Pilot's dismay - simcrossings now worse than ever!

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

9 hours ago, animats said:

They have a huge system written in C++. It's a real time system. Those are rare and outside the experience of the average programmer. It's a big, distributed, real time system. Those are even rarer.

A good summary, I would add to it that this system also comprises a vast amount of user-created content that doesn't always conform to best practice, and is effectively undocumented.

And finally, as has been touched on by other posters, the army of black-box testers file under-detailed and over-duplicated reports, making sense out of those would also require a particular skill-set that is also in great demand elsewhere.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[RiverScallen]

12 hours ago, Pussycat Catnap said:

Case in stupidity: Stuff is broken, I refuse to say how or why. Fix it now!!!

/fail  -- MAYBE ITS TIME YOU GET IN TOUCH WITH THE SERVICE AND THE CUSTOMER YOU ARE SERVICING - MAYBE IF YOU ARE ON THE BALL YOU WILL KNOW WHATS HAPPENING - come on  - its not the entire SL that is flying or sailing - is that so much to ask? The more apathetic you are with your service and your customer - the more they will leave. Do you really expect your customers to start running your service level agreement? - Frustrate your customer and you have LOST them FOREVER!

 

 

[rasterscan]

You can rest assured LL Does take this sort of thing seriously. I do understand your frustration though. I was griping about everything lagging to my partner last night and she pointed out Tuesdays is restart day. Last night I was getting 'No room to sit' on furniture that sits two in theory.

It's wonderful that SL has survived sixteen years of gaming progress but keeping up with user expectations is maybe getting harder to do. Relying on 'the cloud' to interface between client and server may not be the wisest of moves, I don't know, we'll see, but a general degradation in game performance this last year cannot, in fairness, be denied.

[Hunny Bunny]

Maybe you can find a smaller plane and fly in the within the confines of a region, that way you don't have to worry about the crossings. 😁

[Pussycat Catnap]

20 minutes ago, RiverScallen said:

some weird stuff not even placed in the right quote box

Hmmm...

Ya'll do realize I'm not part of Linden Lab don'cha?

 

[Alyona Su]

On 10/8/2019 at 2:36 PM, Aethelwine said:

but they certainly aren't junk. Just junk at sim crossings.

I never said ACS scripts were "junk". I said they are the worst-performing of all modern vehicle scripts and that is the truth.

I have never experienced any that are worse, based on the literally dozens of vehicles I have. Part of it is because there are far too many scripts in the kit, all relying on each others, and also all trying to cater to every type of vehicle, they are a "jack of all and master of none" - meaning recourse-bloat. Thee other part is that they also are ancient in terms of SL time, version 7 have been in "beta" for, what three? ...or is it five years now?

It's not junk, it's just bloated. And it takes a very skilled creator to adjust the setting right for any type of vehicle other than a racer (that mostly races on racetracks build on a single or double region, tops).

So when I shop for a vehicle, I demand a demo, so I can see how it feels when it drives (not race; *drive*). Then I'll look at the contents and if I see ACS in there then I will often just move on and keep shopping.

[Lindal Kidd]

9 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

Yes - you are very right - everything else is to blame except LL. 

 

I did not say that.  The underlying code does not provide the smooth, carefree border crossings we'd like, and I certainly hope that it can be improved.  What I DID say is that there are many contributing factors to any given region crossing that are out of LL's control.  They can't fix those.  Reporting every time you crash at a sim border is unproductive, because there's no way for LL to know what caused it.

Edited October 10, 2019 by Lindal Kidd

[Theresa Tennyson]

8 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

Yes - you are very right - everything else is to blame except LL. 

 

Have you noticed that we're not hearing from people here who agree with you that region crossings have gotten worse?

[Anna Nova]

10 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

I think reporting every sim crossing failure is a waste of both your time and LL's (although they probably spend less time to throw it away than you did to write it out and submit it.)

Sim crossing failures depend on a great many factors, most of them out of LL's control.  The vehicle's scripting, your avatar's complexity, number of passengers and their complexity, speed of crossing, angle of crossing, performance of your and your passengers' internet connections, the condition of the gaining region including scripts and textures.  Possibly your inventory size and structure, the phase of the moon, and how many butterflies in China are flapping their wings.

I have found LL very good at rebooting sims that I report.  So I will continue to report them thanks, and continue to encourage everyone to do the same.

[Zero Starchild]

I stopped trying to drive my motorcycles and cars and fast moving boats since useless pathfinding was brought in! Years ago. Before that you had a somewhat smooth experience within reason but when pathfinding came in I found faster vehicles bouncing off bumps and sim crossings and out of control. I only tend to kayak and horseback ride now to cross sims smoother.

[Amanda Dallin]

5 hours ago, Ziggy Starsmith said:

I stopped trying to drive my motorcycles and cars and fast moving boats since useless pathfinding was brought in! Years ago. Before that you had a somewhat smooth experience within reason but when pathfinding came in I found faster vehicles bouncing off bumps and sim crossings and out of control. I only tend to kayak and horseback ride now to cross sims smoother.

I had problems sailing after pathfinding came in but it was fixed in a few (maybe six) months.  I was sailing and not driving or flying fast.  

As someone who sails daily, xings have gotten worse over the last year.  I've seen issues come and go over more than 12 years so maybe I have more patients than some newer SL residents with these issues.  I follow animats closely since he seems to have a good handle on the problems.  I expect the problems will lessen as they've been worse at times in the past.  It can be a bit embarrassing when your pants don't make the xing with you which has become more common recently.

[animats]

22 hours ago, Lindal Kidd said:

Sim crossing failures depend on a great many factors, most of them out of LL's control.

Not really. Somewhere there's a timing related bug. Anything which affects region crossing timing can affect region crossing success. This creates the illusion that user behavior or vehicle behavior or some performance related change in the code might be the problem.  The real problem is that it's timing sensitive at all. We know it's timing sensitive because it's possible to force serious region crossing failures by adding network lag to the viewer using network testing tools. I've done this on the beta grid and made videos for a JIRA. Conversely, you can do some things in vehicle code that help. But you can't totally fix the problem from the user side. I've tried. So have others.

Almost everything else in SL is reasonably delay-tolerant and does not fail fatally due to race conditions. You may get some performance degradation, but even with a second or two of network lag or sim overload, most important things don't break. That's impressive. But not region crossings. Those are brittle. They need to be more robust.

(Early in my  career, I spent years finding and fixing timing related bugs inside a major mainframe operating system. So I've been there and done that. Not fun. But sometimes, you just have to do that. It takes people time and money.)

(I've said my piece on this. It's up to LL management now.)

[RiverScallen]

On 10/10/2019 at 9:20 AM, RiverScallen said:

 

Thinking - we paid a lot of money collectively for LL to fix it -- you really want to blame the consumer instead of LL ? Really? if you are working for LL they should fire you for the reputation damage you causing with this stupid argument - absolutely insane!

 

Edited October 15, 2019 by RiverScallen

[RiverScallen]

On 10/10/2019 at 6:16 PM, Theresa Tennyson said:

Have you noticed that we're not hearing from people here who agree with you that region crossings have gotten worse?

lol perhaps they aren't pilots -- who are YOU working for?

[Anna Nova]

1 hour ago, RiverScallen said:

lol perhaps they aren't pilots -- who are YOU working for?

Oh!  I think they are far far worse than 3 years ago.  I used to be able to fly, now I sail.  And even then we always say (now) that there is a ration of sailing sim crossings per login!

There is a great difference between makers though.  Some have billions of huge scripts, some have one or two small ones, and some cross well, and others don't.  Not quite got the correlation yet.

[Theresa Tennyson]

3 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

lol perhaps they aren't pilots -- who are YOU working for?

I'm a pilot who's been flying in Second Life for quite a bit longer than you have to judge from your profile. I've been hearing about these "sudden problems" for years and have noticed that the biggest factor in region crossings is where someone lives. A lot of them are brought up by Europeans like you. As a European, every message between your computer and the simulators you're going between have to go under the Atlantic and then across most of the United States across a series of different networks that neither you nor Linden Lab have any control over.

Of course, if you can't wrap your head around the fact that the problem could be anywhere along this path that may well be another factor.

[Nalates Urriah]

On 10/8/2019 at 2:27 PM, Mollymews said:

this ^^

going slow helps, as it allows time for the viewer to connect to the neighbouring region(s).  A good indicator of when the next (neighbouring) region has connected properly is the Minimap.  When the next region is rendered fully on the minimap then we are in almost every instance, good to cross.  What kills us is crossing into a region to which we (our viewer) haven't yet established a full connection

I typically sail and fly with the mini map open. I scale it down to show about 16 regions, draw distance 512.  I am looking for red regions 2 or 3 regions ahead of me. Those will definitely crash me if I attempt to enter them. So I want time to avoid them.

But, regions that look fine on the mini-map may not let me in. So, I also watch for a bunch of green dots piled on the region boundary. If the are not crossing into or out of the region that region has a problem.

Other times everything on the mini-map looks great. But the view out the copter window shows a missing region that is all ocean. Attempting to fly into that void is a certain disconnect.

So, just rendering well in the mini-map is no guarantee you can cross into the region. 

[RiverScallen]

Everybody I speak to agrees with me - IT IS BECOMING WORSE!  And notably so after migrations to CLOUD! Well most of us are very interested in MS FS 2020 game and will certainly leave SL as aviators - a knock-on effect and impact on the LL economy will result in;

1. Less land being rented by aviators -as aviators leave SL 

2. More abandoned lands

3. Less cash flowing into open-seas areas 

4. Sailing enthusiasm dampened 

5. In the end a down-turn in the economies of SL (Less aircraft & sailing vessels sold, less less less less less!)

-- the sim-crossings and orbs and objects in the skies - are all contributing to huge frustrations -- something we will NOT experience in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - 

SO SL AND LL HAVE COMPETITION -  and this competition will just grow in future - less money for LL means delays in SANSAR - simple economics really !

[Anna Nova]

21 hours ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

I'm a pilot who's been flying in Second Life for quite a bit longer than you have to judge from your profile. I've been hearing about these "sudden problems" for years and have noticed that the biggest factor in region crossings is where someone lives. A lot of them are brought up by Europeans like you. As a European, every message between your computer and the simulators you're going between have to go under the Atlantic and then across most of the United States across a series of different networks that neither you nor Linden Lab have any control over.

Of course, if you can't wrap your head around the fact that the problem could be anywhere along this path that may well be another factor.

This is wisdom.

The biggest issue I have is the LATENCY of my high-bandwidth connection when dealing with the USA.  I'm in very rural North UK - i.e my line is long, the line from the local hub to London is long, the line under the Atlantic is long... This wasn't helped by rerouting of connections in California due to a power outage last week (as described to me).

Just as a 'for instance'.  Right now a ping on secondlife.com comes back in 42 ms, whereas as ping to google.com only takes 22 ms, but a local server comes in at under 1ms.  (ms = miliisecond)

We need the Lindens to increase the virtual speed of light in their systems.😖

Edited October 16, 2019 by anna2358
added example.

[Alwin Alcott]

1 hour ago, RiverScallen said:

most of us are very interested in MS FS 2020 game

has not a lot to do with flying as in SL i think
 

1 hour ago, RiverScallen said:

Everybody I speak to agrees with me -

this is what we hear in nearly all rants .. and nobody here has ever been asked .... so who's "everybody" ?

[Theresa Tennyson]

4 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

Everybody I speak to agrees with me - IT IS BECOMING WORSE!  And notably so after migrations to CLOUD! Well most of us are very interested in MS FS 2020 game and will certainly leave SL as aviators - a knock-on effect and impact on the LL economy will result in;

1. Less land being rented by aviators -as aviators leave SL 

2. More abandoned lands

3. Less cash flowing into open-seas areas 

4. Sailing enthusiasm dampened 

5. In the end a down-turn in the economies of SL (Less aircraft & sailing vessels sold, less less less less less!)

-- the sim-crossings and orbs and objects in the skies - are all contributing to huge frustrations -- something we will NOT experience in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - 

SO SL AND LL HAVE COMPETITION -  and this competition will just grow in future - less money for LL means delays in SANSAR - simple economics really !

A dedicated flight simulation program is better at flight simulation than Second Life. Amaaaaayyyyyzzzziiiingggg.... And this competition has only been around since - well - the last 35 years, or longer than Windows.

(By the way, the simulators are one of the few parts of Second Life that haven't been moved to the cloud.)

[Scylla Rhiadra]

9 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

Everybody I speak to agrees with me - IT IS BECOMING WORSE!  And notably so after migrations to CLOUD! Well most of us are very interested in MS FS 2020 game and will certainly leave SL as aviators - a knock-on effect and impact on the LL economy will result in;

1. Less land being rented by aviators -as aviators leave SL 

2. More abandoned lands

3. Less cash flowing into open-seas areas 

4. Sailing enthusiasm dampened 

5. In the end a down-turn in the economies of SL (Less aircraft & sailing vessels sold, less less less less less!)

-- the sim-crossings and orbs and objects in the skies - are all contributing to huge frustrations -- something we will NOT experience in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 - 

SO SL AND LL HAVE COMPETITION -  and this competition will just grow in future - less money for LL means delays in SANSAR - simple economics really !

Maybe?

I'm a member of the Drivers of SL group, which includes virtual drivers, pilots, and navigators. It seems a pretty robust and busy group -- one of the most active to which I belong, in fact.

Whatever the problems, driving, flying, and sailing around SL still seems a pretty popular pastime.

[Alyona Su]

10 hours ago, RiverScallen said:

Everybody I speak to agrees with me - IT IS BECOMING WORSE!

Huh. Everybody I speak to agrees with me - IT'S A DREAM-CROSSING WITH THE RIGHT VEHICLE AND NO UNNECESSARY ATTACHMENTS! Go figure.

[RiverScallen]

maybe you live in the USA ! I don't know who you have spoken to ! I JUST DONT BELIEVE YOU!  I am sure I just saw your nose growing!

 

Edited October 21, 2019 by RiverScallen

[RiverScallen]

On 10/10/2019 at 9:33 AM, MichaMoz said:

Maybe you can find a smaller plane and fly in the within the confines of a region, that way you don't have to worry about the crossings. 😁

So why the degrading in the service --- so if you need an operation on your colon - will you be satisfied when the doctor tells you - oh why don't we just remove your appendix ? REALLY???