Vote for prop 700 - No More Features !

I haven't been able to play SL since the 1.5 - 1.6 transition, and this one made it worse. I've tried it on 5 pc's, having bought two new ones since then. It's equally crap on all of them. I've tried everything you can think of and probably some you haven't.

Can I be fucked off yet?

Sorry Kris, I sympathise with your situation. All I can say is my SL is working great. If it is working for me and my 3 computers and a fair number of other people are also reporting the game is working really well for them too then SL isn't so totally borked as to wreck what has been done in 1.7 and send LL into some sort of cocooning mode, making only changes that is on some sort of "approved" list.

By your own admission it would presumably take a return to 1.4 to get you going again and we can all pretty much agree that would suck greatly for just about everyone. As for your problems, here is a solution I bet you haven't even thought of, ship me your computer. I guarantee I can get it to run exactly like my computers plus I have a known, good net connection. You get it back and it does the same thing then you know for a fact it is something between the back of your computer and the server in San Fransisco.

On second thought, don't send it to me because of how abusive you have been to people who have tried to help you in the past; it would be a bad idea for me to even piss on your computer if it were on fire from the looks of it. No good deed goes unpunished or something like that.

Personally, I dont recall being abusive to people who try to help me. I guess I do get annoyed when people treat me like an idiot and Lindens come along and try to tell you its just about anything your end they can think of. But thats probably because I used to build pc's and networks from scratch for a living before I moved into application development. I like to think I have some idea what I'm doing.

But yes, I accepted that neither LL nor anyone else can help me a long time ago. Which is why I all but gave up SL. Every time they add new features, I just get more and more problems, so while I acknowledge that they're fun for those that can use it, it doesn't help me one bit. I'd just like to be able to play. Even if we were back to a 1.0 feature set.

You work in application development? Cool, what do you do exactly?

EXACTLY!!! I am so tired of all the enabling BS about how the poor Linden's work so hard to create this wonderful toy for us and we should all just understand how fragile the precious technology is. Excuse me - this is a service for which I pay good RL $$ and I don't think its unreasonable to ask for a stable platform of basics that runs at a decent framerate when my system more than adequately meets the minimums. I own a RL business myself - if my products worked (or didn't work) like this I would quickly be out of business. My customers expect the things I sell them to work when they buy them and continue working a week. a month or a year from now. Just because this has to do with technology doesn't mean I don't have the right to expect the same service. UPgrades are supposed to be just that. Not bad engineering that constantly needs to be fixed and refixed. I totally agree that the energy should go into making this thing run right for everyone before adding any more gadgets, bells & whistles. I also think that you shouldn't have to have a state of the art, less than 3 months old, custom system to play. Having "upgrgades" that just obsolete your system aren't "up" grades either.

I write bespoke financial applications for customers of Lloyds of London. Yes, if you thought application development was boring, this is about as high on the boring scale as application development gets

No I think that's really cool There are hardly any women in IT jobs in the UK, let alone development, and yet you have a really, really cool development job. So what database does your stuff use? I hear all the banks use SyBase... Do you work in C++?

Just to say it... I disagree with just about everything ya said here. LOL. But that's OK... I respect your point of view, regardless.

I'm glad your machine is working with SL just fine. There's always an exception to the rule and maybe you have an exceptionally clean connection or who knows what. Hard to tell. But with just about everyone I speak to on a daily basis-- things are not working fine. While I agree that users should definitely check their systems to make sure they're in prime operational condition... my system *is* in prime operational condition-- and I experience problems on a daily basis on multiple sims. I have a dual-core, fairly fresh, nothing-special Windows XP installation with a nice 1 gig ram, 256meg 6600 PCIx graphics card-- and 1.7 is not anywhere near as smooth as 1.6. I'm a computer consultant... and consultant/tech friends of mine report the same experiences. Oh, I also have a fantastic cable connection that runs 3 times faster than a T1... so I'm good there too.

As far as taking a newbie off the street and having him program "new features" to get used to the system... I must wonder how is he supposed to program new features unless he is well-acquainted with how the current system works? Sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. No... you "ease" him into it by giving him small debugging problems and letting him work in slowly and get used to existing code. You don't put an apprentice to work right away building... you have him do small tasks to help him learn the trade.

I have no doubt that LL is doing "the best they can" to try and fix the grid. I sympathize. However, the question is, are they doing the best that can be done? Folks have argued with LL for ages over their apparently unqiue way of running a computer service company. Now admittedly, LL has the right to run their company the way they want to-- even if that means throwing decades of established computer practice out the door. But clients are paying their rent-- and also have rights. Linden Lab can ignore client needs and feedback (which I certainly hope they never do.. but alas.. they do.. LOL)... that is their right. It is the client's right to close up and go with another service any time such becomes available (which it will, probably sooner than later).

So the bottom line, all the above totally ignored-- there are certain ways to do things that have been established in the computer field for years and years-- because they work. You fix bugs first. You satisfy customer needs first... then customer wants. Adding sequens to your clothing may be pretty-- but it's of little value when the seams are ripping apart.

A message above put it well: it took AGES for LL to fix an extremely obvious ghosting problem. And now what? Avatars are able at times to walk around the grid totally invisible. Now that's fun.

All that anyone is saying is that bells and whistles, additions and doodads, might need to be placed on the back-burner while bug-fixing and providing users with essential land management tools are focused upon. Because if bugs aren't fixed... if we cannot manage our lands properly... the system will never be anything more than mal-functioning bling.

Bingo. Thanks for putting this in RL english language. That's the hard-core, bottom-line situation. I hate to be unsympathetic... but you know folks... Linden Lab is NOT "leading-edge technology" like everyone claims. 3-D virtual reality user-definable systems have been around for YEARS. 3-D VR games have been around for years. THERE IS NOTHING NEW HERE. Agreed, LL's method of presentation is a little different, but hey, USERS have been designing UNREAL worlds ever since the game first came out... and they make SL look like tinkertoys.

So as Asia said, if you're going to charge heavy-duty prices, stop making excuses. If you're not good enough to do the job, get out of the field. Let someone else do it. Sell the code for a bundle, retire and let the pros take over.

Otherwise, as Asia said (and I can't resist repeating it once more for posterity), "I am so tired of all the enabling BS about how the poor Linden's work so hard to create this wonderful toy for us and we should all just understand how fragile the precious technology is. Excuse me - this is a service for which I pay good RL $$ and I don't think its unreasonable to ask for a stable platform."

That really cuts to the chase. Because last time I looked, my landgroup is paying LL $10,000 this year for imaginary land on an imaginary world... and I think we have a right to expect the platform to start working for once. I've been here for a year and some improvements have been made in some areas (for example, we don't crash about a zillion times a day any more)... but I think a year is enough time that most professional companies would have already ironed out the major bugs... certainly the ones that are causing grid-wide problems.


PS--Suggestion to Linden Lab: STOP SELLING NEW SIMS. Yeah, stop it. Focus your time on fixing what you've got. Clean up the system as it stands. If people want to buy a sim, let them offer $$$ for existing sims. Forget adding to the system any further until your current system runs clean. THEN put ads in the New York Times for new members.


OK Way... bad dog. No fair using common sense...

I'm not fielding this one...

I very rarely comment about these things, but this sorta stuff is appearing so much in the forums these days I just couldn't resist this time. I find all this demanding that LL do things the way we want them to rather amusing. If someone owned a RL business and their products sucked then yes, you're right, they'd probably go out of business. But the question is why? Well if a product sucks people stop buying it. Company has no profits... company goes under. Now if Second Life as a product sucks so much then shouldn't you show your distaste by not using it? And if it is really as bad as some people like to make it out to be then why is there over 50,000 people using it?

A product does well if it's the best in the market at what it does. Personally I think SL craps all over anything out there that could even be put into the same category (and when it comes down to it there's very little that really fits into the same category anyway). We can bitch and moan about what LL hasn't done to make our world absolutely perfect but don't forget if it wasn't for them we wouldn't have that world at all. I wonder if the only reason people complain so much is because they know there's nothing better out there atm so pushing LL is the only way they can go. I'm a programmer too, so I certainly understand the complexity of what they've created, and although I don't totally agree with everything they do, LL has been able to make something unique and I for one think they've done a pretty good job of it so far.

Not sure if anyone has ever looked at it like that, but I certainly don't recall reading anything in the forums along those lines. But anyway.... it's just my $L0.02. Everyone's entitled to their own opinon.

You have a duel core? Duel core what? Have you tried setting affinity with that duel core because if you don't you are going to get the exact problems you are describing. SL isn't quite right for duel core processors yet and it is not surprising since so few players use them. If it is an AMD duel core, you need to get the latest AMD CPU driver from the AMD website as there is a problem with the current distributed drivers and most all games. To set affinity, open the task manager (control+alt+delete) and go to "processes" , right click on "Secondlife.exe" and click "set affinity". you will need to choose a processor so uncheck either the 0 or the 1. I know because I had this exact problem with my duel core AMD and it took the Lindens pointing out websites showing others having widespread problems with the duel cores. Once I got my house in order, SL has run the best it ever has for me.

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html

/111/d6/67738/1.html

I would keep an eye on the AMD website for patches. Apparently other
games have similar problems on the AMD dual core.

http://forums.amd.com/lofiversion/index.php/t54395.html
http://forums.amd.com/index.php?showtopic=53288&st=0






I dunno, you will have to ask LL why they do what they do but that is how they have explained their "modus opperendi" and why new features become implemented ahead of bug fixes. Made sense to me.



Woo I'm convinced.. you all win. I bow to your obviously superior computer-fu.

I have been through quite a few updates, 1.3 - 1.7 and they all have the same enivitable result. They have problems. It can take weeks to fix them all and some bugs they can't fix because it breaks things even worse. It took a month to get 1.6 usable for most players, all the while the torches and pitchforks came out decreeing LL as agents of satin and the update was the worst ever. The biggest problem people were having at the time was the need to uninstall SL and reinstall the full version as the update corrupted some files on some machines.

I'm happy to say that with 1.7 LL did actualy fix one of my long standing bugs that was driving me absolutely bonkers. But they fixed it so i say keep 1.7 (and why didn't we have a version 1.666) Just so everyone knows LL has 33 devs.

An update to my previous post, Nvidia has released a new driver October 25, it fixes the affinity problem with the duel core processors from what I can tell. Actually upped my framerates a couple percent too. Recommend everyone with an Nvidia to update, especially if you have a duel core processor.

I use an Intel dual-core, and it works great. SL runs faster than it did under a single processor. My dual-core ran 1.6 just fine (well, as fine as 1.6 could have been run).

However, just to be open-minded, I tried "setting affinity" as you recommended (hey, anything is worth a shot). SL slowed down TREMENDOUSLY by choosing only one processor. So SL appears to work just fine with Intel dual-core. Yes, I did download the latest Nvidia drivers too. Made no difference that I can discern.

To be honest, I did all this just so I could say I did... but from the start didn't really expect it to improve performance. Why? Because other users with top-quality computers who do not have dual core are reporting the same things that I and many others are reporting.

Truthfully folks, AGAIN... these problems are not client side. I get so tired of people blaming the end users that I'm about ready to slug someone. We just got through fighting a major battle with LL (and others) regarding just such things in two threads. All through those threads, people made the same claim.. CLIENT CONTENT.. CLIENT SIDE, etc etc etc. Well, we blew those claims out of the water. LL finally admitted it: There are server/programming problems. It's just that simple.

Can you imagine what would happen if Atari tried making the excuses that we hear daily from people regarding LL and SL? People would just plain stop buying their games.

I didn't just pull my computer out of a WalMart Hewlett Packard box. I'm a consultant. I'm not a newbie. Neither are my friends with whom I discuss performance issues in SL. There was a time-- April 2005-- when our sim was running 100% peachy, no lag problems, absolutely wonderful. That changed overnight-- and has never been right since.

Yes, there can be client side performance issues. Yes, there can be badly-behaved client content. That is not likely the case when on sim after sim after sim on a grid-wide basis, people with various computer configurations, both amateur and pros... are experiencing exactly the same symptoms of computer performance. Client-side equipment problems are absolutely not the case when LL themselves admit that 1.7 has some performance issues. The fact that some people don't experience such things just proves that there are almost always exceptions to the rule. It's good to try and figure out why they're not experiencing problems, but that may not be traceable. A user here or there who is experiencing no problems is a quirk, not a sim-wide sample of evaluative data (and maybe that user is having problems and just doesn't recognize them as such. To be honest, I've spoken to many users who wouldn't know performance issues if it bit them in the tail. Kind of like those folks over the past several years who swear that Windows is the best OS on the face of the planet. They just don't know. LOL).

When people are doing just fine with 1.6 and then loading 1.7 crashes them to the ground-- and totally uninstalling SL and reinstalling it doesn't help-- and when LL states "Yes, we're trying to fix the crashing problems"... that is server/programming issues, not someone's computer or graphics driver. So people, please, LL has already admited (and we appreciate that) that 1.7 has problems. Most of us are willing to give them a few weeks to tackle the major ones. So let's stop pretending that 1.7 is fine... and stop telling users that it just has to be their computer that's experiencing problems... because that is just not the case.

Yeah. I will agree that there is some NICE stuff in 1.7. I absolutely don't want to seem anti-1.7. I love being able to mass-move selected inventory items. There are things that work better... and it seems at this time that even a major land-calculation bug that once was a sim destroyer might have been fixed after more than a year of being unresolved (dunno for sure... more testing still to come). So kudos to LL for all that.

The 2 main problems that I'm noticing at this time is extreme "lag" on data retrieval and "movement" glitches. Data lag shows up in late-delivery on rezzing inventory to ground, in displaying textures, in chat going across to other users. Did not have these problems in 1.6 (at least, not to this extent). When I stand in front of a texture for 10 minutes waiting for it to load and it doesn't.. yup, there are some data bottlenecks somewhere-- serious ones. Can't run a 3-D VR system without textures. (Can you imagine playing Quake or Unreal or Half Life or any other VR game with textures taking 5-10 minutes to rez? No way. You'd be dead if they took 3 seconds to rez). So that needs fixed.

The movement glitches might be related... flying along and suddenly being shoved backwards 5-10m or more.. and movement coming to a noticeable halt every 5-10 seconds or so. That definitely was not present in 1.6. In 1.6 a person might lag to syrup... but they didn't "bump" along on a recognizable pattern basis. I figure LL is probably working on that one pretty hard.

But like you, I've found some nice stuff in 1.7 that I'm really glad to see there.

watching 1.7 roll out...and continue to roll out (i think we're already up to 1.7.3 at least), i cannot help but come to the conclusion that linden labs has serious flaws in its' quality assurance process.

having spent seven years as a software quality assurance consultant to several fortune 100 companies, some things jump out at me:

- if i were in charge of a major sofware upgrade that required several critical patches within 2 weeks of its release i would have been fired. regression test important unchanged functionality, thoroughly test new functionality, with emphasis on application stability. bugs will escape the qa process but this approach will minimize the likelyhood of critical bugs escaping from development/testing into production.

- configuration counts more than it should. reading through the forums and seeing how many problems seem to be related to the users' individual configuration settings (of which there are tens of thousands of permutations), i wonder if a. linden labs tests sufficiently across multiple user platform configurations (processor, ram, video and connection) and sl settings; b. sl should simplify things, at least temporarily, until they can stabilize the system. yeah..."open" beta testing is nice but that method doesn't always have specific test cases/conditions, which can leave gaps in test coverage and thusly allow bugs into production...

- who's got our back? the projects i worked on ultimately answered to their stakeholders and sponsors, the people who were going to use the application under development and were the ones paying the bills. they partnered with the application development team to determine what was most important to the user community. granted, the sl user community is larger and more geographically widespread than the ones i dealt with, but i don't get a sense that the users are getting enough representation for their taxation. i could be wrong, but that's the sense i get from reading thru the forums.

i could probably list more but i'm out of time right now...but who is holding linden labs accountable for quality? in the private sector, you get fired if you don't produce a quality deliverable on time and within budget...is sl losing customers because of it's poor quality? what other recourse do we have besides quitting sl altogether?

Im fairly new to SL, joined on the day 1.7 was release. I personally dont really have problems ALL the time. Yes occasionally I do have some issues with lag, what I call warping (ie: flying along and my AV jumping back 10m or so, but ive noticed that its because im flying along and I run into a prim that hasnt rezzed yet so i look like i keep flying then the prim rez'es and i jump back to where i should have hit it lol). The oddest thing I've noticed however is that I can be playing tringo with 20 or 30 people around and have no problems, and then later TP to an island somewhere to shop and there be no one on the island and have so much lag that i cant walk 10m in 10 minutes, or on the Tringo note only have 5 people playing and the game halt due to lag. So, I just go along assumeing its my machine, or my network more than it is SL.

Sure, theres probably lag due to the client to due to server side bugs etc. But I have full confidence in the Lindens to fix things, and know they are doing what they can. Why cause they actually talk to us. I came from another online game(maybe SL isnt a game but for lack of better term in this case) where the operators there didnt really seem to give a crap about what their customers thought. When they did ask, half the time they didnt even respond after asking or they would and would shoot down the majority of posts for the minority of posts. I think we have it good here in SL. I commend LL for doing things/running things the way they do. Whatever issues there are, Im sure they are working on it as fast as they can. Unlike that other game, I think LL honestly cares about its current customers, cause that is what we are is customers, and they listen to us.

That being said constructive critisim is all ways a good thing. But searching through the forums i see constant posts saying exactly the same thing, and I see the same names makeing posts. (no offense intended here at all) IMHO, that constitutes more complaining than CC, that or post counting.

I say we all give LL a big pat on the back for the work they have accomplished. Yeah sure its frustrateing when you really really really looked forward to doing something, but cant due to server side, client side, or user side lag/just plain issues. But thats life, SL and RL. Shit happens we learn to deal with it and go with the flow. Dont stop provideing feedback this is just my opionions. But I think LL gets more complaints than they do compliments (hehe dont we all), just imagine if we all got more compliments than complaints.

I have to agree with the main premise of this thread: The Lindens need to work out all of the coding bugs of that last major release before it goes and loads up a new release with a bunch of added features.

Instead of fixing the problems, they have only exacerbated them and have caused all of us major headaches. I would like to go a week without having to deal with the headaches LL causes by "fixing" things that aren't broken.

One big problem with any QA program is what works in testing often doesn't work when put out full scale. Keep in mind the only way to fully test a release on the grid is to, well.. put it on the grid. I am sure you guys would just love Sl being shut down for a week to do testing, although they don't have more than a hundred or so Linden testers so even then they aren't going to stress the grid and likely not find anything.

There is a long list of folks who did their best to help make 1.7 a better update, Lindens and residents. There is a list of resident testers under the 'About SecondLife' under the Help menu. I know I spent many hours in the preview and sent in several bug reports and it was through chatting with Viktor and Dan that the affinity and AMD driver problem was found which wasn't a probelm with SL.

If you have any specific suggestions on how to improve QA testing or you feel you are more qualified, LL is hiring and the Hotline forum is wide open.

And thanks to todays update my framerates went from a good 35fps in a sim with 14 avatars in it to a nice 41fps. I went to a sim with just a couple of avatars and I was getting over 60fps. Of course anything over 45 is a waste. 1.7.2 is sweet so far.

Headed 'blame these fuckers! not us!'?

actually, your impression of how testing occurs is slightly misguided. when software has to be deployed to a "live" productiton environment, it is tested in a discreet QA environment, usually configured as closely to the production environment as possible, which makes it entirely possible to achieve 75-95% test coverage, depending on certain business rules (sometimes there are things that can only be executed in a live, "production" environment).

actually, without going into a long, drawn-out explanation of software QA methods, including flowcharts and pie graphs in a pretty powerpoint presentation, i'll just say that you're wrong. the biggest problem with QA programs is usually time and the fact that QA is usually an afterthought in the software development process. additionally, as software and the environments in which it operates get more complex, the testing becomes more difficult and requires detailed planning by people who are experts in QA. most companies are just starting to realize this, only after millions of dollars in software product development has gone down the drain to failed projects.

not to be inflammatory but this just aint so...beta testing is called beta because it's the testing of what is at least the SECOND release of a product. the alpha was tested somewhere...and they didn't shut down the grid to do it...

sure, i'm standing on the sidelines and have only a small idea of how the guts and bolts of sl works, but i've seen the end results of poorly planned and executed software QA up close and personally, and sl appears to be another victim...

I would have no problems allocating 50-70 GB to the SL cache. I would personally like to see MUCH larger cache's and the option to mark areas we go to often to never be purged from the cache. The cache size should only be limited by user settings NOT by SL settings.

ps. my system has 2GB of physical system memory. I consider a 1 GB disk cache to be next to nothing.

Because:

1) LL does not have the technical capabilities to fix the bugs. Not that there are no good developers at LL but rather no lead developer who has the capabilities to figure out how to fix the bugs.

2) Philip is not interested, he is a "visionary". Vision is the future, new things, not past things like bugs.

So, give up prop 700, it can not make any difference.

Actually, when I read Cory's bio, I was stunned at how well qualified he is to lead development.

(You didn't think that Philip was the lead developer, did you?)