I need to vent

Lindens:

If you think that the way you are progressing is the way forward, please rethink your strategies.
It appears to me that your "New Viewers" are nothing but a way for you to squize a bit more juice from your servers at the expense of the members experience.
Your last preview viewer was better than the official version released after.
You change and replace User Interfase without announcing to or consulting your clients.
The SL experience that started so pleasant ( a part from lag) is aproacing the stress level of RL.
As you are probably aware there are new Land simulator programs starting, some are already offering deal by far better than you are.
if your goal is to chase all your clients away, i think that you are slowly aceiving your goal,when i hear of major creators migrating to other programs it makes me feel like i am playing for the loosing team.
So, Lindens, get your shit together before you ll end up with the whole sand box for yourselves.
I am a patient man, i have been with you for over two years,all you have managed to improve is the pretty visuals and your bank account, but this is getting stresfull and that is not why most of us are here.
I know its long, but as i said "I NEED TO VENT"

I fully agree with you

I feel like we are paying big money High tier for daily system problems. I have stopped having fun in SL lately due to constant problems and faild inventory and services being down. Let alone getting updated buggy software that has not passed proper inspection.

We all pay equal tier and demand equal service

My advice to new people now days is.. Dont spend any money here and never go premium.. Not worth the hastle and losss

They are offering better deals because you crash every 5 minutes, crash uploading textures, cannot put on attachments and the world is devoid of people.

Sure you get 45,000 prims per server - but have fun deleting any prims you create with relative ease. Those places are 12+ months behind.

Why not spend money here? It is fun for the majority of us. I just lost 3k in a transaction I am hoping the person i was purchasing from reimburses me - but there is no way in hell I am quitting SL over it.

For me, it IS worth the little hassle I go through and it IS worth the rare loss.

Where else in the real world can someone go to do the exact same things we do in SL with a bunch of people to have fun with?

Exactly, no where. So yea, it is worth it.

When another grid comes along offering 85% of the services SL currently has with at least a population like 2004, then I am there, Second Inventory willing. Until then, I guess it is all about "thank you sir can i have another?".

What has and is happening right now, is development of OpenSim platforms by dedicated small and large companies/teams to do what LL should be doing.. creating a stable and secure environment for its paying customers.

The recent prolific updates and distruptions is simply LL trying to play 'lets get our house in order, after so many years of bad husbandry'. It is now a mad rush to gain as much ground ahead of those up and coming platforms, that will steal away those that have suffered too long and lost both patience and money.

For a modest outlay and a bit of techie know how, you can host your own sim on a PC and then link it like a tp or html internet link to many other platforms, including SL. This is the technology that has been driving the many distruptions... fear of loosing a lot of customers. Using current technology such as SLInventory, you can port your goods into other platforms, although that will become more transparent in time.

We are considering hosting our own set of sims, so we can use some as a filming studio and others for our fashion shows. We wont need the many functional layers such as commerce (currency) as we will not have shops, clubs etc there. They will become bespoked places linked to the other platforms, where people can tp to to enjoy our services under our control. Obviously, they will be created soley for bespoked purposes, so will not suffer the lag and issues seen on LL main grid. I have forseen this becoming a reality since joining SL many years ago. Many other platforms are being created in exactly this format, once they are transparently linked, it will open up a whole new type of VR internet world.

For the first little while when I joined there were routine (i.e. around once a week) grid-wide outages. Nobody could log in, and no business was done for hours! Those days are long gone.

Viewer stability has increased by a long way. I still get crashes, but nowhere hear as badly as I used to.

We used to regularly get borked transactions - either not going through at all (in which case the customer would just leave) or ones where the transaction went through and the customer never got their goods. I haven't heard of that happening to our products in a long while.

We had builds that would work with one server version, but then break on an "upgrade" - not something we have seen at all recently.

I am very sorry and sympathetic if you are having issues, but from other perspectives, SL is a LOAD more stable as a platform to run a business on than it was a year ago.

As I see it, OpenSim platforms, as long they have a stand-alone economy and no intellectual property provision, won't be rivalling SL any time soon as a commercial proposition. You say they can be "connected with SL" - from what I have read that statement is a tad misleading.

Kalderi, maybe you do not suffer loggin to find that all the items in your store that are for sale, have had all the perms set to full? Or maybe every client (the honest ones) are spamming you, saying that the TV/Player they bought have become duplicated, or complaining that the once mod set playlist, is now no mod and they cannot edit it, nor can I for that matter! LL seems to drop the ball bigtime sometimes. The Net cost to business is perhaps unfathomable.

With the current situation of 'upgrading' on the fly, gives no room for anyone to plan anything. Only yesterday, we had planned weeks ago to do some machinima shoots, only to discover that 90% of our group could not get inworld, tp's were down, objects wouldn't rez..... then checking the Grid Status, to find out that suddenly, LL decided to carryout grid wide rollbacks/restarts for the next 3 days (which we know can mean a week or more).

At least when they shutdown the grid every Wednesday to do these things, it was known in advance. The worst thing that could happen then, is delays in reopening. We NEVER planned anything for Wednesdays... now, we never know from day to day. I am not aware of any other paid for internet programme, that operates in the ad-hoc fashion.

AWM, please don't get me wrong, I have a lot of sympathy for people who struggle with this stuff. We just have to be careful when making broad, sweeping statements about how everything is going downhill and nobody at LL seems to care...

The advice given not to spend money and not to go premium is one person's advice, not a universal truth. We have many customers who buy stuff from us, and have a great Second Life.

All I was doing was providing an different opinion, based on my own experiences. There are other business owners who feel the same way.

Is there room for improvement? Yes, absolutely - there are some major issues that should be addressed. But making statements like some of those in this thread I find a bit unbalanced.

Not shutting down the grid one day a week is a huge improvement for us because it means another day that we can do business. I'm sure other business owners feel the same way - the outcry for not shutting down was huge, at the time.

SL is not going to hell in a handbasket, in my opinion.

It is true, that where it is deserved, I post the ramifications of LL's actions to the community. When a major step forward is taken, and that can be simply communicating with the community, I post congratulations. I am not a sooth sayer.

With what I posted regarding the, logging in and finding all my store items are set full perms, situation, was more poinient towards long term issues. Imagine what would have been the situation if I had not logged in within an hour of the rollback and found all our TV/Players set full perms, but had gone on vacation? The Net effects on my business would have been huge, BUT.... as full perms TV/Players were now out there, that would also effect other business's doing much the same thing, also feeling that effect.

I'm 'just' talking TV/Players here, some of which are the most powerful media technology to enter SL. Extend that to other areas that can be effected and you have an economy collapse. One word that shakes the SL business community 'CopyBot'. LL knew of its potential 6-12 months before its emergence but ingorned its potential as 'low risk'. Look at the devistation it has caused.

There are fundemental issues with this platform, that the vast majority of the community have been shouting from the LL rooftops for years..... Stability and Security.
Stability is something that has been improved in small steps. I admit security, is a global issue with not just SL but in RL. For the longest time, SL has been an encapsulated platform (one way in, one way out).. I have to wonder what happens when the doors open and link to Global access. Unless your IP rights are attached/linked to the CreditCard/Paypal disciplines and security layers, none of us stand a chance.

I want you to know---from someone who's been around in one form or another since the betas, that this has been going on for five solid years...

It has always been the case that Second Life is completely broken, and that they coded themselves into a corner ages ago that they're all too "invested in" to even attempt to back out of. That's just horrific project management and software architecture--and unfortunately, since they're so far down this broken road...

It will *never* be fixed. Keep that in mind.

Gwolf... I say we "CALL" LL on this so call bullshit of an "Security" update... read my post here
/353/40/285822/2.html#post2172643

I am so sick of this as many are. and to think of all the NEW (not alts) coming into Sl and seeing all this shit that they are not aware of. OMFG! LL needs to wake up for sure!

I WAS on 1.19(5) Until this morning.. was FORCED to 1.20.17 and it sucks philips and torleys ass all over it. Search didnt work (*I* fixed that), Sounds didnt work (*I* fixed that). and no, if I can do it, so can you. I am like and worse then Gwolf here. I am sick of helping people for free just because they cannot PLAY with the viewers and they WANT all this pretty shit. Children.. omg.

And this is worse then SL ???? Please explain YOUR point here..

we get that here or most/some do.

again.. and your point is?

........ send all of us 3k EACH then if you think this is the best place to "play".. after all.. its just L$ (Linden money) not real money.. send away baby... Im wating............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. thought so

Not EVERYONE makes a living (RL) here like some do, or try to do either. So, yes, those trying to make a living here are 1) stressed, 2) have to learn to deal with it, and 3) let things pass and hope that things get better.

That is my point... I do work full time in SL, I made the transition in April this year. Having been here in SL for the past 4+ years, I have seen a lot of things come and go. What is unacceptable is the levels of distruption on a daily basis. It would 'seem' that everyday there is a raft of things being 'fixed'.
I accept that upgrading the core engine to Havoc4 and introducing Mono, is always going to be an ardous time, however, neither are new technologies, yet seem to have caught LL with their pants down. I have never seen so many updates, rollbacks, restarts, patches being done on such a continous basis. I'm not talking days, or weeks here, I'm talking months.

This issue exists because LL got so far behind with keeping things under control, that they are fire fighting now. Anyone else get spammed with 'Connecting to in-world voice'....'connected' every 5 seconds, only to find it doesnt work? This happened when LL took 'control' over the VIOP servers from the creators.
With many individuals developing stable clients, being unuseable when LL decide we need yet another client version, moves the goalposts at such a rate, they cannot keep their versions compatible.

Again yesterday, after another set of restarts, perms were altered on many of our products, including the 1,000's of TV/Player units we sell. Not because the product is faulty, but because the products loose their identities (creator, owner and date aquired), this results in not even me (the creator) can gain control over simple things such as NoteCards. The only resolution is to delete the orginal unit purchased and supply a replacement from my inventory. No mean feat when their are a large range of styles and 1,000's of historic customers (nearly 2 years).

Some of the current issues are historicaly, been 'fixed' and continously reappear (ghosting prims being one, failed to rez object, tp's not working 'offline, please try later', loggin failed, cannot resolve the DNS to SL, chat lag, group chat failing), none of which gives anyone confidence that there is any progress, simply playing catchup with upgrades that should have been done long ago. Anyone wondering why LL are about to employ another 67 people?

For those that are sceptical about the future of the independent providors of the OpenSim platform, you may have heard that Central Grid has been bought out. The whole system is being migrated to new servers, bugs that are plauging SL, are being fixed. I'm not advertising this company, or any other for that matter, my point being, LL will soon find themselves in a reversal of roles.

Yep sooner or later LL is going to have to bite the bullet and do something to reduce all the bandwith required for SL, some sort of permanent texture caching system on our harddrives or install a default set of textures for wall, floors etc that we try to use for say 50% of our builds. And of course we'll squeel like stuck pigs. Better off perhaps just starting again with a new company name and getting it right learning the lessons from here what not to do, none of the opposition would do it the same as we have done.

LOL.. I already went down that road on another thread with someone who is an 'expert', telling me I was foolish to even consider a 'standard texture bank' in our caches. However, with the ability to upload and use millions of textures, there is some merit for that, unless LL get smart and maybe introduce a avatar/client limit for storage on the system, say 50mb's or less. That way people wont upload a 1024x1024 PNG32 texture for a door knob.

You know, admittedly I use a very narrow band of services in SL. I pretty much never buy prims or rez stuff or script anything or use voice. What I do is teleport, transfer money, buy and sell land and IM people a lot. I mean, really a lot. With that said my experience of SL has been light years worth of improvement over the last 6 months. I very very rarely crash anymore, I can't remember the last time and I've often get 2 or 3 viewers open at the same time.

I won't go through a list of problems I've experienced in my couple of years of being in SL but I can tell you for sure 90% of them have vanished. Pretty much what we're looking at now is features that I wish worked differently instead of things that are flat out broken.

WRT opensim. Opensim is dead to me and dead to 90% of the creators in SL. And it will continue to be dead until it solves the money problem. Without money the whole of opensim is just a cute pointless game. Games are fun, don't get me wrong but they're not the micro business platform that SL is and that's what really makes SL tick

Their primary focus is to socialize and have fun? Sounds great to me! But then, I remember Usenet and the pre-commercialized WWW with fondness.

Don't get me wrong. I'm one of those land barons everyone loves to hate, so obviously I have nothing against doing commerce in SL. I suppose I just miss the days when I was on SL to play.

For small values of "most".

*snort*

LL use Squid internally for caching.

Here's how Squid stores cached files:

It takes the URL, and generates a hexadecimal file name based on the URL. The first few characters from the file name are used to create a little directory tree, so a file called "8F01792D" would be found in "/var/squid/cache/8F/01/8F01792D". When you make a request through a squid cache, it takes the URL, generates this filename, opens it, and checks the header to see if it matches... if it does, it just returns the file.

This is what happens when you request an asset from a sim, or a sim requests an asset from the asset server. It's fast enough for the LL servers to do this, it's fast enough for your local computer to do it as well.

There's no reason the texture cache couldn't be implemented this way, without any "virtual file system" front end, especially since textures are already well-distributed hexadecimal file names they can easily store them as something like "cache/textures/55/0e/84/00/550e8400-e29b-41d4-a716-446655440000.png".

No more scaling problem, no more 1GB limit, no more need to agressively discard cache entries when you teleport...