I know its alpha software and all...

But when will we see some fixes? I mean, there are a few things even I could probably fix given an hour or two with the code, like the floating text bug.

So, what is the current status on the alpha client? Do we get fixes someday soon?

All we know is that Icculus is working on the client again. I asked him on the status via email a week ago, but he didn't want to comment any other than what he has written on his homepage.

http://icculus.org/

Look for Icculus finger info and go back in the archives.

Maybe one of the lindens can tell us what has been done so far since he refuses to do so.

Here is one:

http://icculus.org/cgi-bin/finger/finger.pl?user=icculus&date=2006-06-24&time=20-40-51

Quote:

Second Life:
Cleaning up the dependency hell. Usually I work on games that have one or
two dependencies (SDL, OpenAL, maybe a statically linked libpng or
whatever), but Second Life has quite a pile of them, some of which have
fairly complex dependencies of their own (Mozilla, anyone?) and many that
depend on each other (all projects grow until they reference zlib, I swear).

Fortunately, working on Google Earth, also a bit of a middleware magnet,
taught me a lot about how to manage this sort of thing. Tapdancing around
misconfigurations and symbol clashes and unnecessary dependencies (oh my!)
is really a science...or a black, unholy art. If you ever have to make this
happen yourself, my best advice is this: automate the hell out of it. Write
a big shell script that builds (and rebuilds, and rebuilds, and rebuilds...)
every third party library from scratch. This is both because you won't
remember how you did it in six months when you need to change something, and
because you won't remember how you did it in five minutes when you are
iterating yet again to tweak a piece of the build. In some cases I adopted
the Gentoo Portage mentality (build to a temporary --prefix, then copy the
bits you actually care about from the installed image), and in some cases I
wrote a simple shell script that explicitly compiles each file the way I
want it, bypassing the autotools badness. Time spent on this in the past
week: pretty much every waking hour, minus the COD2 issues above. For all
the effort, progress is really incremental (especially when you find out
your 4-in-the-morning typo makes the Mozilla build die yet again, 30 minutes
into the run...how painful!)

... end of quote ...


I don't get the feeling, that Secondlife Linux will go Beta any time real soon...

It is getting disheartening to the point that I'm pretty much certain that this bug in Wine will get fixed first and render the native Linux client all but moot. I don't want to go to using Wine, because the client works so much more smoothly native and there's nothing to say that the SL+Wine combination won't break every other release (of either SL or Wine) which a native client isn't subject to.

This despite a user community here that certainly could have fixed up the following bugs if given even nominal access to the code (i.e. only select chunks of it) through an NDA.

Memory detection - System
Memory detection - Graphics Card (admittedly minor, since we all get around this with settings.ini/xml)
Copy and Paste system hooks
Floating text bug

Possibly far far more involved... likely far from trivial?:
Better OpenGL support (shiny, etc.)

With the exception of that last item, I'd suspect (rightly or wrongly) that all of those are relatively trivial to code. If the internal coding practices at LL are anything approaching sane, those items are probably well apart from code that'd be more "dangerous" to expose us to, such as asset/object management, client/server communications et. al.

I suspect that items 1 through 3 on the list I gave above are bits of code that are OS specific in each client. Seems like they've not even really been given any attention to speak of in the Linux client yet. In the previous sentence, "yet" spans six or more months and close to ten version iterations of SL, during which it has amassed an impressive list of new features and probably somewhere north of one hundred bugs fixed.

Despite all of this, my personal frustrations would be ameliorated with improved communication from Icculus/the Lindens. Blog that stuff! Ask us for moral support! Anything.

In alpha, a program is still mutating rapidly, adding and shedding new features, bugs, quirks, weaknesses and strengths. Either it begins ascending towards beta/release land, or it declines into oblivion. The SL Linux client has not been doing either. We have a the Win/MacOS/Standard client with certain added bugs. It has tracked that standard with depressing reliability.

We have, in effect, a buggy release client and not an alpha at all.

One thing I'd like that'd improve things immensely: In lieu of actually going to the effort of properly detecting system memory, I'd love the option to set main memory though settings.ini/xml. It would render the Linux client so much more useful. Yes, I know people could set it higher than their actual system memory and make their system crawl like a corpulent badger from overuse of the swap file/partition, but the option ought to default to unused, leaving it only to people like us who need it.

-Kel

I've always sworn that I'd switch to Linux as my operating system if I could get Photoshop CS running adequately in VMware. Despite being a tiny bit laggy, I'm Photoshopping away, and accessing SL via Ubuntu, and the alpha client, or Wine, which paints my avies red and chalky with any transparencies on their clothing layers. My point, which is admittedly slow in coming, is that I'm not at all the Linux expert, or really, a computer expert at all. I'm savvy, compared to a member of the general public, but not likely in relation to any of the forum readers.

I think I'm going to represent a growing segment of the populace, however. The cost of Windows, and the cost of doing business with a company that's intrusive and demanding, has grown too high. Mister Gates' products, while brilliant, are about as buggy as this SL release. My computer runs fabulously with Linux, and add that to the lesser security risks, and it's all peachy, BUT I've been considering actually spending money for Windows just to run this game well!

I spend many hours a day in Second Life, for better or worse, and the client, while running smoothly, is sort of like dwelling in a survivalist's remote Montana cabin.. adequate, but not comfortable! And Wine.. well, if we're in SL, we're most likely vain (does it get much more trivial than purchasing clothes and skins for your pixelated alter ego?), and having our clothing layers mucked up with the Wine transparency bug is even worse a problem to contend with.

I've been bummed.

I agree with Kel, though. If I could hear something about progress made, or even what's being addressed, I'd feel so much better. Nothing like a little communication to bestow a ray of hope into any blossoming relationship. (Isn't that what Dr. Phil says.. or might say, I mean, if I watched him?)

Please LL, or Mistah Icculus, the virtual step-kids of PC patronage implore you to hear our cries!

- Strix

Money that, if not sent to Microsoft's coffers, might be sent to Linden Labs for some shiny new L$!

Which LL can then use to to pay Icculus more handsomely for all the hard work that I'm sure has been going on behind the scenes on this stuff.