World Map

[Crim Mip]

This is getting a bit ridiculous. The world map not working makes flying/sailing a major pain to do. The grid has been fully uplifted for a month. There is literally nothing else so broken that it can't wait at least from the user side. Seriously assign however many devs are needed and get this fixed before adding any new features.

[Elphaba Broome]

I agree with Prim Mip.  Also, as a premium member, I feel that one of the reasons I pay the premium fee is so I can at least be guaranteed certain basic things, like a functional grid map.

 

[Artemisia Atheria]

Hi! Is the world map still not working? It loads slowly when I am zoomed all the way in but when i zoom out maybe 3 rolls of the mouse and not really zoom out fully, all the tiles disappear. Is this the same issue?

Is there a way around this? 

Also is there a place that shows the big picture (i don't expect it to be live, just to give me an idea)? Like the whole SL world map with continents explained, etc?

[Qie Niangao]

4 hours ago, Artemisia Atheria said:

Hi! Is the world map still not working? It loads slowly when I am zoomed all the way in but when i zoom out maybe 3 rolls of the mouse and not really zoom out fully, all the tiles disappear. Is this the same issue?

Is there a way around this? 

Also is there a place that shows the big picture (i don't expect it to be live, just to give me an idea)? Like the whole SL world map with continents explained, etc?

Yeah, it's the same problem. We're all eager for the fix, which is supposedly making big progress but still isn't ready for deployment.

It's a really old map, but has the layout of the major Mainland continents, except the entire Belliseria span between Sansara and Jeogeot, a whole lot of expanded "Blake Sea" island chain east of Nautilus, the Horizons extension north of Zindra, and probably a bunch of other stuff. So I'm not sure it's all that helpful, now that I think about it.

It would be possible for a program to glue together the static, fully zoomed-in region images and make an enormous map that could be scaled somehow, but I don't know of it being done yet, and those static images are getting pretty out of date so it would be of limited interest even if we thought it might be a while until the proper fix is available.

[Artemisia Atheria]

5 minutes ago, Qie Niangao said:

It's a really old map, but has the layout of the major Mainland continents, except the entire Belliseria span between Sansara and Jeogeot, a whole lot of expanded "Blake Sea" island chain east of Nautilus, the Horizons extension north of Zindra, and probably a bunch of other stuff. So I'm not sure it's all that helpful, now that I think about it.

Thanks very much, this is really helpful for someone who hasn't seen the world map when it was working.

[Artemisia Atheria]

13 hours ago, Qie Niangao said:

Yeah, it's the same problem. We're all eager for the fix, which is supposedly making big progress but still isn't ready for deployment.

Is there a way to tell which continent you're at? Like somewhere in About Land or The World Map that tells you the continent name for that region, similar to how you can see the region name for the land?

[Solar Legion]

43 minutes ago, Artemisia Atheria said:

Is there a way to tell which continent you're at? Like somewhere in About Land or The World Map that tells you the continent name for that region, similar to how you can see the region name for the land?

The Continent Names do not show up anywhere outside of image files around the Grid - they were never a part of the region or Map Server data.

[Qie Niangao]

I found this little gadget on Marketplace. Worn as a HUD, upon touch it reports to owner chat the current location's continent and an idiosyncratic "region" name. (The HUD is green, which is kind of a trademark of the creator, if you've seen any VERY green autonomous vehicles cruising around the Mainland.)

(It almost inspires me to make a more "cartographic" version, starting with the same continent location data the creator contributed to the wiki back around 2014.)

[Stefanie Starlight]

So the last post on this is now weeks ago, and the thing STILL is not fixed.  I want to resurrect this thread for further discussion, because as a Premium member with actually several Premium accounts (for land ownership access, not playable avatars) I do feel extremely let down after now 4 months of no map tiles except at maximum zoom in.  It's all been said already, above, by much more erudite persons than me, but how long IS this going to go on.  Heck, I can go into the most lowly OpenSim grid and get working map tiles of the entire grid.  But for me, land acquisition especially has been extremely tricky - I just found a nice parcel in southern Satori, and the only way I actually knew where I was was because I came across the bottom end of Route 8 in Bagheera.  Sailing and driving is also a total pain and not really pleasurable as it used to be.

Don't get me wrong, I love the Lindens.  They work darned hard for us, and respond to tickets as quickly as possible, with good humour and patience.  I love SL and although I do peek into OpenSim grids a tiny bit, the quality of the SL experience is generally superior - I am not much of a builder so I need access to the best creators, and they are basically working where they can make some money out of it, and who can blame them.  BUT...  as someone who has been in SL for many years, though only quite recently finally accessing Premium...  this right now is the single worst failure by LL that I can recall.

And finally, the worst part for me is not even the failure of the map tiles.  It's the failure of communication by LL.  As far as I know nothing official has been said about this since the official update on Jan 21, over two months ago.  https://status.secondlifegrid.net/incidents/cgpt13b12sry  Please, LL, provide members with some sort of explanation...  take us into your confidence, let us know a bit about what is happening, what the issues are...  many of us are sympathetic and understanding people, we are "on your side" when the chips are down, but we do deserve to know what the actual heck is going on.

Please.

 

Edited March 24, 2021 by Stefanie Starlight

[TT120]

Agreed.  I do not have the map memorized enough to know where I am most of the time and especially the new regions.  I can't plot any kind of course to fly or sail which makes it impossible to get to any destination.  I can still randomly sail around but have no idea where I am or where I'm going.

[Aethelwine]

I know my way around the world pretty well, but the longer this goes on the more making maps for routes becomes a pain.

Areas of Eden look totally different to the tiles, there is a large addition to Second Norway that has no map tile information just like the new Bellisseria area.

Without the map tiles it really limits the routes you can make.

[arabellajones]

I think I mentioned it somewhere else.

Cool VL Viewer is providing a zoomable  world map function. Some totally new map tiles are not visible (North-east corner of Bellisseria) or not fully up to date, but I have seen recent changes showing on the map. Is it worth using?

I just checked, it's detecting a new block, south of Second Norway, but no tiles loading. Other places, definitely new tile data. If the map data is updated on a cycle that might explain it, but when was the new Second Norway block turned on?

One of the recent changes appears to be a major airfield at the Gaeta end of the Corsica-Gaeta channel

 

(Some of the Wiki pages are getting horribly out of date.)

(Later the same day.)

Firestorm is now showing new map tiles, although the map zoom is still erratic.

Edited March 26, 2021 by arabellajones
Update on Map tile behaviour with Firestorm

[arabellajones]

Update on Worldmap Status.

Firestorm is showing new tiles, but the zoom is erratic. Cool VL Viewer doesn't have the zoom problem.

Many regions have full scenery, but only show as region titles on the map. Apart from the usual deliberate gaps, the regions connecting Bellisseria and have been named and show as region titles. Try a search on "Fiddlesticks"

Regions such as "SSPE1110" still show as complete blanks even though they look very complete, even a railroad station at the end of the line, complete with rez zone.

I really hope that there isn't some deeply hidden code difference between Firestorm and other viewers which explains the difference on Zoom behaviour. It may just be a side effect of some sort of caching. 

[Nika Talaj]

I'm not seeing new tiles on Firestorm, even on "Fiddlesticks".  Could it be version dependent?  My network and PC are both very good, but I'm on FS 6.3.2.58052

[Odaks]

I'm on the current version of Firestorm, 6.4.13.63251, and nothing appears to have changed as far as zoom goes (or rather doesn't go!).

The search for "Fiddlesticks" brings up a named region that shows no detail at all.

[arabellajones]

"Fiddlesticks" is one of the regions under-construction to extend Bellisseria to Satori. We saw the same pattern of named-but-unmapped regions for the Stilt regions while they were emerging.

 

[Anna Nova]

I wonder if the LindenLab are making the new tiles by hand since they can't afford a programmer....

Edited March 27, 2021 by Anna Nova

[Eddy Ofarrel]

On 3/5/2021 at 2:15 PM, Qie Niangao said:

It would be possible for a program to glue together the static, fully zoomed-in region images and make an enormous map that could be scaled somehow, but I don't know of it being done yet, and those static images are getting pretty out of date so it would be of limited interest even if we thought it might be a while until the proper fix is available.

I've just had a go at doing exactly that... well, kind of. It's based on the standard Second Life web-based map API, but with a few tweaks (everything beyond the fully-zoomed-in level seems to be non-existent there now). It doesn't actually do any gluing together of images, but it does allow you to zoom further out using the fully-zoomed-in images rather than trying to load the others that don't exist. The disadvantage of that (compared to using specific images for each zoom level as it's meant to) is that it will put a lot more load on your browser (and the server serving the map tiles) the more you zoom out, so I've limited it to only zooming out by two levels, at least for now (i.e. 3 zoom levels total)

I've also added names to the bottom left corner of each region to try to match the in-world map, but that also requires a separate request for each region to a Second Life server, so I've limited it to only the first two zoom levels and then the names will disappear after that (which is sort of like the in-world map does anyway)

I realise it's probably not that much use right now, particularly as there isn't (yet) any way to search for/load any particular region or area of the map, but I will add more functionality in the next few days if anyone thinks they would actually find it useful (bearing in mind that the one thing I'm not in a position to do anything about is getting the map tiles to actually update, as much as I would love to help with that)

http://map.eddyofarrel.com/

Edit: I've just made it possible to load a particular location by using it sort of like an SLURL, i.e. replace maps.secondlife.com in the URL with map.eddyofarrel.com and keep everything after that the same. It should go straight to it as long as it's formatted correctly

Also just made it possible to zoom in by an extra level. It won't make things any more detailed, as it's still using the same set of map tiles, but it might still be useful sometimes.

Edited March 28, 2021 by Eddy Ofarrel

[Aishagain]

@Eddy Ofarrel Congratulations Eddy, you have single handedly done something that REALLY helps!  Linden Lab should offer you a job on the strength of this alone, but I am guessing they couldn't afford the salary you could command.

[Eddy Ofarrel]

@AishagainThanks!  I don't really feel like I've done that much so far - the zooming part was just a very simple tweak to the existing script and doesn't fix the underlying issue on the server side. I have got a bunch of ideas for ways I could improve it further though, so I'll start working on those tomorrow.

As for working with Linden Lab, I'd actually be very willing to help fix this particular issue (i.e. both the zoom levels and the map updating - I know that's more complicated) if they'd give me a chance to (and it does seem like the sort of thing I probably would be able to help with, if given the necessary access to work on it). It just needs sorting out, so I'd be more concerned about making it work properly than the money. But I doubt that would be something they'd even consider as I'm on the other side of the planet from them (maybe if they hadn't closed their UK office back in 2010, which I've only just discovered even existed lol)

Edited March 28, 2021 by Eddy Ofarrel

[Aethelwine]

Eddie's World map is very useful, but it isn't showing the new regions.

I have noticed while visiting Second Norway Firestorm's (and presumably other viewers) minimaps are showing updated tiles for the the new regions there, where the world map still shows nothing.

I am not 100% sure but I think this is progress, I am sure the minmap tiles not so long ago were showing the same old tiles that were last updated on the world map last November. 

Edited March 29, 2021 by Aethelwine

[arabellajones]

18 hours ago, Eddy Ofarrel said:

Also just made it possible to zoom in by an extra level. It won't make things any more detailed, as it's still using the same set of map tiles, but it might still be useful sometimes.

There have been times when I have wondered in Linden Lab have ever taken into account even ordinary eyesight problems. The extra zoom level does make a difference, but I have a suspicion that viewers, in general, are still designed for a  maximum screen resolution of 1024x768. Even an ordinary TV can deliver better resolution, and the way things work out I struggle to cope with the size of text which viewers use.

The boosted zoom level does show oddities such as gaps in Linden Roads at region boundaries, but I suspect going through a web browser, and avoiding that viewer weakness, is at least as significant a factor.

[Lucia Nightfire]

I'm not seeing any map tiles that have aerial prim calendars update. They're all still showing November 18th.

[Jaylinbridges]

16 hours ago, Aethelwine said:

I have noticed while visiting Second Norway Firestorm's (and presumably other viewers) minimaps are showing updated tiles for the the new regions there, where the world map still shows nothing.

I see no change at Second Norway or any other region between the minimap and the Big Map.  Some older inactive regions have not changed a single object since last November though.  

[Ardy Lay]

I just played with Cool VL Viewer on another computer with another Second Life account.  The World Map appears to be displaying the full-resolution tiles at all zoom levels except perhaps all the way out.  That appears to have some sort of desaturated summary tile on display.  Unfortunately, this approach resulted in the viewer ceasing to respond to OS service requests resulting it it being frozen from my point of view.  It's "Cool" though.  Just don't try to look at the whole world at once.

Edited March 30, 2021 by Ardy Lay