Blake Sea sim boundary crossings

[Pazzo Pestana]

I'm an avid sailor and pilot and love the open water/sky of Blake Sea; however, I'm confused as to why the servers have such a difficult time passing me from one sim to another without sucking me into the vortex and spoiling my sailing and flying. You'd think that, in an area with nothing but water (hence, not much to rez, I guess) and no others in it, there would be fewer problems with sim crossings. Sailing and flying aren't done within the confines of a single sim usually, at least in the Blake Sea where sailboat racing spans many sims. When I consider the amount of creativity that has gone into building planes and boats, and the cost of ownership, LL would be more attentive to this problem. I'm not much of a techie but I do understand that a vehicle and it's occupants must be handed off from one server to another and that, especially at high speeds, the process can be tricky. However, sailing isn't a high speed activity ... racing boats will hit 15 knots sometimes but most cruise in the 4-10 knot range, from my experience. Is this sim boundary problem, which has existed since my first day, something that LL should've corrected instead of devising new gizmos for the interface that frustrate so often? Also, I realize that my client (system resources) and my network are factors in the process. I wonder, though, are there particular aspects of certain vehicles that make the crossing more difficult? Pazzo Pestana

[Marigold Devin]

It does seem frustrating that new features come out while region crossings continue to be problematic, some weeks worse than others, depending on the code that has been rolled out during that week.  However, there are many Linden people constantly working on trying to improve the region crossings, and then separate teams of people are employed to create new features.  There is some crossover, of course, where new features have to be tested, and the introduction of same does also have an effect on the whole grid, which can, in turn, cause more "bugs".

Sailing is certainly only to be tackled by the more skillful, or extremely patient, in Second Life, and I know from experience that weekends can be horrendous (although I do blame the weekends being worse because more people are sharing my internet connection, so everything slows down).

Linden Lab also are not responsible for the user created content, and so some vessels seem to fare better on sim crossings than others.  I expect you are in some sailing groups, and swap notes about different creators of sailing crafts. Many sailors remove as many scripts and scripted attachments as possible before travelling, too, to minimise the risk of becoming unseated on sim crossings.

At this time, I do not see a solution, but, as I say, be assured Linden Lab do constantly give this issue a lot of attention.  It comes up often at the Beta Server User Group sessions on Thursdays, and of course people update the JIRA SVC-472 that has been ongoing for several years now.

 

[Pazzo Pestana]

Marigold, thanks so much for the helpful response!  Querying other sailors is a good idea!  and, of course, reducing scripts.

Pazzo

[Dilbert Dilweg]

I kind of doubt sim crossings will ever be smooth . I think in order for them to be fast and efficient. The neighboring regions needs to be on the same server machine/same data center.  with the way these regions randomly hop around on crashes and restarts to other host machines. latency from connecting from one network to another causes the stalls.

[Theresa Tennyson]

I fly a seaplane in the Blake Sea area sometimes and very seldom have problems with a simple crossing from one region to another. I find crossings work best when I"m not trying to change speed or direction when crossing the border and when I hit the border more-or-less perpendicularly. Avoid going into the corner of sims when you cross. I have a HUD that shows my position in the sim in simple graphic form and also shows rezzing areas, parcels with ban lines and full parcels along the border of the next sim. It makes a tremendous difference in my ability to fly long distances.

[Pazzo Pestana]

thanks, all, for the helpful info! I fly a seaplane on Blake Sea (based in Swallow Tail) and agree about the perpendicular/no corner crossings. I use the minimap to see the boundaries but I still have the problems, in my helo as well. I have what I think is a decent system (Intel Core 2 duo, nVidia 9800GT, 4GB RAM, WinXPprof) but wonder about the Roadrunner network connection. The lag meter usually shows the "client" with low FPS and suggests lowering the draw distance. I'm also wondering about Windows7 and 64bit stuff in running SL ... and ahead to Windows8. Would increased graphics and computing power have an effect on the sim boundary crossing issue? Pazzo

[Qie Niangao]

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Would increased graphics and computing power have an effect on the sim boundary crossing issue?

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Not likely, unless your machine is seriously underpowered, in which case sim crossings wouldn't be the only pain point.

Network connection matters somewhat more.  If one's crossings are consistently worse than those experienced by others making the same crossings at about the same time, then it could be that the between-sim handoff is going fine but there are delays (or even maybe lost packets) in the network traffic that happens when handoff occurs. (I would expect that teleports would also be rougher, if network is the cause of one's bad sim-crossing experiences.)

What most frustrates me about this is that the sim crossing problem has been a high impact issue for years, yet with each new RC rollout, it's a crap-shoot whether any marginal improvements will be lost.  They've invested a lot of time and effort in trying to make these things better, and yet there really hasn't been much lasting improvement.  It's not as if they don't have equipment to test this, and it's not as if it's really hard to replicate the problems.  Why is it only after each release hits the grid that the impact on sim crossing problems is assessed -- and then, subjectively?

[Pazzo Pestana]

I found an interesting thread in the forum regarding tweaks to the graphics settings: basically, let the graphics card do the heavy lifting. Adjusting the settings on the graphic card and shutting them down in the viewer has helped a lot with sim boundary crossings. I still think that if the servers for a homogenous area such as Blake Sea could be more effectively linked the problem would be less. Also, following the suggestions of the above response to avoid changing direction at a boundary, cross at right angles, and avoid the corners has helped, too. thanks, again, for the responses! Pazzo

[Pazzo Pestana]

Here's the link for the helpful graphics card tutorial: http://shoppingcartdisco.com/digitallife/tutorials/tutorial-letting-your-graphics-card-do-the-heavy-lifting/

[Qie Niangao]

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Pazzo Pestana wrote:

I found an interesting thread in the forum regarding tweaks to the graphics settings: basically, let the graphics card do the heavy lifting. Adjusting the settings on the graphic card and shutting them down in the viewer has helped a lot with sim boundary crossings. I still think that if the servers for a homogenous area such as Blake Sea could be more effectively linked the problem would be less. Also, following the suggestions of the above response to avoid changing direction at a boundary, cross at right angles, and avoid the corners has helped, too. thanks, again, for the responses! Pazzo

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Hmm. It really doesn't seem that graphics operations could be so time-consuming as to cause actual sim-crossing failures... but I guess they might appear a little smoother, locally.

I did think of one viewer-side graphics setting that might help sim-side, and that would be to shrink the draw distance as short as tolerable.  That would (somewhat) reduce the amount of network traffic.

My understanding is that they already tried re-arranging the server hosting of large numbers of Blake Sea sims to optimize network proximity, even co-hosting neighbors when possible. I don't know what happened after that, but if crossings didn't improve, maybe they gave up on that approach.