This has gone too far.

I guess the easiest way to respond to this is in a list format, since there is a list of complaints I'll list some ways to remedy them, and also lay blame to the systems that are causing your woes. Please keep the watermelon guns to yourselves, people and accept my apologies for the problems you're facing.

Packet Loss
This can be caused by a few things: the first, is our World Map. As much as we hate to say it, our map eats bandwidth like its in the finals for a hot dog eating contest. Work is currently underway on making the map not suck up your bandwidth.

The second, is your Maximum Bandwidth slider in Edit > Preferences > Network > Maximum Bandwidth. Start at 300kbps (most cable connections) and lower it if you see lots of non-map-related packet loss. Raise it if you don't see any packet loss and find that the world is loading too slow. (paraphrased from a notecard by Kex Godel)

A third cause of packet loss is higher than usual network traffic. If you are in a region with lots of avatars and/or lots of active/scripted objects sending updates you'll see this kind of packet loss. Remember that the simulator not only has to send updates to you but to everyone else in the region (as well as communicate with the 4 regions it is adjacent to).When those updates go over the top, some packet loss will occur.

Friends List and Presence Problems
The Friends List has been having problems for a while now. We are working on it but it's "not trivial to fix" (my least favorite LL'ism). The Friends Online page on our website is hit the most and contributes to the pain. In an effort to alleviate the symptoms we've started disabling that page when presence issues rear their ugly heads. A number of projects have resources dedicated to them to solve this problem and we hope to have it out before 1.12.2.

Crash While Building
This one I'm not familiar with this one (only one that was reported which indicates that when dropping an attachment you are editing your viewer will crash, which I am unable to reproduce). If you have a repro please send it to me via IM inworld.

Database Stability
We have projects underway to increase the strength of our backbone and database. We also have been doing work to reduce the strain on the database by changing back-end mechanics for storing avatar textures for improved performance and robustness (today's release). As far as data security, we are reviewing what we should and should not store in the databases with a strong sensitivity to the privacy of our Residents.

Texture Overlapping
As others have mentioned, uploading an image without an alpha layer but as a TGA file will cause it to be alpha-sorted as an alpha texture. This can cause the see-through textures you are experiencing. When uploading textures its always best to upload 24-bit TGA's unless you really put an alpha layer in the image. I've talked to the engineers in this department and they say that we check for "all-white" alpha layers and discard them on upload now. Unfortunately, this doesn't fix textures that already exist inworld. If they are truly freebie textures you should be able to download them (open the texture in your Inventory and choose File > Save Texture As...). Re-save them as 24-bit TGA's and re-upload them and you shouldn't have a problem anymore.

I hope this helps. If you have further questions please let me know.

Packet Loss
This can be caused by a few things: the first, is our World Map. As much as we hate to say it, our map eats bandwidth like its in the finals for a hot dog eating contest. Work is currently underway on making the map not suck up your bandwidth.

I guess the easiest way to respond to this is in a list format, since there is a list of complaints I'll list some ways to remedy them, and also lay blame to the systems that are causing your woes. Please keep the watermelon guns to yourselves, people and accept my apologies for the problems you're facing.

Packet Loss
This can be caused by a few things: the first, is our World Map. As much as we hate to say it, our map eats bandwidth like its in the finals for a hot dog eating contest. Work is currently underway on making the map not suck up your bandwidth.

The second, is your Maximum Bandwidth slider in Edit > Preferences > Network > Maximum Bandwidth. Start at 300kbps (most cable connections) and lower it if you see lots of non-map-related packet loss. Raise it if you don't see any packet loss and find that the world is loading too slow. (paraphrased from a notecard by Kex Godel)

A third cause of packet loss is higher than usual network traffic. If you are in a region with lots of avatars and/or lots of active/scripted objects sending updates you'll see this kind of packet loss. Remember that the simulator not only has to send updates to you but to everyone else in the region (as well as communicate with the 4 regions it is adjacent to).When those updates go over the top, some packet loss will occur.

Friends List and Presence Problems
The Friends List has been having problems for a while now. We are working on it but it's "not trivial to fix" (my least favorite LL'ism). The Friends Online page on our website is hit the most and contributes to the pain. In an effort to alleviate the symptoms we've started disabling that page when presence issues rear their ugly heads. A number of projects have resources dedicated to them to solve this problem and we hope to have it out before 1.12.2.

Crash While Building
This one I'm not familiar with this one (only one that was reported which indicates that when dropping an attachment you are editing your viewer will crash, which I am unable to reproduce). If you have a repro please send it to me via IM inworld.

Database Stability
We have projects underway to increase the strength of our backbone and database. We also have been doing work to reduce the strain on the database by changing back-end mechanics for storing avatar textures for improved performance and robustness (today's release). As far as data security, we are reviewing what we should and should not store in the databases with a strong sensitivity to the privacy of our Residents.

Texture Overlapping
As others have mentioned, uploading an image without an alpha layer but as a TGA file will cause it to be alpha-sorted as an alpha texture. This can cause the see-through textures you are experiencing. When uploading textures its always best to upload 24-bit TGA's unless you really put an alpha layer in the image. I've talked to the engineers in this department and they say that we check for "all-white" alpha layers and discard them on upload now. Unfortunately, this doesn't fix textures that already exist inworld. If they are truly freebie textures you should be able to download them (open the texture in your Inventory and choose File > Save Texture As...). Re-save them as 24-bit TGA's and re-upload them and you shouldn't have a problem anymore.

I hope this helps. If you have further questions please let me know.

We tried to hold the weekly LUG meeting last night when the grid came up, the topic of conversation wasn't all the wonderful bug fixes Tofu Linden has worked so hard on, it was the 30-50% packet loss everyone at the meeting experienced - we even moved to another sim only to find it worse! (ppl were running windows client native, windows client with wine & cedega and the Linux native client - consistant extreme packet loss).

Yep, I'm having the same problems you are all having, major packet loss, friends list not working, crashing all the time for reasons I don't understand, ect.. SL used to be just a little laggy and the challenge was in creation, ect. - now the challenge is just excisting, wtf is going on over there?

I think this is probably correct.

As I posted earleir on another thread, all of my problems and most everyone elses started when they introduced culling and started to "optimise" the stream from the server. They simply don't know what they are doing in that respect from what I have heard. This optimisation is also the source of the texture offset problem that they refuse to admit even exists, and poor network performance is at the heart of the "pulse lag" problem they also don't talk about.

As to the culling though, why, ... when standing in a 10 metre cube house, the wall behind me should vanish when I am not facing it (even though it's less than 5 metres away and clearly part of my immediate millieu), is incomprehensible to me.

I know about culling, but that is just bad design, or bad culling design or whatever you want to call it. I am sick and tired of turning around too fast for the server in SF to send me the fourth wall of my house, when it really should already be in the gigabyte of space on my hard drive. That fourth wall is really just a couple of K of data, "culling" it serves no one in that situation and is simply a mistake in the algorythm.

I apologise to Brent for over-reacting on his stupid remarks earlier, but they were stupid remarks. The Lindens give us darn little information as it is, so if one of them is going to post to the forum it could at least be someone hwo has some "people skills," someone who is actually good at communicating to people and has the actual facts at hand.

Despite the seeming attempt at communication, if you read Brents remarks closely you can see that we still don't have an answer to many of the questions posed and despite the (finally!) inclusion of one "sorry" and one "apologise," it still reads to me like the words of someone who is sidestepping the responsibility for the problems.

LL's quality control is really quite bad. Obviously so.

Someone posted on another thread five clear bugs in the UI that they noticed in the ten minutes they were online today. These bugs are not related to "going live" on the server as Brent intimates. They are just stupid obvious bugs and glitches that any decent software developer would see in a flash.

What about the recent update that was "all about the UI" where ten or fifteen major bugs in the UI were discovered by users literally minutes after it went live? They simply are not testing enough and probably do not have an actual, rigorous testing program in place is my guess.

Given their well known insane management style of letting the developers "pick their own problems", they likely let the developers tell them when things are "ready to go" too, instead of doing the obvious thing which is get a second (or third) party to test it first.

MIC-KEY-MOUSE!

The last time I heard anyone say what Shiney just did it came from Lee Linden

Sorry, folks. It's NOT your pc. It's Linden Lab.

I have a pc that can start WW III..more honking than Alienware's bestest. It cuts through the most difficult and demanding games and programs like a hot knife through butter.
.

Maybe you either paid too much for it or your ISP is still twisting phone wires together on it's network.

Because I too have no problems other than lag on my mid spec gaming machine in it's $30 case lacking Bling lighting, maybe it's the Sims you frequent, my"dodgy" original mainland sim puts many new Class 5's to shame for lag.
35k people on line and the worst thing I notice is I can only run 2 alts well instead of 3 simultaneously.
Teleports no problem, in and out of any sim first go.

Bad Thread necromancer! , BAD!

But now we are reach 10,000 online members...............Lag hit us i believe int 1.5 client .as some say.
9,000 members has caused very bad pocket loss for many....
The system has to breach some where right?!

LL released the client as open source quite a few months ago now, has anyone done anything with it? NO.

Take a look around JIRA - a number of viewer bug fixes have been done by the community.

Anyone here actually believe that 9USD a month will support and finance the full growth of SL as we would all like it? Whats really wrong here, is the lack of funding, no one is to blame, maybe too late to correct (BTW when I joinned I paid for a lifetime membership). How many other online games only charge 9USD's a month and offer the opportunity to generate a living, or give everyone the vast scope of freedom to be creative or have as many functions as SL? How many of those are bug free?