Discussion: Feedback on release cycles, what do you think?

[NiranV Dean]

It would be interesting to hear what you think on release cycles.

How should they be done? Manual updates? Auto updates?

How fast should a Viewer be updated? Every day? Every week? A month?

What do you think are the pro's and con's of each?

 

Personally i'm all for full forced "latest only" updates somewhere around every week. If necessary as fast as possible. Why though?

First off, let's get into some of the issues specific to SL. SL is a MMO, it is an online world with millions of people, around 40-60k online at any given time, most of the time. It needs constant maintenance and is in constant development and with a real currency backing it up it is also a target for security issues that need patching ASAP. I think a 1 to 2 week update cycle would be fine for the general maintenance and bugfixing here. Critical issues such as the Viewer completely refusing to work suddenly or even security issues should have a much faster frequency and if necessary should be patched the day they have been discovered, if necessary on the very day the previous update was made public.

This ensures that we get constant updates, bugfixes and probably new features in a timely manner and are never experiencing frustrating bugs and or showstoppers for too long. Second Life isn't exactly a big application either, with just merely 100-200MB it is exceptionally small and a perfect candidate for quick updates unlike some bigger applications which remedy this issue by offering actual patches rather than the entire application unless needed.

I've heard many complains in the past about forced updates and fast release cycles though. Let me address them:

 

I don't want to be forced to update, i'm fine with my version, i know best which version i want. (The "never change a running system" type)

First off, no you don't. I can assure you that you definitely don't know whats best for you. The developers that have been spending all their time to make the Viewer as good as possible know much better what's good for you because chances are big they have also spend a great deal making it good for you in the process, besides these developers just want the best for you and the best is clearly a new version that is as good as the old but it contains even more bugfixes for issues, maybe even those you complained so much about. I have had so many people tell me they use version X for reason Y. There is never a reason to silently use version X. If you use version X because version Y is not working as good for you maybe you should have used it earlier and told the developers about it, they might want to investigate and fix it if its not on purpose. Which creates the subtype of people who don't like where the Viewer is going, maybe decreased performance, maybe loss of a feature, maybe something entirely different but going forward you have no choice except to accept your defeat in this matter. If the developers decide to change something once and for all, there will be nothing you can do about it, maybe said change was directly forced by LL. Hiding behind your older version is not going to help, this older version is not going to get bugfixes, security fixes, new features and is also unsupported and might get you a very stupid support answer, its your own fault after all. Sometimes issues simply cannot prevented and you'd do better for your own sake (and that of everyone else) by using the latest version and report the issues to the developers, they can't fix what they are not aware of after all. I was already personally "insulted" as doing a Microsoft, yea i get it, i'm not a fan of their Windows 10 forced updates either but force-updating your basic OS with giant updates that require your OS to restart, often break lots of applications and at the end of the day make the OS even worse than it was before (yea... Windows 10 is like that) is something entirely different to a single application wanting to stay up to date, what's the worst thing that could happen? Yea your Viewer breaks down whoopdiedoo, report the issue and get another one for the time being.

 

I don't want to be annoyed with constant downloads of the Viewer.

Look, i respect your opinion on this but... wait no i don't. Your reason is completely flawed, you are constantly downloading stuff, in and out of SL, you are downloading gigabytes worth of content every day. Doing a quick update before starting is not going to hurt you.

 

I have limited internet bandwidth.

Ugh. This is a difficult one but it all essentially boils down to, "tough luck". To be honest if you are on a tight bandwidth budget you REALLY shouldn't be using SL in the first place. It is the epitome of wasted download bandwidth only followed by Ark: Survival Evolved and its 50gb "small" updates. Sure you can throttle your bandwidth down but in the end this is not going to help, have you ever thought what limiting down your bandwidth does? Nothing, it slows down the download, which at the end of the day has to be done, slow or fast and it will impact your Viewer's performance. As long as the Viewer remains in "download" mode it has severely lowered performance, don't do this to your Viewer, it likes you and you put it through this painfully slow download for no good reason.

 

Faster updates mean lower quality and less testing translating to more bugs.

This is only half true. Regardless of how much rigorous testing you put an update through, the public will always find more issues than any testing team could ever hope to find. Testing your updates is one thing but... but having it go live is something entirely different. I've seen so many games test updates for weeks, months nonstop just to have the update break down spectacularly the moment you start it, crashing, rendering bugs, lags, clipping, missing textures, absolutely everything, the entire palette of bugs, i'm sure the devs spontaneously combusted when they saw this happen after so much testing. I mean i'm sure developers make sure that they at least test the basic functionality of changes they add and that's good but beyond some basic and maybe some extra big of testing, that's pretty much it, you the users will always find bugs, always and the sooner you do the better for us... and for you. In the end, the amount of bugs is very dependent on each developer, some make more mistakes, some make less. I've blown my builds up so often in a spectacular but unforeseen way, it's hilarious and if you find a small issue, a button not working or something behaving weird, congratulations you can't imagine how many bugs didn't make it into this version.

 

Everything else:

Whatever the reason may be, whether you don't want to wait a minute or two before starting or you hate increasing version numbers, don't like changelogs or don't care for the development of the very tool you keep using to access what seems to be a big part of your life, no matter what you say at the end of the day it is important that the Viewer stays up to date and ASAP, the faster everyone jumps to the latest version, the faster bugs can be found, things can be tested and development can continue.

 

In the end, fast update cycles are the way to go, they make sure development never halts and they occasionally give you some new toys way sooner so you can start breaking them earlier and we can start improving them faster.

[Paul Hexem]

This thread's gonna be good.

[Qie Niangao]

This will be an unpopular position: I seem to be fine, either way.

I use the regularly updated Linden viewer (and preliminary project viewers) for early access to features not yet present anywhere else, so I'm fine with getting ridiculously frequent forced updates.

These days, however, my "daily driver" viewer is Catznip which hasn't had an update in about a year. Part of that satisfaction with creaky obsolescence is because I have zero interest in Animesh (and that's being generous), but in any case, I seem to be fine with an extremely lax update schedule.*

If that means I'm missing viewer-side security patches, though, I guess I should be worried. I'd much prefer to think that the infrastructure of my operating system and that of the SL servers totally isolates any viewer security issues, but of course that's wishful thinking. So yeah, if there are real security concerns, we should get immediate updates -- and, in that case, really, the Lab should be able to completely disable connection of any viewers that pose real threats to users or the grid, until they're updated to patch the vulnerabilities. (But come to think of it, don't they already have this ability? And, if they haven't had to use it, does that mean that any security issues haven't been that serious?)

______________
*That will change once scripted EEP is a real thing, expected Real Soon Now.

[ellestones]

once a month for maintenance release

once a quarter for new features release

 

[Theresa Tennyson]

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Personally i'm all for full forced "latest only" updates somewhere around every week. If necessary as fast as possible. Why though?

Are you also planning on paying your users to perform necessary hardware updates when your forced latest version requires them?

[Theresa Tennyson]

6 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

First off, no you don't. I can assure you that you definitely don't know whats best for you. The developers that have been spending all their time to make the Viewer as good as possible know much better what's good for you because chances are big they have also spend a great deal making it good for you in the process, besides these developers just want the best for you and the best is clearly a new version that is as good as the old but it contains even more bugfixes for issues, maybe even those you complained so much about.

Like how the Linden Lab developers decided to fix offline notifications so they released a change that ended up making it impossible to open an attachment directly from a notification recieved when you aren't online, and it still hasn't been fixed?

[Parhelion Palou]

Every week is fine. It's well known that developers don't make mistakes and testing isn't needed.

[LittleMe Jewell]

Release as often as desired, but do NOT force it on me.  I know all too well what sort of screw-ups can happen in those wonderful 2 week agile cycles. 

[NiranV Dean]

5 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Are you also planning on paying your users to perform necessary hardware updates when your forced latest version requires them?

No. Getting hardware that can run SL is neither expensive nor hard. A 300$ budget PC can run SL with Deferred Rendering and shadows just fine.

 

4 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

Like how the Linden Lab developers decided to fix offline notifications so they released a change that ended up making it impossible to open an attachment directly from a notification recieved when you aren't online, and it still hasn't been fixed?

Wait. THEY DID THAT ON PURPOSE?!

Ffffff... well guess that explains the infinite unreliability of offline notice attachments... and i was so going to try to fix that. Why LL, why?

[NiranV Dean]

9 minutes ago, LittleMe Jewell said:

Release as often as desired, but do NOT force it on me.  I know all too well what sort of screw-ups can happen in those wonderful 2 week agile cycles. 

That's why the update forcing is done not immediately but after a few days to make sure people have some time to do some initial run tests and see if things break down. I had forced updates before and it worked fine. I haven't yet forced an update that exploded spectacularly but then again that's mostly because it took 1-3 days before the update became effective, so i just let people have fun with it for a day or two and if nothing bad happened i applied the update for the auto-updater inclusion which took another day or two until Oz sorted it out. Obviously you shouldn't force a completely untested update immediately as the must-have update without making sure first that it works.

EDIT: Besides, in the case that something ever happened, and i had things happen already, trust me i'm fast. I've already done hotfixes not an hour later after the update went up to fix something people found that i didn't (or broke for some stupid reason). Again that's why you break the fixed-cycle occasionally to fix something that needs immediate attention... but then that's an exception. I know not everyone would do this, i know that most games in my Steam Library don't do this when they royally ***** up, sadly, they just keep it going for a week or two.

I can even name you a game: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

Every second update is broken for me, the game crashes out before i get past the splashscreen, they keep this version without any way to revert for weeks if not months and i can't start the game anymore. Until they finally fix it for one update and then decide to do another round of "optimizations" and the game is broken again.

Edited November 22, 2018 by NiranV Dean

[Whirly Fizzle]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Wait. THEY DID THAT ON PURPOSE?!

Ffffff... well guess that explains the infinite unreliability of offline notice attachments... and i was so going to try to fix that. Why LL, why?

It wasn't done on purpose.
Switching offline notification handling over to the new cap unfortunately had some nasty bugs.

The bug Theresa mentioned: BUG-225551 - [RAKOMELO] Unable to receive ANY attachments from offline group notices
Even worse, it causes inventory loss: BUG-225696 - All offline inventory offers from scripted objects are lost

 

[Ansariel Hiller]

[Klytyna]

15 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

It would be interesting to hear what you think on release cycles.

How should they be done? Manual updates? Auto updates?

How fast should a Viewer be updated? Every day? Every week? A month?

What do you think are the pro's and con's of each?

In professional corporate IT...

It's common for "updates" to be carefully tested, on an isolated system, well away from the live main system, for days or weeks on backup copies of data, before going 'live' with it, just in case installing the update should, accidentally DESTROY tour customer invoice system and leave your company unable to do business for 2 weeks losing $10,000,000 a day...

Because you KNOW that the weasel words in the EULA and "limited company status" mean there isn't a hope in hell of getting the software dev company to cough up $140,000,000 to cover your losses, or of fixing it in the two weeks.

...

5 Years ago, a good friend, who wasn't that techy, had serious graphical issues, JUST in SL, but they decided their gfx card must be dying so they splashed out $300 on a new card and, still had glitches, THEN they asked me.

I asked them if they were foolish enough to have Windon't Auto-Eff-Up Dates enabled, and kindly explained that the latest eff-up date included a 'fix" for people using opengl, that basically overwrote the card makers opengl support with dysfunctional windon't opengl, in a bid to encourage a shift to directx.

I told them to disable the eff-up dates, and reinstall their card specific drivers, problem solved.

...

Recently, LL implemented a Launcher, to perform Auto-Eff-UP Dates on their SL Inferiority Viewer. Due to bad habits, this foolish and worthless software insisted on trying to install 64 bit viewers on 32 bit platforms, which of course, failed totally.

...

Many years ago, a Software publishing Company hired a dev company to write a sequel to a highly successful game.

They gave the dev company a bag of money and a deadline and waited, then the deadline arrived and "can we have more money and time please" so another bag of money and a new deadline...

Finally the puplishers demanded that the game be presented, and the dev company sent them the master install disc - retail release 1.0 for duplication at the dvd pressing plant.

The game went out, and the dev company staff buggered off to an industry convention for the weekend.

Then the in itial reviews came rolling in, followed by complaints, and the puplishers called the devs at the convention and screamed "wth? this game is a 0.3 alpha not a 1.0 retail", the devs replied that they didnt know what went wrong, but would "hotfix patch" the problem on monday.

They hotfix patched on monday, tuesday wednesday thursday friday, and 5 days a week for the next couple of months, then bi-weekly, and eventually, a YEAR after initial release, they announced the "all clear".

When people asked what the hell an "all clear " was, the reply was "we have patched the game back to the intended 1.0 retail version standard we should have released a year ago.

The only explanation ever given for all this was "goblins broke into the office and swapped the 1.0 disc for a 0.3 alpha in the night, before we put it in the post..."

Even after a year of hotfix patches, the game still wasn't 1.0, more like a 0.8 beta, not even an RC build.

The dev company almost went bust, they were forced to resort to crowdfunding for an 80's style sideways scroller to try and earn enough cash to keep the lights on. 

...

STO... They did a forced update to their client that had a critical directx buglet in the loading screen, and a failed error handler buf, that combined meant 20% of the user base couldn't run the game without it crashing to desktop.

The first bug failed to use the auto-detect for directx version, and sent a dx11 command to dx9 and dx10 systems. Those systems reported back with a 2 part error code, first part refering to a generic multi problem code, the second telling you which problem was refered to.

Second bug, in the error handler didn't bother checking the second part of the code, so it assumed that it was ALWAYS the first on the list "Error your gfx card has fallen out of the back of your pc" and CTD's the game, rather than realising that it should have been "Warning - invalid dx command recieved, command has been ignored"

The company's customer tech support, didn't know what was wrong, and simply told the affected 20% of the users "your pc are too suck for STO", the devs didn't know because tech support NEVER told them it was broken.

ONE user noticed what was going wrong, and she posted the first workaround for the problem ion the forums, she did this because she had been in tech support for decades...

Can you guess her name on this forum?

...

Rapid release cycles have become a major thing these days, to such an extent it's regarded as "normal" for groups of "high fashion cluster-shag github programing in a theoretical user free environment" fanboi faux-devs to release broken 0.7 beta software as 1.0 retail, then hotfix patch it to usability over several months while the customers rant andfoam that their software doesn't work and doesn't do what it claimed.

The WHOLE "Bug of the Week Build" thing every Friday, with the "Hotfix of the week" on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, which is why the faux devs don't have time to TEST Fridays NEW "Bug of the week build"

I use Catznip, I love their "we dont fubar your SL for 12 months at a time" approach, it allows me to spend a year laughing my ass off at users of over-updated viewers that end up on the forums complaining about "does any one else have problems with the new version 6.6.6.38.24.36"

Forced Updates are great for devs... You always know what version of the software the users are complaining about...

They are bloody awful for users... You never know if the next auto-eff-up date will break things to the point where you can't use it at all, and there's NO option to NOT install the busted crap.

Auto or Manual updates... THEY ARE CALLED AUTO-EFF-UP DATES FOR A REASON

How often should updates be released... WHEN THEY ARE READY

Should updates be forced... HELL NO

16 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

The developers that have been spending all their time to make the Viewer as good as possible know much better what's good for you

Hahahaha! Like that thing where YOU decided people shouldn't use the "cursor keys" to move around, because the Gods of 80's Retro Gaming had decreed that we should all use WASD?

16 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

and might get you a very stupid support answer,

Some years back LL updated their installer to demand that your OS had all the latest service packs installed or it wouldn't run... This ended with people being unable to install the 'latest viewer' and their old one wouldn't run because "theres a mandatory update".

One RLV tpv user, who tried to install the SL viewer to break rlv and reset gear, found she couldn't. She contacted Livechat support to ask why she couldn't install the SL Viewer and was told...

"Installing an RLV enabled tpv permanently alters your pc so you can never run the sl viewer again..."

*I* had to calm her down, and explain that Livechat.Linden was a two faced lying sack of tech-illiterate crap, and that all she had to do was install an RLVa capable tpv, and then turn off rlva support in preferences when she needed to relog and break out of gear.

See also the "suppoort response" at STO when their devs fubared an update. Stupid support responses" are an industry standard these days regardless of release cycles or forced updates, because ... Tech-illiterate call center staff using badly made un-updated "tech support knowledge base" apps.

16 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Personally i'm all for full forced "latest only" updates somewhere around every week. If necessary as fast as possible.

Good Practice:

Download 6.6.6.38.24.36, discover its buggy crap, report he bugs and roll back to 6.6.6.38.24.35 Until the bugfix build 6.6.6.38.24.37 is announced...

Bad Practice:

Download, discover its buggy unusable crap, and you are stuck with it, unless you follow the dev's advice to...

16 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Viewer breaks down whoopdiedoo, report the issue and get another one

... Change brands by moving away from Arrogant-Ware to people who understand tat they make mistakes at times and that users might NEED to roll back.

16 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

I was already personally "insulted" as doing a Microsoft, yea i get it, i'm not a fan of their Windows 10 forced updates either

So... You already KNOW why forced updates are bad... Yet still you insist we have them... Go figure...

 

[NiranV Dean]

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

*snip*
 

Ah. It's you again. Let's get to work then and break your neck here and now, i always love me some challenge.

 

First Story:

Has nothing to do with SL. Why?

Second Story:

In case you didn't actually read what i wrote, let me summarize it for you. We're talking about SL, not the OS. Giving OS autoupdates (especially Windows ones) as example is just stupid and besides i've already adressed these. I'm against Windows 10's auto updates and i was against Windows 7's too, i have auto-updates disabled for Windows. The OS is a whole different beast, a lot more is at stakes when doing updates of the OS, literally MILLIONS of applications and games could break in an instant.

Third Story:

Yea, i remember LL's *****up with the 64bit/32bit client swap. Mistakes were made, clearly their auto-updater system wasn't tested before. It was their first baby steps on a new updater system and they didn't test it with betas before, it was just "suddenly" part of the new 64bit client. Problems were bound to happen. Besides, in case you didn't know, i'm still pissed that the auto-updater doesn't work for TPVs. This is however again not an issue of auto-updates themselves. LL simply *****ed up, they made a mistake and handled it badly. See below.

Fourth Story:

Bad developers. What does this story have to do with auto-updates?

Fifth Story:

It was probably you and i'm unsure what this has to do with the auto-update discussion. It's an MMO that requires you to be always on the latest version, unlike SL where you have the possibility of connecting with basically anything that can handle the SL protocols. They could have just immediately pulled the update until it was fixed. Again mistakes happen and they reacted wrong to it.

 

And finally after going through these very good examples of simply bad or incompetent developers i can get to the meat of your post.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Rapid release cycles have become a major thing these days, to such an extent it's regarded as "normal" for groups of "high fashion cluster-shag github programing in a theoretical user free environment" fanboi faux-devs to release broken 0.7 beta software as 1.0 retail, then hotfix patch it to usability over several months while the customers rant andfoam that their software doesn't work and doesn't do what it claimed.

They are an important part of an open development cycle.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

I use Catznip, I love their "we dont fubar your SL for 12 months at a time" approach, it allows me to spend a year laughing my ass off at users of over-updated viewers that end up on the forums complaining about "does any one else have problems with the new version 6.6.6.38.24.36"

And with that they lack pretty much everything that has come the past 12 months. Bento, Animesh, soon EEP, protocol changes, improvements, crashfixes, support for serverside stuff and so on, the list goes on and on. Not to mention that slow Catznip updates also indirectly mean slower RLVa updates which in turn is bad for us other TPV's who don't have Kitty on a leash, spanking her ass to fix our RLVa implementation. It's probably over a year or two now that i've considered RLVa working in my Viewer. I'm at the point of simply giving up RLVa once again due to its too slow development. I simply cannot wait months for RLVa to be updated with the latest stuff LL comes around shortly after RLVa literally just fixed the last stuff... a few months after they released it. It's aggravating and i'm honestly sorry for my users who have to deal with a possibly very broken RLVa (haven't had any reports of it breaking yet but codewise i'd assume that it MUST be broken, somewhere, somehow). But then again i also respect and understand Kitty's choice. Not everyone can dedicate so much time to Viewer development but i can't say that without also immediately slapping her wrist for developing something so fundamentally and universally used as RLVa and then not living up to the demanding task of keeping it up-to-date with all the latest stuff at all times.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Forced Updates are great for devs... You always know what version of the software the users are complaining about...

They are bloody awful for users... You never know if the next auto-eff-up date will break things to the point where you can't use it at all, and there's NO option to NOT install the busted crap.

I disagree. They are good for both the user and the developer. You just have to do them right.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Auto or Manual updates... THEY ARE CALLED AUTO-EFF-UP DATES FOR A REASON

Manual updates are a pain in the ass. Not only has the user seek them out and keep up-to-date with the development (*slaps himself for defending the user here* THEY REALLY SHOULD DO ANYWAY) they also make it harder for the support and the developers to track down their issue. The only reason i've had so much success with my personal support so far is because i can somehow keep track of these 5 million different versions that i have released and have a rough mind map when i changed what and where and whether something the user is experiencing is a bug i already fixed or not. I can tell you that if i wasn't the support of my own Viewer and would let someone else do it they'd be sitting there giving you the exact same stupid answers like in your stories but again its a thing of doing it right. I can do it right because i'm the developer and i know what i did which helps me keeping track with issues.

"You don't let a horse repair a carousel, it would try its best but it would mostly just frighten"

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Hahahaha! Like that thing where YOU decided people shouldn't use the "cursor keys" to move around, because the Gods of 80's Retro Gaming had decreed that we should all use WASD?

So what? How does this have anything to do with the "problems of autoupdating"? I made a design choice, just like i'm doing hundreds others constantly. If i wouldn't have done so, i wouldn't have earned lots of flak and i wouldn't have implemented full rebinding support to allow anyone to fully customize their controls to their liking. Regardless of whether auto-updates were in place or not, sooner or later you would have had to update to a build with these controls, you can't cherrypick a Viewer's features after all.

Yes, changing everyone's controls was controversial, lots of people hated it but also lots of people used this chance to try out WASD and learn new things. Sometimes you have to break the rules to improve them.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Some years back LL updated their installer to demand that your OS had all the latest service packs installed or it wouldn't run... This ended with people being unable to install the 'latest viewer' and their old one wouldn't run because "theres a mandatory update".

One RLV tpv user, who tried to install the SL viewer to break rlv and reset gear, found she couldn't. She contacted Livechat support to ask why she couldn't install the SL Viewer and was told...

"Installing an RLV enabled tpv permanently alters your pc so you can never run the sl viewer again..."

*I* had to calm her down, and explain that Livechat.Linden was a two faced lying sack of tech-illiterate crap, and that all she had to do was install an RLVa capable tpv, and then turn off rlva support in preferences when she needed to relog and break out of gear.

See also the "suppoort response" at STO when their devs fubared an update. Stupid support responses" are an industry standard these days regardless of release cycles or forced updates, because ... Tech-illiterate call center staff using badly made un-updated "tech support knowledge base" apps.

Hahahahaha! I think i peed myself a little.

"Installing an RLV enabled TPV permanently alters your PC so you can never run the SL Viewer again..."

Oh oh oh this is good. This goes right next to "IM: How do i chat in nearby" and "RLVa is a virus and infects the entire Viewer, it's cancer" into my book of stupid things to say.

Just another example of bad customer support. Like seriously what has this to do with auto-updates?

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Good Practice:

Download 6.6.6.38.24.36, discover its buggy crap, report he bugs and roll back to 6.6.6.38.24.35 Until the bugfix build 6.6.6.38.24.37 is announced...

Bad Practice:

Download, discover its buggy unusable crap, and you are stuck with it, unless you follow the dev's advice to...

Is almost exactly how i did it. Released 3.0 and announced it, people download it, i go to bed, wake up to my house burning and people throwing stones at my window, make 3.1 and fix complains, go to bed again, wake up with no burning house and no angry mob throwing molotov cocktails at my car, great looks like i can make this mandatory, make update mandatory in 1-2 days.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

... Change brands by moving away from Arrogant-Ware to people who understand tat they make mistakes at times and that users might NEED to roll back.

I love you too. I'm inclined to not answer but...

I know you're trying to stab at my impenetrable fortress that is my ego but you could have at least tried to make a good example. Neither do i not understand that i make mistakes too nor do i not leave the option open for a fallback unless i'm sure the latest update i'm going to make mandatory is at least working. Besides, you make it sound like it's a bad thing to tell people to use a different Viewer if there is truly no other option, i mean what else should i tell you? Not to use SL for the time being? It's only logical and i assume you'd do it regardless of whether someone told you to.

2 hours ago, Klytyna said:

So... You already KNOW why forced updates are bad... Yet still you insist we have them... Go figure...

Yes and i know what Microsoft is doing wrong. They are force feeding people highly unstable, broken and experimental updates with more spyware and bull***** with every update than the Wikipedia can keep track of and all of this on something that forms the very foundation every single application is run on. That's the worst thing you can do, besides that i know that i'm not a good coder but my code isn't as low quality as the current Windows developers show with every update. I don't break basically your entire PC on a large scale with basically every update that i do.

 

-----

It is quite obvious that you don't like me nor what i do and i respect your opinion, no one needs to like me or my work but it is also quite obvious that you came here to smack my face with weak reasons at best why auto updates and especially forced updates are bad. You are projecting the bad stories and experiences you had with other developers on everything else. I think that these bad experiences don't mean that the feature in itself is bad nor its added "forced" part. You can apply this conversation to many other things, graphics for instance. Depth of Field in particular, Motion Blur is a common example of a collectively hated feature for no good reason. Just because some, or even many developers don't do something right doesn't mean it's bad what they were trying to do.

Developers need to grow, they need to improve their skills and one good way to learn is by making mistakes, i made a lot of them in the past with Nirans Viewer specifically, i was learning the ropes of development. With Black Dragon i set out to improve on everything i have done before and so far this was worked great, even after 5 years the Viewer hasn't fallen apart crumbling like Nirans Viewer did long ago. I like the challenge of taking something people absolutely hate and make it work so people hate it less, i've set out to make everything better others fail at and while i'm not always successful with that i don't simply give up on it but rather learn from my mistakes and improve on it. Full Keybinding support is just the most obvious example. I made forced auto-updates work just fine, i haven't had anyone complain to me that they are being locked out of the Viewer, except that one time i had to get rid of RLVa completely because it was broken beyond recognition until i had time to reimplement it, it was a mistake on my side, i see that now, i could have made one last update that artificially pumped the version number up a bit to prevent it from getting auto-updated then continue making lower version number updates until i push the version number higher in an update that once again contains RLVa. Mistakes were made and i learned from them, they are not going to happen again that easily.

But what do you know, you're not a developer and even if you were, you don't sound like someone who'd be willing to risk anything. You'd be a boring developer, panicking that you could lose a few users over a change, limiting yourself and your options according to your users each and every desire. You're not the type i'd expect to come up with the next "Materials" kinda project to enhance SL because you don't experiment, you don't challenge yourself and with that you will not improve beyond your artificial restrains that you put on yourself.

I know, i know, you probably think that its funny, possibly ironic to hear this from me but then again i've experienced it firsthand and i'm not free of these artificial restrains either but i know that everything is possible, everything can be made to work if you just put enough effort into it.

But whatever, you're not using my Viewer anyway from what i can tell, which is a good thing, i don't like having to act nice to people and help them even though they spit into my face.

 

Edited November 23, 2018 by NiranV Dean

[NiranV Dean]

2 hours ago, Ansariel Hiller said:

Why is it not surprising to see you answer like this?

I guess that could be because the entire discussion is basically a massive secret conspiracy theory to undermine Firestorm's slow development cycle. Aeh idk.

[Callum Meriman]

Not sure there needs to be a global directive on this, especially as few people have the right to dictate how others can play the game.

The beauty of SL...

• Those who want to use Black Dragon can, and they can update as regular as pie.
• Same with CoolVL to Henri's cycle.
• Those who want to stand in Singularity's non-alpha, pre-bento camp can, and they can have system bodies on XP and just deal with bento jaggies.
• Those who want to be with the LL viewer and miss out on everything TPVs have added, can be on that viewer.
• People who need to use Lumiya, can enjoy that option.
• And those who want to be on the slower (but moderately stable) release cycle of Firestorm can too.

What each dev team decides is the way it is. It's just another factor for the users of that product, amongst many factors that make the user choose 'that' viewer.

About the only time a viewer update needs to be forced is when the underlying technology requires it - for example SSL logins, or the change to the CDN, or new CAPs. Outside of that - who cares if MaryJo.Snood is running pre-alpha Singularity?

[NiranV Dean]

8 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

Not sure there needs to be a global directive on this, especially as few people have the right to dictate how others can play the game.

The beauty of SL...

• Those who want to use Black Dragon can, and they can update as regular as pie.
• Same with CoolVL to Henri's cycle.
• Those who want to stand in Singularity's non-alpha, pre-bento camp can, and they can have system bodies on XP and just deal with bento jaggies.
• Those who want to be with the LL viewer and miss out on everything TPVs have added, can be on that viewer.
• People who need to use Lumiya, can enjoy that option.
• And those who want to be on the slower (but moderately stable) release cycle of Firestorm can too.

What each dev team decides is the way it is. It's just another factor for the users of that product, amongst many factors that make the user choose 'that' viewer.

About the only time a viewer update needs to be forced is when the underlying technology requires it - for example SSL logins, or the change to the CDN, or new CAPs. Outside of that - who cares if MaryJo.Snood is running pre-alpha Singularity?

True. But here we already see that there is no upside of long drawn out release cycles. You put Henri's CoolVL Viewer in comparison with Firestorm, while Firestorm takes 6 months (down from 9+ before) Henri pushes out an update every week like a working clock, you can basically set your alarm when a new update comes out and his updates aren't short of changes, fixes, new additions and i haven't seen Henri's stuff explode spectacularly yet. I'm sure he could force every update blindly.

Alright look, i have to confess i didn't want to say it directly but Firestorm's slow release cycles are the very reason i've come up with this discussion and i'm basically here to hear the complains and then shatter them with the impenetrable wall of "It's the developers incompetence" which so far i've seen no one come past. It's no secret that Firestorm's releases lately have been hit-or-miss (more miss than hit from what i can tell) and i believe that with much more frequent releases they could have much smaller updates that focus on certain parts not only to easier identify and track the issue but also to step in early enough if something is going wrong rather than (as people have to do right now) wait another 6 months for an update that HOPEFULLY fixes all the issues they introduced and reading their blog and hearing complains inworld gives me a rough idea what is going on and it doesn't sound all too nice. Firestorm's quality has declined over the past releases (according to users) and the only constant seems to be the crash statistics that seem to be pretty low. I'm literally trying to show them that a 6 month release cycle for A: the most used Viewer and B: the most important Viewer , is a giant pile of *****. It's bad for them, bad for the users and bad for the development of SL as a whole. I've seen them talk with LL about "delaying" bigger updates for SL for a bit so FS can prepare and then they still need weeks if not months to bring important content creation updates. Many people (and thats quite sad) wont see Animesh and thus many creators won't be creating them until FS has it, its artificially delaying development of the platform as a whole for no reason and to be honest if anything of what all these users keep saying is true then their so called 1 intensive testing program has made absolutely no difference in comparison to any other Viewer's releases.

[Callum Meriman]

13 minutes ago, NiranV Dean said:

Alright look, i have to confess i didn't want to say it directly but Firestorm's slow release cycles are the very reason i've come up with this discussion and i'm basically here to hear the complains and then shatter them with the impenetrable wall of "It's the developers incompetence" which so far i've seen no one come past. It's no secret that Firestorm's releases lately have been hit-or-miss (more miss than hit from what i can tell) and i believe that with much more frequent releases they could have much smaller updates that focus on certain parts not only to easier identify and track the issue but also to step in early enough if something is going wrong rather than (as people have to do right now) wait another 6 months for an update that HOPEFULLY fixes all the issues they introduced and reading their blog and hearing complains inworld gives me a rough idea what is going on and it doesn't sound all too nice.

My opinion is simple "what does it matter?"

Outside of a rare cherry-pick now and again (which flow in both directions), what Firestorm does makes no difference to your viewer. If they release a cruddy version that crashes every 2 logins and causes all their users to scream and rage-quit to Catznip, then you can sit back on your haunches and giggle quietly knowing you were right.

Rubbing their nose in it; taunting them like a frenchman up on the castle parapets, throwing cows at the silly english ka-nig-ehts below, achieves nothing but discord.

It's better to remain quietly happy in your knowledge that your viewer has significant benefits for photographers, and others who use it, and work to improve your product along the roadmap you wish.

 

Edited November 23, 2018 by Callum Meriman

[Klytyna]

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

Has nothing to do with SL. Why?

 

Pay attention... The 'first story' isnt a story it'sd a statement of why corporations do not auto-update major software...

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

In case you didn't actually read what i wrote, let me summarize it for you. We're talking about SL, not the OS. Giving OS autoupdates (especially Windows ones) as example is just stupid

Pay attention, it had EVERYTHING to do with both SL and thge Evil of Auto-Eff-Up-Dates...

SL uses opengl... Their directx games worked fine, their desktop worked fine, the glitches that made them think they needed a NEW gfx card, were all in SL, and all based on opengl, because some muppet decided that the broken opengl files from Microboat were obviously better than the ones included with the drivers from the card's manufacturer, and... Auto-Eff-Up-Dated regardless.

1 hour ago, NiranV Dean said:

And with that they lack pretty much everything that has come the past 12 months. Bento, Animesh, soon EEP, protocol changes, improvements, crashfixes, support for serverside stuff and so on

For a "tpv dev" yopu seem a bit ignorant of what's in other tpv's...

Catz supports Bento just fine, it's the 32 bit version of Dr. Singularity's Frenkenviewer that doesn't.

As for supporting EEP, Animesh and BakeFail-on-Mesh, meh.

2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Hahahahaha! I think i peed myself a little.

"Installing an RLV enabled TPV permanently alters your PC so you can never run the SL Viewer again..."

Oh oh oh this is good. This goes right next to "IM: How do i chat in nearby" and "RLVa is a virus and infects the entire Viewer, it's cancer" into my book of stupid things to say.

Just another example of bad customer support. Like seriously what has this to do with auto-updates?

Because the reason she coul;dn't install the official SL inferiority Viewer was... a) it had been recoded to demand that you accepted all the latest auto-eff-up-dates from Microbloat, and b) it wasn't optional, welcome to forced updates, you HAVE to update to the latest SL viewer to run it at all, and it wont install the latest version because... blah blah, this was an old old account who was scared that they could bnever use their account normally again because of forced version updates, demands to accept auto-eff-up-dates, and bloody minded tech illiterates on the support desk.

2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

But what do you know, you're not a developer

No, I was professional corporate IT operations, the person who was supposed to see that the crap handed us by 'devs' actually worked, and throw it back in their fac es when it didn't, the person who went round and told them you couldnt play with alpha test software on live customer data files, and would they kindly clean up their test data copies when they finished...

2 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

But whatever, you're not using my Viewer anyway from what i can tell, which is a good thing, i don't like having to act nice to people and help them even though they spit into my face.

I used to use your viewer...

I stopped when YOU decided that rlva was 'broken beyond using" and pulled it, even tho nobody else could figure what the hell you were on about, as the 'breakage seemed to be entirely in your mind, and in fact rather than demanding your help, or spitting in your face, I was one of the people who told YOU that it wasn't rlva that was broken but that you had gotten two of the settings crossed between the menu and the debug settings, so that each setting had the WRONG value. but hey, as it says in your blog... "I don't listen to people , its my viewer for me" right?

 

[NiranV Dean]

9 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

My opinion is simple "what does it matter?"

Outside of a rare cherry-pick now and again (which flow in both directions), what Firestorm does makes no difference to your viewer. If they release a cruddy version that crashes every 2 logins and causes all their users to scream and rage-quit to Catznip, then you can sit back on your haunches and giggle quietly knowing you were right.

Rubbing their nose in it; taunting them like a frenchman up on the castle parapets, throwing cows at the silly english ka-nig-ehts below, achieves nothing but discord.

It's better to remain quietly happy in your knowledge that your viewer has significant benefits for photographers, and others who use it, and work to improve your product along the roadmap you wish.

 

But... that's what i'm doing already. Did it change anything? No. Absolutely nothing has changed and it makes me sad. It makes me sad to see that development is constantly being hampered. SL works on a simple offer and demand system, less users with a particular feature means it gets less attention, less content, less improvements. This spirals down infinitely and could downright destroy a feature due to the lack of users. Look at how long Projectors and Materials took to become commonly used. Projectors were introduced ~2009 and it took roughly 5-6 years until many creators have adopted it because at the time almost no one used them.

It it really that much to demand, making things better?

[NiranV Dean]

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Pay attention... The 'first story' isnt a story it'sd a statement of why corporations do not auto-update major software...

Pay attention, it had EVERYTHING to do with both SL and thge Evil of Auto-Eff-Up-Dates...

SL uses opengl... Their directx games worked fine, their desktop worked fine, the glitches that made them think they needed a NEW gfx card, were all in SL, and all based on opengl, because some muppet decided that the broken opengl files from Microboat were obviously better than the ones included with the drivers from the card's manufacturer, and... Auto-Eff-Up-Dated regardless.

No. They are simply stories of bad experiences you had and they don't say anything about this topic nor give they any valid reasons why auto updates or forced updates are bad. I guess i have to repeat myself here as expected: A feature is not bad because the devs don't know how to work with it. IT Professionals doesn't mean a damn thing, look at Blizzard and how professional they were in the past, then they announced Immortals and riled up their entire community against them. That's how professional professionals are. They aren't.

 

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

For a "tpv dev" yopu seem a bit ignorant of what's in other tpv's...

Catz supports Bento just fine, it's the 32 bit version of Dr. Singularity's Frenkenviewer that doesn't.

As for supporting EEP, Animesh and BakeFail-on-Mesh, meh.

No, i took your 12 month example and named you off the top of my head what would be missing, i didn't even include Bake-on-Mesh but thanks.

But yes, i don't exactly keep track of Catznip's releases, nor do i of Singularity (although i know Singularity supports Bento) just as much as they don't keep track of my updates. Why would they, it's not important to their Viewer.

40 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

I used to use your viewer...

I stopped when YOU decided that rlva was 'broken beyond using" and pulled it, even tho nobody else could figure what the hell you were on about, as the 'breakage seemed to be entirely in your mind, and in fact rather than demanding your help, or spitting in your face, I was one of the people who told YOU that it wasn't rlva that was broken but that you had gotten two of the settings crossed between the menu and the debug settings, so that each setting had the WRONG value. but hey, as it says in your blog... "I don't listen to people , its my viewer for me" right?

I pulled RLVa because not with the release you used before but with the upcoming release which had major appearance changes merged in from LL, the entire RLVa system broke down so hard that i was unable to compile the Viewer without ripping out large parts of RLVa which in turn broke RLVa parts that were depending on it, having to remove those quickly turned into an endless tail-chase scenario where you end up having RLVa completely removed. If i didn't pull the plug back then i couldn't have offered support for Server Side Appearance and a few other things and we all know that SSA was a huge thing and it was mandatory. Since i don't have Kitty on a leash and can just pull her up real quick to fix my ***** for me i had to make a choice and i chose to remove RLVa temporarily. Judge me all you want for it, i made the right choice, i promised to bring it back and i did.

And once again you're just taking my top blog warning and criticizing it, interpreting your own things into its meaning. If i didn't listen to you it had a damn good reason and seeing how *****-mode you engage here its not surprising because you're clearly not doing it with the background knowledge to understand what was really going on. You seem to think all i do is look up more ways to ***** up people, cause them more trouble and generally make using my Viewer as painful as possible to them because i took away your playtoy for a while. You know, the only one who openly complained in a meaningful matter to me back then was Penny, she made it clear that it made her impossible to use the Viewer and that's when i realized that i had made a mistake that i could have worked around.

Every now and then i see people take my quote on the blog and read it as "i don't give a flying ***** about what you have to say" when it is the solar opposite, i've spend so much time going through these forums, going through SLU (and now VV), googling my ass off, finding people's blogs, reading reviews on Nalates's and Inara's blogs for valuable feedback i've always been implementing in some way or another and then comes someone of your likes and tells me what little i care for my users, that i'd ignore them. It sickens me hearing this every time this comes up. If it meant even remotely what you think it does i wouldn't be releasing fixes for bugs people keep reporting, i wouldn't be moving a damn finger if a release falls upside down and hell i wouldn't be spending most of my online time with bugging users, helping them find their option they couldn't find when it was right in front of them. I have been doing special fix releases for single individuals simply because they asked me for help, guided them through all steps to get them to work with me on the issue. Maybe, just maybe, rather than throwing a hissifit you could have offered a valid alternative which would not only have helped you but Penny as well. How about "what if you made a release free from auto-updates until this is sorted out?". I can see why some of the support staff on the FS team often blindly tosses a wiki/FAQ link, they are simply done with this *****. If i wasn't so incredibly patient with this i would have long given up doing support, the occasional happy face is not worth tanking the flak of ***** users and churning through a multi-hour marathon of live-support. 

Edited November 23, 2018 by NiranV Dean

[Willow Wilder]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Alright look, i have to confess i didn't want to say it directly but Firestorm's slow release cycles are the very reason i've come up with this discussion

 

[NiranV Dean]

10 minutes ago, Willow Wilder said:

 

The obsession to make Firestorm a better Viewer... wait... a... second. I hate Firestorm, i should not try to make it better.

3 hours ago, Callum Meriman said:

Outside of a rare cherry-pick now and again (which flow in both directions), what Firestorm does makes no difference to your viewer. If they release a cruddy version that crashes every 2 logins and causes all their users to scream and rage-quit to Catznip, then you can sit back on your haunches and giggle quietly knowing you were right.

Sssssss*****.

 

 

 

Okay back to "Why are forced auto-updates bad". Bring it on, i still have a few "bad developers" answers left or bring me a real reason, one that is an undeniably, unfixable reason why its bad.

Edited November 23, 2018 by NiranV Dean

[Ethan Paslong]

3 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

  i don't exactly keep track of ........................just as much as they don't keep track of my updates. Why would they, it's not important to their Viewer. 

 

5 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

i have to confess i didn't want to say it directly but Firestorm's slow release cycles are the very reason i've come up with this discussion and i'm basically here to hear the complains and then shatter them

perhaps start doing with FS what you do with those other viewers.

as far i know:

you'r not on the firestorm team

you'r not a firestorm user

you'r not helping anything in firestorm

you have your own, make more concerns about that and spend your, and our precious time on other things.

It's not of your business how others run their team. And absolutely not the job of a competing viewer, as far it is, to burn down others.

btw, i'm just a user and have no connection with the FS team.

If/when users have problems with FS, their support and team are always there to help.

 

If you want to talk about your issues with FS, contact them, don't make this a public distpute because you don't agree how they work.
 

 

Edited November 23, 2018 by Ethan Paslong

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, NiranV Dean said:

Okay back to "Why are forced auto-updates bad". Bring it on, i still have a few "bad developers" answers left or bring me a real reason, one that is an undeniably, unfixable reason why its bad.

The problem with the sign on your little desk is that it's meaningless. It essentially says, "If something is good, it's good." Forced autoupdates aren't necessarily done right; in fact you yourself have listed times when they aren't.