

When you red zone there is still a tiny bit of a connection... enough that you can see the world. But not enough that your PC can interact with it. To others in world, you appear to freeze and remain frozen until you simply disappear (when you gave up and hit control-Q, and the sim finally recognizes that you really aren't there). There is no error message or log out message.... you simply lose your connection. It frequently happens while someone is AFK, but sometimes while you are active. (i've watched the bandwidth drop on me till it hits zero and stays there)

Why does this happen? No one is really certain because there is no one answer. In some cases, it's a laggy parcel. In others, it might be a bad connection Not necessarily at your end or linden end, but somewhere in between.

What can you do? Very little, really. You can minimize as many of the various causes. remove laggy attachments such as the Multi-gadget & Xcite, excessive bling, etc. Avoid laggy places (too many hi-res graphics, too many scripts running when they don't need to be, etc). Maybe increase your bandwidth by upgrading your connection. Even then, it's still known to happen.

There's an old saying:
"God grant me the strength to change the things that i can change,
the courage to accept the things that I cannot,
and the wisdom to know the difference"

Honestly, there is little that we can do prevent red zoning, so the wise course is to accept it as a fact of your SL experience, take measures to minimize it, and enjoy SL during those times when you are at your PC.

Thanks so much for your explanation Stephanie, that at least helped me understand. Still strange that this happens every single time I go afk too long, but at least I know what the deal is now.

Well redmapping (or redzoning as Stephanie called it) is one possibility, but I think you're simply timing out, Patrice. Second Life intentionally disconnects you after a certain amount of player inactivity to reduce the burden of AFK players on their already struggling system.

There ARE several ways to get around this problem- one of them is even built into the client now. I've never used any personally though, so I'm unable to tell you how to fix it.

I did a fair bit of dancepadding in my early SL days. True it earned less cash than my reller was paying in electricity bills, but we agreed that my fortune would be made in SL as far as possible. I did pay up so I could become a landowner, though, and hope to be finacially self-sufficient in-world from now on.

My first thought would have been that you timed out, but since that normally gives an SL disconnect message that says something along the lines of "you have been disconnected for inactivity". Since you indicated that there was no error messages, log out messages, etc.... that is normally a symptom of Red Zoning (or Red Mapping, as Wildfire calls it).

This is something new in my experience. If you go afk you will time out normally but if you are using an animation you don't time out the way it should. I think this is a glitch or a feature , I'm not complaining because if I'm on an animation I don't want to time out after just a few minutes anyway.