Another weird one

Hi folks,

Last week, all ok. This week, a strange new phenomena. I go dancing quite a lot, but when I click on the blue male pose ball and my girlfriend clicks on the pink, I see myself as moving ever so slightly, and my partner not at all, she appears to be sitting on an invisible chair in front of me. However, my partner reports that she sees us both dancing, no problem.

I have tried different dance partners, and different types of dance pose balls, and different sims, all producing the same effect.

However, if I choose the pink pose ball and my partner the blue, then I see both of us dancing, as she does.

What the hell is going on now?

Rock

Oh, and I have also tried removing all animation overrides, and all other HUDS and non-essential attachments (but I have not used any new ones since last week anyway).

Rock

Yep it's happened to me on a number of occasions and I now put it down to lag. When it first happened I used to keep standing up and clicking again to no avail. My partner would either say that I was sat in mid-air when I saw us both dancing or I saw myself sat down whilst they saw us both dancing. After a while when it happened again I gave up caring as long as my partner (and I forgot to mention other dancers see the same anomoly described above in either way round) was happy then I wasn't going to whinge about it. Then after I had left it alone for 10 minutes all of a sudden I started dancing normally or saw my partner dancing normally.

So now I would ask you to try the same and just leave it and see if it does correct after a while and confirm my theory. I think the longest I've had to wait is nearly 15 minutes and on average when it does happens about 5 minutes.

This has happened to me before too. I couldn't see any dances that I was doing, but other people could. It might be lag. I went to my gestures folder once and activated all of them including the dance ones, and I think that solved that problem. Sometimes when I'm lagging I'll try to sit on something, and I will end up in a dark scary place with a deformed or spinning avatar. If I wait a few seconds it usually fixes and I will appear sitting normally, lol.

What types of computers do yo uand your girlfriend have? also, what types of connections?

I've seen people using laptops perform this way. (they having the laptop)...while they see everything fine, the other person sees them sitting or standing still

No idea what my g/f has, but I have a pentium 4, 3.2GHz, 1Gb RAM, twin NVIDEA 6600 graphics cards, 10Mb broadband.

But like I said, no problems ever with this dance prob, until this week.

A real baffler. Particularly the swapping of dance poseballs always curing it, but not when we switch back to correct coloured balls.

Glad I'm not alone in noticing this though.

Rock

It may have something to do with the change of priority that the client uses since the last update, script running is lower down the priority list now by all accounts. As the server becomes under greater stress, down they go again. Some dance balls use a 'syncronising' script that keeps each client updated and in sync, in most cases resetting the animations jointly to the same starting point.

This is a known bug that has been around for months. Clearing cache and/or relogging sometimes helps.

Thanks Sylvia, I'll try clearing the cache. Still can't understand why this has only begun happening this week, as I dance EVERY week, and no probs before, which I would have thought would have happened to me before now if it has been around for months. But if it is a known bug, why doesn't it then affect everyone?

Rock

russian roulette.

I've seen this before. It happens a LOT to me.
Perhaps it would help you to understand the "behind the scene" of why this happens.

When you get on a poseball, you are "Sitting".

Every time you use the 10 o'clock position on the pie menu to "get in, on, or use" some object, dance pad, chair, or vehicle.. you are, in point of fact, "becoming seated on the object"

But, what happens is, a script says "hey wait.. someone sat on me". The script then looks at you, and stops your "sit" animation, and then starts a new animation or pose on your avatar. Now that's the easy part. It sets an animation flag on your agent.

Avatars are animated on the client-side.

Each agent in the vicinity that can "see" your avatar, then gets the notice that your pose has changed. Each client then asks the server for the animation file (bvh), so it can animate your avatar. The server then downloads the files to each of the clients. On a broadband connection, the bvh file that is transferred takes only a very tiny amount of time.

Now, during that download.. it's possible to have a lag spike, or a few lost packets.. the file could get damaged as it's downloaded to your client, or it could be incomplete. And on rare occasions, you may get served the wrong file. (only in very strange circumstances does this happen).

What's happening therefore, is the person who sees you sitting, or just standing there.. either hasn't received the notice that your animation has changed, or else they haven't received a usable version of the animation file to apply to your avatar.

You may also notice this when TPing or entering into areas with camping chairs. You may find several avatars standing in the "default T pose" for a few seconds, until the animation fully downloads to your client, and then suddenly the avatars all sit down.

Think of it like that "one image" on a website that fails to load for you. It's there.. it's fine if you reload the page.. but you got a messed up copy or a timeout or something the first time.

You may be seeing more of this this week, due to high load in the places you are dancing.. or generally higher traffic. Perhaps there are issues in your ISP's lines.. there are so many reasons why this could happen.

Relogging, clearing cache, TPing out and back in.. sometimes just unsitting for a minute then jumping back on.. any of these might work. Switching places with your partner for a few seconds could also help. (triggering you to download their animation, or them to download yours.)

Many thanks Winter, that answers my question completely.