New Building Tools and a river in Egypt

Having just spent about an hour building in 1.6 I realized that my recent large-scale project could simply never have been finished if I'd been forced to use this new excuse for building tools. Good for a laugh though. Very ROFL.

It's an odd sort of thing really. One files a bug report explaining that one of the new building features simply doesn't work. The reply says that it does work if only it would be properly used. One patiently explains that it is being used properly, and simply doesn't work. The reply says that it does work if only......Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Dating myself here, but I can recall a time when the purpose of having users test pre-release software was to find and fix bugs. Though this can't be right, starting with 1.2 each subsequent Preview has seemed little more than a sop; a pretense which allows LL to later say, "But we did test it! It's a total surprise to us that it was released full of serious bugs."

Does no one rememeber how quickly emergency patches had to be released for the last four releases? Broken lighting and prim drift in 1.2 (neither of which has ever been fixed); vanishing vehicles in 1.3 (also never fixed); broken audio in 1.4 (ditto); and the lagtastic, virtually login-proof 1.5.

And now 1.6 will carry on the tradition of introducing new pre-broken features that nobody wanted while fixing none of the major problems like lag; lighting; linking; land and prim drift; rubber banding; packet loss; audio that alternately lags, blasts, distorts, doesn't work at all; ok, this is pointless because everyone knows all this.

BTW, *cough* Havok 2 *cough*

While I sympathize, perhaps you could post your bug report in here and get further verification.

I'm getting the sense this is going to be named the ignorance is bliss release.

What's wrong with the new build tools?

Why not share the problem with us? It's hard to have a disucssion about a vague, undescribed problem.

Please describe what you mean by broken lighting? Additionally, I have not experienced any prim drift in the past 6+ months.

You have a point here, but I don't expect vehicles will ever work perfectly until SL gives up the grid toplogy. And no, Havok 2 will not fix this.

This is a very vague statement. What is broken about it? The only problem I have is some vehicles which use looping sounds causing a sim-wide stuttering. It's very annoying and if that's what you mean, I'll give you this point as well. Other that this, I've not had any problems with audio.

This isn't a bug introduced by 1.5, it's a growing scalability problem that had crossed a threshold. The population has grown a lot, and the code couldn't handle it.

Ghosting wasn't a major problem? Do you reall think that absolutely nobody wanted international language support, video streaming, parcel return-by-owner lists, llLoadURL(), llGetObjectMass(), scriptable permissions, an improved texture browser, or a full inventory search?

What kind of lag? People overuse that term these days. In my experience, the video framerate is much faster in 1.6. As far as network latency, I don't know how you can judge this from 1.6 already given that it's not running on the same hardware (and possibly not even in the same location) as the agni grid.

There were some lighting problems, but as far as I can tell they are fixed. Please be more specific.

What problem are you having with linking?

You're having land drift problems in the 1.6 preview? How can you tell if there's prim drift in 1 hour?[/quote]

This is an inherent problem with all MMOs. If you come up with a solution for it, you'd be able to make a lot of money. The problem is the client and server have to keep synchronized across a network with latency. Sometimes the client is off, and when that happens, the server tells the client to re-position you. I've not experienced this problem as being any worse in SL than any other online game.

You're claiming that 1.6 doesn't fix packet loss? As if LL is responsible for the network between them and you? 1.6 doesn't create world peace either, you know?

Audio will lag if people don't use llPreloadSound(). The data has to download at some point. SL doesn't come with several CDs containing preloaded sound for you to install. Sound distortion is probably caused by the "doppler effect" settings. You can turn this down to minimize it.

Everyone? Wow you found out a lot during your 1 hour in the preview. You know, some of us have spent a dozen or more hours in there, and have done a lot of construtive work reporting bugs and running tests instead of just popping in briefly as justification to rant on the forums about past issues.

Heh. You do realize that Havok 2 isn't going to be all that spectacular as people are making it out to be? Physics will run a little bit faster, and sims will crash a little less often. And it will possibly open the door for some new features later on. That's about it.

All in all, if you want to be construtive, why not share some details about the problems you're having so we can compare, validate, confirm, etc. You make it sound like LL is intentionally keeping the system bugged by either spite or negligence. This is hardly the case if you see how much time they spend working on this, and how much more readily something can be fixed when you are thorough in reporting a problem.

I think you'll find once you start being constructive and describe the problems you're having more precisely, you'll actually notice your efforts contribute to getting things fixed.

However, if you just want to rant, I suppose that's fine, but don't be surprised if it kind of irks those of us who spend time on the preview grid in an effort to improve SL instead of tear it down.

Yeah... maybe it's something on your end.

SL since 1.2 has only gotten better for me. *shrug*

Hay guys, I'm reading and I'm missing something.

What do building tools have to do with Egyptian rivers?

*confuzzled look*

Thanks.

Denial is not just a river in Egypt.

HAHAHA -- OMG, wow, okay, that slipped past my humor radar the first time.

That's like what Stuart Smalley says, right?

Granted I'm running a low-end box by today's standards (1.2ghz Celery, 512mb @ 100mhz FSB); and your mileage may vary. Also granted I've gotten rid of almost all video problems since I switched from Radeon to GeForce about six months ago.

I'm not denying that some things have gotten better over time. But the really major issues I mentioned (some of which date back to Beta), have gotten worse for me and many others as the versions roll by.

Sorry, it's just that ever since 1.2 was released I feel the need to do my standard rant for each new version. IMHO, they badly need to reallocate Dev time almost exclusively to fixes and stop putzing around with experimental new features until the basic functions (like login) work reliably.

It's all a matter of priorities: chat balloons vs. lag; streaming a/v vs. login. LL is still just a small company, and Dev resources are seriously limited. Deliberate mimicry of There's mis-guided fumbles isn't likely to be the best course for SL's future. I was in There's Beta from the start right to the bitter end, and it's not something I want to live through a second time, and neither do you.

Sounds right...guess I need to get some better sources.

Obviously this is all just IMO, and no doubt plenty of people will prefer the new tools:

The mouse over-sensitivity which has always plagued XYZ movement (often moving prims across multiple sims with a tiny mouse movement) has now spilled over into stretch. I was editing a single linked prim isolated from it's build, simply trying to stretch it to the 10m limit along the Y axis, with the prim angled downward 37 degrees. Each time the mouse cursor reached the 10m mark along the grid, that end of the prim would start bouncing rapidly back and forth between the 9 and 10m marks. In the end, i had to enter the size manually and then tediously reposition the prim, which of course takes a long time because of the tilt away from the horizantal.

The new color/texture picker's apply instantly function is still broken. I believe this is considered a known bug. True, we can select the OS color picker, but as far as I can see we're stuck with the new texture picker. The huge problem is that we are now presented with a truncated inventory tree instead of the old single list of textures. I say truncated because only a few folders can be seen in the texture picker tree. I can't be the only one who has spent an enormous amount of time arranging my inventory to work well with the single list, and now find it impossible to locate the textures I need which are often buried in sub-sub folders. Because of the huge number of textures I have, many are named simply with numerical sequences, so the new search function is no help.

In the single list, I knew exactly where everything was sequentially. Bottom line, it was impossible to find the textures I wanted to use. The 'solution' would require a completely revamped inventory arrangement; and since the inventory tree problems still haven't been fixed, this would take an inconceivable amount of time.

Finally, the one new feature which would have been hugely useful to me simply doesn't work on my system. I'm referring to rotation Snap to Grid.

And again, why are they wasting Dev time on new features when things like joints and linking have been broken since Beta?

I believe Samuel Clemens coined it though. (Mark Twain)

i believe interface and other new features are important simply because not everyone is a builder.

the new search make suck for your picking textures from a list but its a million times better for actually finding stuff in your inventory like not having to open folders for it to look in.

Like Mr. Spock said : The needs of the many outweight the needs ot the one

Definitely. The new Search function is excellent for general Inventory use. It works impressively well. It's easily the best thing about 1.6.

And, yes it really is more important to make the building UI user-friendly for casual builders than for someone who's been building since version 0.8. LL very much needs to look to the future, even if stubs some old toes along the way.

Building was always the most fun part of SL for me, and I'll really miss it. But it'll give me that much more time to play with vehicles and scripting, so it ain't all bad.