Vehicles vs. sim crossings, why it's so awful

[ellestones]

9 hours ago, animats said:

All excuses for Linden Labs not fixing the problem have thus been eliminated.

is this kinda statement that annoys people. Linden Lab don't have 'excuses' for why stuff doesn't get done.  What LL have is limited resources which they have to prioritise

is good that you are doing in-depth identification on the issues with sim crossings. And I am appreciative of you and everyone else who helps identify bugs

but yeah. You better to express yourself in a less hostile manner. Like "I have filed a JIRA on this latest discovery" and leave it at that

[animats]

54 minutes ago, ellestones said:

 You better to express yourself in a less hostile manner. Like "I have filed a JIRA on this latest discovery" and leave it at that

That's appropriate for a new minor problem. This has been a major unfixed problem for over ten years. Increased pressure on LL is required.

I'm a paying customer, paying for both premium and tier. I pay a few hundred dollars a year. I expect problems to get fixed. Us users have been cutting LL way too much slack on their software quality.

No AAA title would ship with a bug like this. If you shipped a MMO with a bug like this you'd be laughed at by the industry and the players. That has happened. For a much lesser bug than region crossings. Here's a history of canceled games from Blizzard. Entire teams of game developers have been fired when they couldn't get their game debugged.

Yes, SL is not a game. But new users compare it with modern games, and in comparison, it doesn't look good. Linden Labs as a company has not internalized that user tolerance for bugs and slow perfomance is far lower than it used to be.

Take a look at Fix PUBG. This game had enough bugs that the company behind it had to embark on a major, public campaign to bring it up to acceptable standards of performance. They have a web site just for the fix effort.

[ellestones]

1 minute ago, animats said:

They have a web site just for the fix effort.

so does LL have a web site for the fix effort. Is here: https://jira.secondlife.com/secure/Dashboard.jspa

[Parhelion Palou]

22 hours ago, animats said:

I'm a paying customer, paying for both premium and tier. I pay a few hundred dollars a year. I expect problems to get fixed. Us users have been cutting LL way too much slack on their software quality. 

I'm currently paying around $2800 per year and I figure I've paid LL around $28,000 over the past 12 years. I don't care if LL works on the region crossing problems, and I think I should get 9 votes against to your 1 vote for it. ? (I'd rather they get EEP online ASAP).

If LL made region crossings so smooth you didn't know you'd crossed regions, it wouldn't measurably affect retention. Not that many residents care, and virtual worlds are a niche product that a only small percentage of the populace will ever 'get'. Despite all the predictions made a decade or so ago, they'll never be mass market. Real life is far more interesting. (An apocalypse might help, but that's going a bit far.)

[animats]

As someone who goes to Server User Group each week, I see last names as the biggest item of interest. This week there was someone from the golf community who was very annoyed that some change had made golf balls behave slightly differently. Some weeks it's the sailing crowd, who get very unhappy about region crossing problems in the Blake Sea. Windlight/EEP comes up occasionally, as does animesh. Region crossing is the biggest bug/defect item, as opposed to new features. It's the most brutal immersion breaking bug regularly seen in SL. What else forces you to log out frequently?

One of the few articles about Second Life in recent years is "Returning to Second Life" on Ars Technica. They make a key point. People don't move around in SL like they used to:

"This is part of a larger issue that today’s Second Life citizens are struggling with just like their real-world counterparts: discovery and navigation have become hard in 2017. Iki Akari says that 10 years ago, “People would walk around and see what Second Life had to offer. Shopping was done primarily in ‘main stores,’ and the ability to meet other people exploring was a lot more easy than it is now.” Now, she says people buy their own land and stay in their own territory. It has become a more isolated experience."

It's subtle. But the effect of in-world travel being harder and teleports being easier means that people don't run into each other as much. Much of the population and much of the action is in isolated sims.

If you fully embrace that concept, you get Sansar. Which has about fifteen users at any one time. So that's the wrong way to go.

Region crossings need to be fixed because they glue the world together.

[ellestones]

6 hours ago, animats said:

One of the few articles about Second Life in recent years is "Returning to Second Life" on Ars Technica. They make a key point. People don't move around in SL like they used to:

"This is part of a larger issue that today’s Second Life citizens are struggling with just like their real-world counterparts: discovery and navigation have become hard in 2017. Iki Akari says that 10 years ago, “People would walk around and see what Second Life had to offer. Shopping was done primarily in ‘main stores,’ and the ability to meet other people exploring was a lot more easy than it is now.” Now, she says people buy their own land and stay in their own territory. It has become a more isolated experience."

It's subtle. But the effect of in-world travel being harder and teleports being easier means that people don't run into each other as much. Much of the population and much of the action is in isolated sims.

If you fully embrace that concept, you get Sansar. Which has about fifteen users at any one time. So that's the wrong way to go.

Region crossings need to be fixed because they glue the world together.

what the quoted part of the Ars Technica article neglects to mention was that back in 2005 the number of SL regions numbered in the 100s - all mainland and connected. When direct teleport came it opened up the pathway to private estates which quickly numbered in the 1000s

X connected mainland sims vs Y unconnected estate sims. The people vote with their money

vehicles in and of themselves are cool. In a previous life I was into vehicles big time. Should your investigations help to improve vehicle sim crossings I be quite pleased. I probably have another go at the Starchild Rally

if you ever do want to test stress levels and patience on sim crossings then have a go: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cliffoed/46/194/38

will be 5 years next January since some person who shall remain nameless completed this vehicle rally

 

Edited September 27, 2018 by ellestones
dwubble

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Parhelion Palou said:

If LL made region crossings so smooth you didn't know you'd crossed regions, it wouldn't measurably affect retention. 

I wonder about that. And I wonder if retention would improve if the general issue with SL's many broken and missing features were addressed more aggressively. There's also an assumption that SL needs to track (some segments of) gaming as tablestakes: if for example SL graphics falls too far behind, folks will abandon SL for sparklier pastures. I'm not sure that's true either.

For years some gamers have been fussing that what SL really needs are NPCs -- hence all the animesh excitement, I guess. Maybe that's important to attract users who might be retained a while. I have no idea if that will work.

Vehicles are "chicken-and-egg": not that many SL users are that into vehicles, but what would we expect while vehicles don't work that well? Would SL attract and retain a bunch more folks if vehicles were much better? To me, a 10% improvement in vehicles seems way more valuable than all the best any NPCs could ever hope to offer.

But that's quite possibly wrong, and in any case it's really up to marketing.

[animats]

8 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

I wonder about that. And I wonder if retention would improve if the general issue with SL's many broken and missing features were addressed more aggressively. There's also an assumption that SL needs to track (some segments of) gaming as tablestakes: if for example SL graphics falls too far behind, folks will abandon SL for sparklier pastures. I'm not sure that's true either.

For years some gamers have been fussing that what SL really needs are NPCs -- hence all the animesh excitement, I guess. Maybe that's important to attract users who might be retained a while. I have no idea if that will work.

Vehicles are "chicken-and-egg": not that many SL users are that into vehicles, but what would we expect while vehicles don't work that well? Would SL attract and retain a bunch more folks if vehicles were much better? To me, a 10% improvement in vehicles seems way more valuable than all the best any NPCs could ever hope to offer.

But that's quite possibly wrong, and in any case it's really up to marketing.

It's hard to tell how much effect it has on users. My point here, though, is that this is an area of SL that's badly broken. That's just not tolerated by today's gamers. Like it or not, future SL users are drawn partly from the online gamer population. SL dates from the era when users put up with far worse systems. (Remember the Blue Screen of Death from Windows XP?)

SL has a big sailing community, and they get out in the big world. I didn't really appreciate sailing in SL until a friend took me out on a good boat in the Blake Sea, and we sailed around quietly for an hour, as she made steering and sail changes and we chatted quietly. It's very relaxing.

Pilots are really frustrated by this. They cross so many regions. Kelly Shergood builds very elaborate helicopters that require real flying skills. Some are kitted out for emergency rescue missions. Such missions fail at region crossings, totally ruining elaborate roleplay scenarios.

The military battle people run into this. When you come out of your tank at a region crossing, you're dead. Or your ship goes out of control.

Drivers have constructed elaborate single-sim tracks that spiral up thousands of meters to work around the sim crossing problem. That's how much user effort has been invested to work around this bug.

Even the railroad people are frustrated. They can't run a reliable transportation system.

I do a Drivers of SL rally each week. About 50 start. Maybe half make it to the destination. This despite a HUD from Christi Charon which warns drivers about region corners.

All these users feel pain because LL won't fix bugs. Some give up and leave.

As a general rule in marketing, for each customer who complains about something, at least ten customers went away and will never come back.

[ellestones]

it may be that a totally seamless vehicle crossing won't come until UDP has been deprecated. LL are progressively working toward deprecating UDP. Is possible to write an own UDP-based transaction protocol, however I think that a HTTP-based protocol is maybe a better fit for sim crossing transactions

while everything you do to help identify issues with the current UDP-based protocol, which I encourage you to continue doing,  we may have to wait until then - for total no worry seamless

should a transaction protocol eventuate then will be possible with further work, for vehicles with multiple avatars seated to teleport. Stuff like starships entering and exiting sims via user-created wormholes, stargates, etc 

[Klytyna]

17 hours ago, animats said:

If you fully embrace that concept, you get Sansar. Which has about fifteen users at any one time. So that's the wrong way to go.

Project Stupid doesn't have 15 users because people can teleport from place to place rather than spending 20 mins walking on a prim road...

It has 15 users because its an unfinished Alpha test grade version of something that is inherently crap...

17 hours ago, animats said:

As someone who goes to Server User Group each week, I see

And that's why it is unwise to judge what "most people would like" from the opinions of the handful of people who make it to this weeks snobby beta grid clique meeting...

Remember, MOST SL users don't use the beta grid, cant use the beta grid, dont know how to get beta grid access, and dont even KNOW that there IS a beta grid...

17 hours ago, animats said:

Region crossing is the biggest bug/defect item, as opposed to new features. It's the most brutal immersion breaking bug regularly seen in SL. What else forces you to log out frequently?

I've been forced to log out more often by...

Griefers

LagTech Security Orbs etc.

RLV/RLVa issues

Lag

Viewer memory leaks

... to name but a few, far more often than by sim crossings, and yes I used to fly and sail a fair bit...

THIS is why you don't assume that Problem X is the single most important thing in SL based on who shows up at a weekly meeting with single figure attendance levels, held in a place most users don't even know exists let alone have access to...

 

[arton Rotaru]

25 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

And that's why it is unwise to judge what "most people would like" from the opinions of the handful of people who make it to this weeks snobby beta grid clique meeting...

Remember, MOST SL users don't use the beta grid, cant use the beta grid, dont know how to get beta grid access, and dont even KNOW that there IS a beta grid...

animats is talking about the Server User Group on the Maingrid (Agni). As one of those snobby beta grid clique meeting members, I can tell that you, Klytyna, would be a perfect match to attend that meeting as well.

[Fionalein]

She still has a point though: the sample size is pretty small and biased - there is no way to draw conclusions on the overall population base of SL-users by relying on this sample.

[arton Rotaru]

2 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

She still has a point though: the sample size is pretty small and biased - there is no way to draw conclusions on the overall population base of SL-users by relying on this sample.

That's true for sure, and in the case of this snobby beta grid clique meeting, today we were 7 people, including 2 Lindens who were hosting the meeting. All snobs though, that's for sure.?

[animats]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

I've been forced to log out more often by...

So log in. I know you had an access problem, but you must have SL access by now, or why are you here? Join Drivers of SL and do a drive. There's one every Saturday at noon SLT. See 50 people try to go somewhere. That may change your opinion.

Edited September 28, 2018 by animats

[Fionalein]

13 hours ago, animats said:

So log in. I know you had an access problem, but you must have SL access by now, or why are you here? Join Drivers of SL and do a drive. There's one every Saturday at noon SLT. See 50 people try to go somewhere. That may change your opinion.

.... LOL that kind of stuff does not work in events why should it for Driver of SL.... sorry 50 folks trying to cross a 40 avatar limit region with most likely mostely unoptimized 80LI cars with tons of scripts in both cars andtheir apparel... I can't see why this is going to be preoblematic LOL...

On 9/27/2018 at 1:45 PM, ellestones said:

if you ever do want to test stress levels and patience on sim crossings then have a go: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cliffoed/46/194/38

will be 5 years next January since some person who shall remain nameless completed this vehicle rally

Well no wonder, it lacks instructions and shows me a map of people died on Sansara while I am on Gaeta - without knowing what to do I have no idea how to finish it, and so will others.

Edited September 28, 2018 by Fionalein

[Love Zhaoying]

If a large group of Spartans tries to attack you all at once across a region crossing, they will fail. It’s a good thing.

[Klytyna]

17 hours ago, animats said:

See 50 people try to go somewhere. That may change your opinion.

Really?

You are actually foolish enough to believe that...

12 hours ago, Fionalein said:

50 folks trying to cross a 40 avatar limit region with most likely mostely unoptimized 80LI cars with tons of scripts in both cars andtheir apparel...

... will some how convince me to change my opinion that...

1. Deciding what "Everyone in SL REALLY NEEDS" on the basis of 2 or 3 out of 5 attendees at some pathetic clique meeting is TOTALLY INADVISABLE.

2. That a constant stream of BLOODY AWFUL IDEAS will not "Save SL"

Let's look at the track record on those ideas...

People who DON'T want to live on the Madlands in some fugly urban RP Primwaste Laghole should "leave SL and move to Project Stupid because they are antosocial"

- Not one of your better suggestions.

Place temp rez bicycle dispensers outside safehubs on Zindra because "obviously, the sex crazed noobs constantly spamming each other for posebal sex or asking asl/skype/nude-selfies, ACTUALLY want to explore the 'Beauties' of the Semi abandoned fugly-tech urban primwaste zone that is Kama City"

- Another lame idea.

LL should BAN all "bots and alts" because sex crazed urban thug RP noobs harassing people from 2 km away with unwanted IM's might be discouraged when people refuse to reply, so BAN all those alts... That people spend money on to supply them with clothing, hair shoes, bodies, heads, etc., not to mention the "army of Entitlement Club Alts" thing that many Madlanders use to get more "Tier Free Land", LL should BAN alt accounts that put money in their pockets

- Also not one of your better ideas

Strips of navigable water sims connecting sailable zones on different continents should have 30 x 1024 parcels, all with road and water access, despite the fact that there is no practicable way to FIT 30 such parcels onto a single sim with "lots of roads and water" and still have space between the houses, AND have enough navigable water un obstructed by Freaking road bridges to make the plan worthwhile at all. 

- Another barely planned "how to save SL" disaster.

People quit SL because they can TELEPORT almost instantly to where ever they wish to go, instead of wasting a 1/4 of their limited online hours traveling along ROADS, so outlaw teleporting and close down the 2/3 rds ofthe grid that isn't Madlands, sending all those Islanders off to Project Stupid where anti-social teleporters belong

- Yeah, that's BOUND to improve SL concurrency figures, right?

Cover the other continents in COPIES of the semi abandoned fugly-tech urban primwaste that is Kama City because, EVERYONE wants imersive urban street thug wannabe rape Roleplay!

- That suggestion needs no comment from me...

We can fix SL by... Encouraging EVERYONE to use a custom compiled "31 Flavours of Whinux" based version of Bloatstorm, in which the velocity interopolation has been kludged as that will fix vehicle crossings which is what EVERYONE really wants and NEEDS, right? 

Oh wait, that didn't work, ummm lets spend 9 months discovering what people said on the first page of this thread. Damn it, they were right about not crossing at corners. Why wont LL assign devs to FIX this...

- Possibly because they have a limited pool of devs, and at least one of those is currently being wasted implementing a lame idea suggested by 2 people at some pathetic under attended clique meeting as "What EVERYONE in SL actually NEEDS" - "BakeFail on Mesh"

...

I always enjoyed sailing in SL, and pottering about in my Spiker & Wingtips chopper, but I always KNEW that it's a MINORITY pass time in SL, not "the ONE TRUE CURE for all SL's problems".

Realistically, you are no different to those ePeeners who claim that being able to "kill people" at random all over the grid will...

 "make SL wot r mor FUNZ and sayv dis game!"

 

[animats]

20 hours ago, ellestones said:

it may be that a totally seamless vehicle crossing won't come until UDP has been deprecated. LL are progressively working toward deprecating UDP. Is possible to write an own UDP-based transaction protocol, however I think that a HTTP-based protocol is maybe a better fit for sim crossing transactions

while everything you do to help identify issues with the current UDP-based protocol, which I encourage you to continue doing,  we may have to wait until then - for total no worry seamless

(Technical discussion follows)

That's a reasonable idea, and might solve a part of the problem, but not the whole thing. Nor will it improve performance. There will still be race conditions which come from the viewer talking to several sims and asset servers all at once, while the sims talk to each other.

It might be simpler to send all the "reliable" messages over TCP. Send only a few types of messages, such as ImprovedTerseObjectUpdate, which handles object movement, over UDP. Those are the messages you want right now to get smooth movement. If you miss one of those, that's OK; the motion will be a little jerky but the next update gets you back on track.. If one comes in out of order, you discard it as old news. This would eliminate the need for SL's "reliable" message system, which is trying to do TCP's job. Other than cleaning up some technical debt, there's no pressing reason to do this.

Current work in the game world is producing tools for big seamless worlds. There's SpatialOS, which works with with Unreal Engine 4 to support very large MMO games. Worlds Adrift was the first game to use SpatialOS, and the scaling features seem to work well. It's a persistent multiplayer world where users can build. There's much interest in this in the game development world. The current generation of virtual worlds (Sansar, SineSpace, High Fidelity, etc.) are not seamless - they're disconnected levels. The next generation probably will be seamless. The trend in gaming is to allow more building, because, as with SL, once people have built things in game, they want to come back to them and buy more things to go with what they've built.

SL doesn't really need a change that big, though. It just needs some bug fixing. It's hard to debug SL because the developer tools are weak. You can't even get a good log of all the events going though the viewer. All "network logging" gets you is a list of message types going by, not their contents. I'm still plugging away, adding debug messages, and it's slow going.

[Fionalein]

1 hour ago, animats said:

It's hard to debug SL because the developer tools are weak.

Are you working for SL? Do you know the full potential of their developer tools? You are just a customer - why should they hand you the devtools?

[Qie Niangao]

39 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Do you know the full potential of their developer tools?

I took the "developer tools are weak" comment to refer specifically to messaging that's flowing past the viewer, which indeed is available to anybody willing to hack a TPV. It's a valid point, though, because the biggest, hairiest race condition is likely (IMHO) to be in the sim-to-sim handoff, server-side, which would need Linden developer resources to address, and we know they're sparse on the ground (and frankly always have been).

There's never going to be universal agreement about all development priorities. For example, I agree with some of what @Klytyna suggests above, disagree with some, and am genuinely curious to see how other projects (e.g., Bakes On Mesh) turn out. I'm super eager to see EEP to completion, with full-function scripted Windlight, all cool stuff we were promised years ago that will substantially improve the SL experience across all user communities -- whether or not it measurably improves retention.

Improved sim crossings, vehicular and on foot, might benefit retention. Those little standalone, void-surrounded islands have been a big part of SL for a long time, but as other platforms and games improve scalability, they're going to seem more claustrophobic. There's longstanding demand for larger sim dimensions even without corresponding increases in LI and avatar limits; at least some of that demand could be satisfied by better handoff performance.

[animats]

33 minutes ago, Fionalein said:

Are you working for SL? Do you know the full potential of their developer tools? You are just a customer - why should they hand you the devtools?

The viewer side is open source. Debug logging is in the code, so that's visible in the viewer source. There's a Wireshark plug-in for decoding SL messages, and that's open source. I'm finding C++ bugs in the viewer that would be caught by Coverity or other analyzers, so they're not running those. If you know how to read code, it tells you quite a bit about the dev team, their tools, and mindset.

Lindens have admitted to me that they don't really have clear internal documentation on how region crossings are supposed to work.  From talking to the Linden developers at the Server User Group meetings, it's clear that they don't understand what's going wrong. That's why they have so much trouble fixing it. Plus the fear of breaking the working system. They have so much technical debt. I don't envy the people who have to work on this.

One piece of technical debt that causes problems is that SL was written when 64-bit floating point operations were expensive. So positions in SL are not global and 64-bit; they're 32-bit and relative to the local sim. The viewer's local origin is the (0,0) corner of the avatar's current sim. When the avatar crosses a sim boundary, the viewer coordinates of visible objects have to be shifted to adjust to the new origin. The region-sized jumps avatars sometimes make on bad sim crossings seem to come from that shift being misapplied - either not applied, or applied twice, or being applied as an offset between the vehicle parent and avatar child.

It looks to me like when a single region crossing gets stuck, there's a 10-second timer in the viewer which tries to get it unstuck. That seems to interact badly with the region shift, resulting in the avatar being mis-shifted. Dumps of ObjectUpdate messages indicate that the sim sends the viewer valid coordinates from the correct sim, and then the viewer mis-applies the shift adjustment. Haven't found the root cause of that yet.

Double region crossing failures involve a bogus kill message from the sim. Single region crossing failures do not. It looks like the double region crossing failure starts out with an bogus kill message at the start of the region crossing, and then, 10 seconds later, something that looks like a single region crossing failure happens.

Is anyone deep enough into the code to help with this?

 

[Love Zhaoying]

12 minutes ago, animats said:

. I'm finding C++ bugs in the viewer that would be caught by Coverity or other analyzers, so they're not running those.

Seriously..how do YOU know they are bugs? You’re only seeing viewer-side, not server-side. I am a C++ programmer with 25 years experience, so I’m very skeptical of your superpowers. 

[animats]

21 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

Seriously..how do YOU know they are bugs? You’re only seeing viewer-side, not server-side. I am a C++ programmer with 25 years experience, so I’m very skeptical of your superpowers. 

You don't find bugs when you read code? I found two buffer overflows, and LL made the JIRA report non-public. They were routine bugs of the kind analysis tools catch. Like "sprintf" vs "snprintf", but in a non-string context.

[ellestones]

16 hours ago, Fionalein said:

Well no wonder, it lacks instructions and shows me a map of people died on Sansara while I am on Gaeta - without knowing what to do I have no idea how to finish it, and so will others.

click the sign to rez the bumper car, sit on it and go. The finish line is marked on the map. Is an orienteering rally, so work out your route to get there. If you do make it to the finish line, keep going, to the far corner of Pounce if you want to win the gold cup

it hasn't been completed because most times drivers get killed on sim crossings. As there are not public right-of-ways for the entire journey then can also get killed or impeded by orbs, banlines, parcel full, etc

[Klytyna]

22 hours ago, animats said:

The current generation of virtual worlds (Sansar, SineSpace, High Fidelity, etc.) are not seamless - they're disconnected levels. The next generation probably will be seamless.

More than 4 years ago, an old friend pasted me a link to Philip Not-A-Linden-Any-More's original public Crowdfunding begging letter to the world, in which he outlined his plan for what would eventually become... "Lo Fidelity".

He stated that his new system would be a world without borders or sim crossings, seamless and endless.

My friend asked me what I thought of Philip's promises about Lo-Fidelity, to which I replied "a load of clueless tech-illiterate pie in the sky BS".

And here we are more than 4 years latr and Lo-Fidelity has... Almost NONE of the features Philip promised the world when he went begging for dev funding...

20 hours ago, animats said:

So positions in SL are not global and 64-bit; they're 32-bit and relative to the local sim. The viewer's local origin is the (0,0) corner of the avatar's current sim.

That's because... The viewers only getting positional data from the simulation server, which only deals with THAT sim, and thus doesn't really NEED to use global coordinates...

However SL as a whole DOES have global grid coordinates, they used to be mandatory for rlv based teleports before an update added the ability to use a region name and local coords instead which was far more user friendly.

You used to have to go to the intended destination, and use a script to obtain the global coords to include in your teleport scripts, thank goodness thats over.

20 hours ago, animats said:

Double region crossing failures involve a bogus kill message from the sim. Single region crossing failures do not.

Old experienced vehicle users KNOW not to make rapid double crossings at corners because... 

You leave sim A and enter sim b, then leave sim B for sim c before sim b has finished recieving you properly from sim A, causing confusion.

The kill message probably isn;t 'bogus' it's just being applied by a region thats lost track of where you actually are, in terms of regions, because you crossed at a damn corner and left sim b before arriving there...

20 hours ago, animats said:

Lindens have admitted to me that they don't really have clear internal documentation on how region crossings are supposed to work.

Cthulhu Code...

15 Years ago some guy writes some code to do something, then a couple of years later he leaves, then a couple of years later some other guy tries to modify it, then he leaves a year later.

Then THIS year, some noob coder turns up and starts messing, and is confused that calculating the display of avatar height seems to involve the phases of the moon as seen from Pluto run through some bizarre form of differential calculus working to base 13, multiplied by the value of the users breast size slider...

The noob coder inadvisably works late in the office, on the night of the highest tide of the year while eating a fish-paste sandwich, in an office located on the site of an ancient temple to Dagon...

The next day his co-workers arrive to discover the noob coder has left, and in such a hurry he left some things behind...

Like two quarts of blood, a kidney and half an earhole...

20 hours ago, animats said:

From talking to the Linden developers at the Server User Group meetings, it's clear that they don't understand what's going wrong. That's why they have so much trouble fixing it.

This isn't news... And we didn't need to go to a meeting and ask them...

Why do you think it took 8 weeks to fix a bug in a server code Release Candidate that left  people on the RC channel regions with HALF their hair and clothes missing (as in one side of the body not there), all because of a "kewl new feature" designed to "make SL look better" by adding a stealthed 32 m to draw distance for prims more than 10 m on a side based on a total lack of understanding as to how people built buildings with prims, which co-incidentally is whats responsible for the weird appearance of prim based buildings at the limit of your draw distance (where the walls made of small prims correctly do not render because outside your DD, but the floor and roof slabs DO render outside your DD, because, bloody stupid idea), that you mis-identified in one of your "fixing SL" threads as "a lod issue".

 

 

Edited September 29, 2018 by Klytyna