Bandwidth/Packet Loss bars

Why were these removed? When I'm with my wife and we're just sat somewhere, the only way to see if I'd been disconnected was to look at the bandwidth bar. If it was at 0 kb/s then I'd been disconnected.

I've only been playing 2/3 months, so I'm not 100% sure there is something else that tells me I've been disconnected. I know if I'm walking around I won't be able to do things such as sit down etc, but when sat with my wife and just talking, I won't know. Other MMOs come up telling me I've lost connection, but this doesn't.

They were removed ostensibly to make room for the new Search bar. If you want them restored, please go vote for bug VWR-3156 in Jira (if you've never done that, repost and I can give quick instructions).

Here'a a previous thread talking about it: /142/b9/226727/1.html

Also, if you want notification when your client's become disconnected from SL's servers, the Nicholaz version of the client does that: http://nicholaz-beresford.blogspot.com/

The link to his downloads is on the right.

Minimap becomes red after disconnecting.

And yes, I too miss the bandwidth bars... and also see no sense in not having popup on disconnect.

Ctrl+Shift+1 brings up a stats window, showing bandwidth etc... the most important one would be the Time Dilations, this is the syncronisation of the LL servers interacting with the sim server you are currently on. If that fluctuates for long periods below 75%, there is a good chance the 'region' will log you out.

In the Client menu (Ctrl+Alt+D) under Character, then the 2nd nested menu (cant think of the name atm), you can see AFK setting, deslect that. SL won't view you as being afk and disconnect you for inactivity. This is something LL has tightened up on, to logout all those ppls that are inworld, but maybe gone shopping in RL, leaving their account running, maybe until they get the asset server upscaled and coping better without bringing SL down with grid wide crashes.

Havok4 should see more stable serverside code, although given that it was promised over 3 years ago (Havok2 then), why they aren't installing a higher version now. Maybe its a stop gap, until the serverside open source code becomes available and let those with more money resources, install and run that themselves. They will be the 'sims to be in', when that happens.

Or you can do as I do and use Nicholaz's Old School viewer, which has the Bars, and Old Comm window still intact.

I'm not sure that's correct..

http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417

I usually look at Sim FPS as this is how many frames per second the sim thinks it's doing. Time dilation seems to be more of an indicator on how the physics part of the sim is doing vs the rest of the sim. Then again the docs for this stuff aren't that great so I could be way off.

The quote says it all, albiet in a slightly default way of seperating both the phyiscs and the framerate conditions. Perhaps now you know why when someone uses a guesture, it doesnt play the same for everyone at the same time. Sometimes the animation happens before or after the sound, depending on which server (Sim or Asset) it is being loaded from onto the sim server cache, for broadcasting.

Time Dilations is probably the best indicator that the various servers are in sync or not. When you rubber band whist walking, watch the time dialtions reading. If it constantly drops below 50%, expect a sim crash.

Time dilation is the difference between the physics engine and real time. Since physics fps is pretty much locked with sim fps, I'm still not sure why one is better than the other - do you often see Time Dilation _not_ being the same as twice the Sim FPS plus a little?

I guess I just like the FPS values better because I know that a happy sim puts out 45 frames per second. From there, it's easy enough to know that if a sim is taking more than 22ms (1/45th of a second) to generate a frame, something isn't happy. That in turn makes it easier to look at the time values in the stats bar..

Also, I think your use of the term 'various servers' is probably confusing the newbies, since these numbers are for one, individual sim.

Really?... lol.. so you think that sl runs off a single server? Your avatar, depending on what it is doing, is connected to at least 3 servers at all times... add voice and media, that's two more.

EDIT for the 'newbies'.. voice and media are 3rd party host servers.... hopefully cleared that one up...

I didn't say all SL runs on a single server.. I did say that the time dilation value is info for just a single sim - a sims physics engine doesn't run on a different server than the rest of the sim.


Feel free to check that quote yourself. Note that it's under the 'Simulator' category.

http://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/default.asp?deptID=4417

You also have the nifty (and relatively useless) new lag meter that you can turn on from the Help menu (think it's help, cant get into SL right now. Down while they bang on things, maybe stop banging on them and fix them and you dont have to bang on them so much).

I call the new lag meter relatively useless because this shows you three lights for Client, Network and Server. Ostensibly it will show you exactly what item is causing your lag issue mostly Client: textures loading (why are textures constantly loading bringing FPS down to <10 when you're standing still near the SIM edge looking at a blank wall and yet not when you first enter a SIM and ostensibly everything is loading, I have no idea) or Server: too many image calculations.

Sounds pretty usefull, right? Say that when all three are green (means everything is hunky dorey, right?) but your avatar is walking happily straight line down into the ground, or up into the air, and you cant turn or stop or chat and a few moments later are disconnected.

Anyone know what happens to the new Lag Meter when you are disconnected? Do all the indicators stay green? All the OP is asking for is a way to know when they've been dropped. I wonder what the new Lag Meter does in this case?

Ctrl-Shift-1 brings up the stats window, showing bandwidth, among other things. If your bandwidth is reading 0, you have been disconnected.

Bandwith never reads 0. I've been disconnected for 10 minutes and still had network activity.

I've had mine hit 0 and then about a minute later SL unfreezes and it's back to normal. Sorry to say 0 doesn't mean disconnect, unless it's that way for more than a minute as of late.

I've had that happen, too. I think SL retries a few times before declaring that you have been disconnected.

Well, everytime I get booted out of SL, mine's reading 0. I guess i'm just special...