Here Be Dragons..

[Prokofy Neva]

So Second Life is down, as you can see from this thread -- the old graphic of the monkeys banging the bones, taking from 2000: A Space Odyssey are invoked.

So the question is: why?

The word on the street has been because LL is "moving SL to the cloud". But every time in the past year or so I've heard that as an explanation of bad things, someone will say "but they didn't move it yet". So did they or didn't they?

"Moving to the cloud," as anyone who has run an office or a busy web site knows, can be a mixed blessing, but generally it's supposed to be "better" and "faster". So...why?

Each time one of these hard crashes has occurred, I've been busy putting out animesh dragons or trying to run them with a HUD that won't work, or trying animesh developer kits or making a feeding bowl for my dragon that uses up lots of particles and scripts.

There's been an absolute explosion of dragons and dragon-theme related items in SL because of "Game of Thrones," which is something my son watched years ago and dropped but has become wildly popular even among middle-aged people who never did dungeons and dragons before. Probably there is a political and social reason for this...

I was just at an event with a whole bunch of roaring dragons, dragon eggs, dragon throne, dragon tea (which not surprisingly consists of dragonfruit, which I'm not sure actual dragons use).

So I blame the dragons, but more technically, I think it's this:

o Animesh was grafted on to a world not originally intended for it.

o Bento was grafted on to a world not originally intended for it.

o EEP is being grafted on to a world not originally intended for it.

So it's like grafting "Western capitalism" on to "Russia," or something.

The "shell" of SL is changed since 2003, but perhaps not greatly. It's not like every atom has been replaced. 

The other day, again, I was putting out an animesh thing and a gatcha rare house when all of a sudden, I had a message that "4 objects have returned to lost and found". Four is nothing; maybe I didn't set it to the group. Then more and more trickled; soon it was "58 objects". So I immediately flew to the scene. A few tenants were crying that their skyboxes were returning. Now the returns were deluging -- virtually everything in the sky was returning, and some of what was on the ground, although large houses and rocks remained -- very odd. A quest I had spent three months laying out -- all bunched up in Lost & Found. THOUSANDS of objects, many no-copy gatchas or things made on the fly and never copied into inventory (lesson learned!) Curiously, scripted things just made not returning; old things unscripted from years ago returning...

I was in such shock that all I could do when I called the help desk was say "Something bad is happening in Winnipeg..."

This "something bad" shaped up over the next few hours to be an enormous disaster -- builds returning, no-copy items not returning -- etc. And the sim was not overloaded. I usually keep a buffer of at least 1000 or more prims and it was more like 1500 when I had last checked. A few tenants had a few things out overprimming, but that was not by any more than say 200 or 300 prims. The animesh dragons or pets or breedables are always on that sim and don't cause any problems. One tenant was upset that maybe it was her scripted baby. But I don't see how that could possibly be the reason.

When things return, there is usually an order to it -- last in, first out. In the old days, if a griefer fire-primmed your sim, you could face returns, but Lindens built this "grey-goo fence" thing and made other changes to prevent that. Normally, a tenant attempting to put out 500 prim jewelry on a table will see it bounce and get a message about the parcel full or even the sim full. If I imprudently link mesh to a twisted prim suddenly creating a 3000-prim monster, it tells me I can't do that because there isn't enough room. So something is wrong in that "last in, first out" system -- and I know in the past they've had to fix that over and over.

In this case, the Lindens rolled back the sim to restore the builds at least to the last sim save. They NEVER do this. In the time I've been in SL (nearly 15 years) I've seen them do this perhaps 2-3 times for Mainland. The reason is obvious -- anything you've just spent the whole day building, any gatcha rares you put out, now disappear forever if the sim is rolled back in time (which was sad, but I was happy to sacrifice that for the whole sim's sake). Conversely, you may get doubles of gatcha rares in a rollback, which may or may not make up for what you lost. And this is also PS a copybotting technique the Lindens are wise to. Also what happens is that with a rollback, too, you go back over the whole thing and find odd things missing -- because you didn't know they were missing before or "just because". 

This is a real wake-up call for me on the Mainland, which I remain devoted to. Large projects don't really fit on the Mainland. They should put put on private islands you have more control over, you can watch better as to top scripts, and which in theory can be rolled back upon request to the Concierge if there's a crash or return of a build.  If you insist on big builds on the Mainland -- and the Lindens have them, too -- you should go through and make cluster copies and put them in folders and/or take a picture. This is a bother. But better than crying when a year's work is deleted.

 

Edited May 14, 2019 by Prokofy Neva

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

Can't help with the cloud-move, but the region-returns sounds nasty and it's the sort of thing I've had my own nightmares over.

I'm not sure if this suggestion would be practical for an entire region, but I've had similar issues in the past, and there is something you can do.

Each link-set that you have rezzed inworld could have an entry in the description field of the form "@<position>&<rotation in degrees>" , which is created by dropping a script into the item to write that information. (Eg @<150.35,94.75,1004.2>&<0.0, 0.0, 90.0>) It shows you where it should be, and shows the rotation in human-readable degrees, not Hamilton quaternions that mean little to the non-geek.

If/When the item gets displaced or thrown back into your L&F, you can at least restore them to their recorded positions using a script that is dropped in the linkset to read the position and rotation stored in the description field and move the linkset back to those values (Or, you can just manually edit the object, moving it to the X-Y-Z values and then rotating it to the appropriate degrees).

I developed this method to try and get around the creep problem that seems to happen with restarts when things move slightly from where they should be and gaps start to appear.

If you wish I can give you a couple of scripts, one to store the current position and rotation in the description field, one to restore the object to the stored position, but I have to say it could be a lot of work for a full region. And obviously no-mod items are not going to be amenable to this approach.

ETA on my wish-list is a TPV option to write to a notecard the names, position and rotation of every link-set in a parcel, some of them do give a sort of list but it's a bit of a kludge to scrape the text from the floater and stuff it into notepad.

ETETA I've stuck the two scripts into the script library forum for those brave souls who love to jump in feet-first regardless of how many alligators there are in the swamp.

Edited May 14, 2019 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[ChinRey]

16 hours ago, Prokofy Neva said:

In this case, the Lindens rolled back the sim to restore the builds at least to the last sim save.

They actually rolled back a mainland region? They didn't even argue about it first???

You're right of course, that never happens. This msut have been something really out of the ordinary.

[Prokofy Neva]

Yes, they NEVER EVER do this. I did ask several times because virtually the entire sim's builds were all returned. I own all the land on that sim except one other person whose build was very static. I made those arguments and I guess they conceded it was their fault, a problem with the rolling restart/patch so they did roll it back. As I mentioned, this is always a mixed bag. The "last save" might be quite a while ago in which case all new builds/rezzes will be lost. They don't do this because fixing one person's problem will cause problems for others, etc. etc. as I explained. But rarely, they will do it. Always worth asking, although usually they say "no".

[Prokofy Neva]

19 hours ago, Profaitchikenz Haiku said:

Can't help with the cloud-move, but the region-returns sounds nasty and it's the sort of thing I've had my own nightmares over.

I'm not sure if this suggestion would be practical for an entire region, but I've had similar issues in the past, and there is something you can do.

Each link-set that you have rezzed inworld could have an entry in the description field of the form "@<position>&<rotation in degrees>" , which is created by dropping a script into the item to write that information. (Eg @<150.35,94.75,1004.2>&<0.0, 0.0, 90.0>) It shows you where it should be, and shows the rotation in human-readable degrees, not Hamilton quaternions that mean little to the non-geek.

If/When the item gets displaced or thrown back into your L&F, you can at least restore them to their recorded positions using a script that is dropped in the linkset to read the position and rotation stored in the description field and move the linkset back to those values (Or, you can just manually edit the object, moving it to the X-Y-Z values and then rotating it to the appropriate degrees).

I developed this method to try and get around the creep problem that seems to happen with restarts when things move slightly from where they should be and gaps start to appear.

If you wish I can give you a couple of scripts, one to store the current position and rotation in the description field, one to restore the object to the stored position, but I have to say it could be a lot of work for a full region. And obviously no-mod items are not going to be amenable to this approach.

ETA on my wish-list is a TPV option to write to a notecard the names, position and rotation of every link-set in a parcel, some of them do give a sort of list but it's a bit of a kludge to scrape the text from the floater and stuff it into notepad.

ETETA I've stuck the two scripts into the script library forum for those brave souls who love to jump in feet-first regardless of how many alligators there are in the swamp.

It's good to know this exists but it's dependent first of all of having those link-sets. That means you have to MAKE THEM first, out of all objects at a "level" or "site" in a quest like this, which is at all different levels and buildings in the sky. This is time-consuming but I'm going to try to do it. Of course no-copy things won't get picked up and linked. What might make more sense is to have a series of platforms. Each platform is labelled as to the level or site it's at. Then *that* platform prim could have the location fixer in it. You can't link things across big distances I don't think. But you could rez out all the platforms individually and they would go to their previous position. Some rezzers come with an option to save the location so that you can get the skybox back at that perfect level you found if you have to delete it (or if it is returned). So I may try this just for the platforms, not the linked sets simply because it's easier.