arabellajones

It is rather annoying that I can log on to secondlife.com, got to the Marketplace or support.secondlife.com or community.secondlife.com (here), and find myself logged in to one of my other accounts. It's not even all that predictable. I logged in, had to log in again to post here, and when I checked support.secondlife.com I found myself logged in with this account. On other occasions, I went direct to the support page from the dashboard page, after logging in with account A, and found myself still logged in at the support page with account B. I'm guessing it's a cookie not getting changed, and different parts of the site use different cookies. It doesn't help that my username appears at the top of the page in grey text on a black background. The Lindens aren't the only programmers who don't seem to have normal color vision, but they do seem to have picked some pretty horrible color schemes for the wib site and the SL Viewer.

I have now managed to figure out the original problem. The distortion was coming from the Breast Physics, which can also jiggle the buttocks and belly. The basic avatar is, arguably, a bit of a caricature at mid-range slider settings, and low slider settings combine with even "subtle" physics settings to produce new distortions. And the breast physics effects are turned off in the shape editor mode. It's a very localised distortion, and many items of clothing just don't have visible detail in the affected area. I do know a little about this, and the basic polygon structure of the avatar mesh could be improved without any change to the UV mapping. Mostly, the ancient mesh structure works fine, better for skin than for patterned fabric, but it's been pushed to the limit.

I have been having a problem with another viewer, and was advised to check if it still happened with the standard Linden Lab viewer. I run Linux. I downloaded the current Linux version. According to the README it's a beta. I suspect that the file needs updating, because the file names are consistent with the current viewer. I followed the instructions, and all I got was a brief black window before the program closed. The original problem? There's a distortion affecting the avatar on the hips, a little below the dividing line between the upper and lower body textures, visible on pants with a slightly lower waistband. It's slightly behind the front/back seam. There are all sorts of flaws like this in the avatar mesh. What is strange about this one is that it vanishes while in shape-edit mode. There are also signs that it briefly vanishes during the texture-baking process. Just changing a clothing texture produces some odd shifts back and forth in the avatar shape.

"Go! write a JIRA," so the geeks all cry, Declaring that it is the only way. This is, alas, another programmed lie That hides the sickness of their daily play. They take a tool, designed to run their time, And set an object for each working hour, Then promise us it is no useless mime With which to bring a new idea to flower. So often have they lost the simple plot, So often do they fail to notice fail, That when the bloody obvious is not There must be something in their minds doth ail. And so I follow literary roads, I know the tricks; sarcasm in my odes!

There are a few options in the Inventory window, some of them feeling rather obsolescent, but nothing for the Appearance window, and the very flat structure in the Appearance system makes some of the flaws even worse. Search in Appearance, and every instance of the search-string is returned, both in the outfit names and in the component names. Since there is no sorting of outfit-names (which look a lot like folders) there's no real way of picking out recent outfits. If the outfit-names are folders, there can be no sub-folders. If there is no way of limiting the search just to outfit names, or to folder-names in the Inventory, it would be laughed at in the days of MS-DOS, and I have not been able to find such an option. And have you noticed how, in the Appearance window, every outfit returned by the search defaults to open? And no, the answer is not "Use the JIRA." I try to choose my words carefully. I try to be clear and precise about the problems I experience, but it has become clear to me that I don't speak any language known to programmers. I'm told that the version of the Appearance window shown in the Inventory as the Outfits folder shouldn't be changed by the user. I am told there are work-arounds. It increasingly looks to me that the people responsible for the original outfits system, and fior the work arounds, just have no clue about managing an outfits list that has more than about 25 items. It's as if nobody at Linden Lab ever changes their clothes. Just having a better search function applying to both Appearance and Inventory would make a big difference. Those obsolescent features? The old distinction between such as "Clothing" and "Objects" is becoming totally pointless with so much mesh clothing. I can't see any easy way to change it, those tags are likely built-in at server level. Possible improvements: the Inventory search can show results sorted by date or by name. The Appearance window only has results displayed by name. And I haven't found any hint of a way of getting the search based on the first letter of the name-string. Being able to search just on a folder name, and not opening every folder to show the contents would also make a big difference. Incidentally, I am not sure that there is any strong reason for Linden Lab to have to do anything on the server side. A search seems to be something the viewer does from a cache held by the viewer. I sometime hang around at NCI Kuula. I've tried to help people who didn't appear to have any knowledge of how Windows, or any other OS, displays and manipulates files. I have begun to wonder if somebody at the Lab, making design decisions, is similarly gifted. It's not just the search that is only a vague approximation to what an OS can do to organise files.

I won't be there. I have just been ejected from the region and banned. The sim-owners have a humans-only rule and refuse to suspend it for the Meeting. I have seen several Lindens with non-human Avatars, as well as there being a large number of furry residents. And they seemed to be saying it's your fault for picking the venue.

I am repeatedly told that vehicle prims are counted against a region-wide prim count, and tha total parcel-related limit which triggers parcel-full messages is less than the region total. With prims also being used for Avatar Attachments, there needs to be a fairly large margin, and I have a recollection that there is a chunk of the total reserve allocated just for vehicles. Yet I find myself too frequently plummeting from the Grid's unfriendly skies after crossing to a new sim, being told that my vehicle was not allowed entry because the parcel was full. It turns up, eventually, in my Lost+Found folder. This seems to be an ancient bug that has never been resolved. I could say something pretty rude about the security orbs on some parcels (and nothing visible within range), which ends up with the same effect, but that's a different problem. And somebody is going to tell me it's my connection that's to blame for all this. Does any virtual world work as designed? Probably not, but after a dozen years you'd think a problem would have been fixed.

I think this may be part of the reason on why my machine get better performance when I upgraded Windows a few years ago. I had a three-core processor, and that would be one core for Second Life. What I recall is that the more-recent network driver didn't seem to choke so much. But thanks for the info. This motherboard is getting a bit old, but it sounds as though I can stop drooling about the prospect of a 6-core CPU. USB-3.0 still looks worthwhile, for other reasons, and that has to be motherboard. (3-core AMD CPU, 4GB of RAM with 64-bit Windows 7, but the hardware is getting old...)

I use a wired headset, but smartphones have bluetooth, and so there is plenty of choice for bluetooth headsets with a mic. And not so expensive. Not obvious, and everyone warns against wifi for Second Life anyway, is that Bluetooth uses the same 2.4GHz ISM band as WiFi. If you're not seeing neighbour's WiFi it shouldn't be a problem. If you are it's one more source of noise for your network to cope with. I have an app called WiFi Analyzer on the phone. There are several people around me using the default Channel 6. I don't use WiFi for Second Life, but just switching away from Channel 6 made a big difference for my Tablet

The Lindens should try fixing Second Life instead of breaking it. Just about every wonderful new idea of the past year has made things worse. I was just trying the Grid Flight. I couldn't even get the 'plane to fly out of the region it was starting in. My ISP tells me that there are no problems. Speeds have improved slightly. Nothing I can measure suggests anything is wrong between me and the Second Life servers. It begins to feel like "It's you connection" is the excuse of the helpless and the incompetent. All the negative seems to be associated with the shifting balance between HTTP and UDP: the more HTTP traffic, the worse it gets. I shall switch to Kerbal Space Program for my flying. No internet problems, and it has much better big bangs.

I think I get the idea, but the application looks horrible.

Copy/Cut/Paste work too, but don't forget to remove any old head (I'm assuming this is an attachment rather than part of the AV Shape).

I have been told that I am only allowed to connect to SL for 86400 seconds per day! Is this true?

Most of this happened at Kuula sim but may be quite widespread. It didn't just affect me, so is unlikely to be my connection. (remember, people can be connecting from different continents—how likely are we to be all using the same ISP?) Kuula sim, according to an in-world monitor script, went down at 7:45 and 8:36 At about 9:10 I arrived there with no apparent problems. My own Avatar rezzed without problems. Several avatars were partially or completely invisible. Mesh attachments were not rezzing on these other avatars for me. Other people were seeing ny Avatar as incomplete while I was seeing it as complete. At about 9:25 I tried to TP to another region. My viewer lost contact with SL and closed down. The problem might have been local to me.

I had some cheap item's de-listed several months ago. What I can remember of the message was that the items were in the wrong category, but the message vanished without explanation. And the message didn't give any useful info about what made it the wrong category for the item. I don't really expect the Lindens to know the correct category. All I remember is I glanced over the message, something about a marketplace user reporting it as the wrong category, decided to sort it out later, and the message seemed to vanish forever. This doesn't strike me as a useful system. Anyway, several items that had been delisted were reported as ordered and delivered a month after the date of the message. All I can think is that somebody realised the original delisting was wrong, restored the items, and at some later date they were delisted again, and nobody told me. But since I have to go by memory, can I trust the info I have. Why do the messages vanish without trace? There are alternatives to the Linden Lab Marketplace, and there are times I wonder how anyone can do business through the Marketplace when they cannot rely on the information flow.

For many years, customers in Europe have been charged VAT on their fees to Linden Lab for their Premium Account. The rules on the place of supply of digital goods are changing on 1st January. As merchants, we have never had to worry about VAT, but the changes may affect us. Here in the UK, I doubt any Second Life merchant does enough business to require VAT registration under the current system. Under the new system, it seems I might have to pay the tax. And the rate depends on where the customer is. I don't think I understand the rules, but it looks as though the tax collection system, and the required record keeping, would contradict the TOS on collecting the identity of other players. If Second Life merchants have to pay the tax, they will need to keep records of customers that we are not allowed to collect. and Linden Labs may not themselves be collecting sufficient data on Premium Accounts. Yes, there are companies which already act as agents for creators. Amazon do this, and I am not sure what exactly they will do to prices or what they charge Kindle Direct authors when they have to oay 20% VAT rather than 2%. They're not talking. I think I may just close down my store. Linden Lab do act as though buying L$ isn't VAT-liable, and what we spend those L$ on has no liability, even as they collect the VAT on the Premium payment. I can see how it might be that the legal place of supply for an item is in the USA. We can only ever use it on their computers so, while we are in Second Life, we are in the USA for text purposes. Oh dear... But the EU is changing their rules, and I really would like to know that we are safe from this suffocated bureaucratic overload. Here in the UK, the HRMC only told people who were registered for VAT, not realising that so many businesses were below the UK threshold for registration. And so I wonder who else they have not told. I know the changes are coming, do Linden Lab?

Speculation here: I was seeing very slow delivery of meshes, a little later in the evening. When it's only one sort of item, with the CDN handling other stuff decently, that suggests a connection fault near me is unlikely. The problems I have seen a couple of times this weekend suggest something local to Second Life servers instead. Why can't the SSA server find an Alpha texture? As I read the descriptions of the system, the actual asset server is in the same building as the SSA server, and any wider internet problem, which might be my fault doesn't get involved except when I sent a list of component changes (and if that doesn't arrive, how does the SSA server even know it wants to load that Alpha?). On the whole, I think I am lucky to live in Europe, in such a different timezone, as I miss the US weekend peaks. The CDN is taking load off the actual sim servers, but things internal to Linden Lab may still be overloaded. And with most of the effective support being associated with Firestorm, rather than any Linden Lab user support, I wonder how they will ever notice.

The weekend is starting, and with it all the usual problems. How much is down to what, I don't know, though I think I can rule out the lack of a main-channel restart. One MC region I know is being plagued by horrible lag, especially huge delays to object rezzing and outfit changes, but it restarted several times on Wednesday. Teleports are so unreliable that I could use them instead of trying to quit the viewer. And I am getting nervous about just which avatar I will see when I log in again. Maybe that is why there are all those naked guys standing immobile with attachments of unusual size. They're not ignoring me, they're not seeing anything yet. Maybe the load will have slackened when The Hobbit is in the cinemas next weekend. Why is it that, before all the improvements, SL was coping with more people connected? Is all this stuff really an improvement? Based on the last six months, I am not convinced.

It's my recollection hat Tucson was mentioned in connection with doing a Speedtest—they didn't for a while have a Speedtest server in Phoenix—and not for the actual server site. Server locations for both SL and a Speedtest server are given here. Read the footnotes. The servers are in Phoenix AZ, not Tucson. When I checked last week, there was a Speedtest server in Phoenix. It is apparently a major hub for some internet routes. Oz Linden repeated the location info in one of the forums, but now I can't find it. Some thread about the ping times reported by the viewer. I did turn up a reference to Chandler AZ, which is a suburb on the West side of Phoenix proper, but I don't know if that is correct info.

It might depend on who is carrying the traffic, but the last time I did a traceroute the last machine before Linden Lab hardware was a router in Phoenix. Geography might be a little vaguer, something like a suburb rather than Phoenix itself, but the placename was in the router-name. just as for the connection from my ISP in London. Tucson to Phoenix is far enough that it has different data centres, around a hundred miles I think, and its own routers.

Tuesday night, UK time, so late morning SLT, things were pretty rough. Some attempts didn't connect, some connected but soon failed, some lasted longer. My connection seems fairly good at the moment, downloading Ubuntu on BitTorrent ran at full speed, so that tends to discount line faults at least. But Second Life is different.

I agree. It's just as much paying-to-play as is walking into a shop and buying a copy of Dungeons & Dragons or a set of chess pieces. I am not sure the Lindens always manage to explain these things all that well.

The Halloween parties have started. Sexy Zombies... I'm English. I have family connections with Guy Fawkes, Kit Wright, and the whole Gunpowder Plot thing. I WANT TO BLOW THINGS UP!

There were several things about the RedZone affair, but the IP address problems you describe were why it's claimed effects were so obviously bogus. The really worrying things were that some lindens were so enthusiastic about it. Then they got badly embarrassed when the person running it was identified. Maybe that's why the Lindens. collectively, seem so scared of saying anything.

It seems to be happening in a lot of places. I ask a question, giving as clear a description of what happened as I can, and get a response that is consistent with a bot scanning messages for keywords and sending back a list of URLs. And there's a comment tacked on that makes it look as if the responder didn't even read my question; some trite, rather smug, one-liner about this can happen with any viewer. Gentlemen, I have just reported a problem with your product. Yes, it might happen with some other viewer, but the only way I can fix it is to use some other viewer. It all looks like an excuse to blame somebody else, made on autopilot. And I am left with the uncomfortable feeling that nobody bothers to listen. You try to put everything in your posted question, as you are asked to do, and then all that feels to be wasted effort. And on so many things Linden Labs is just the same. Was there any point in making that AR? You do get an auto-reply for your first AR of the day, but if you make two—you think there aren't days like that—there's nothing about the second. And you never even learn whether your AR had enough information to be investigated. I'm left with the feeling that everything I send to a helodesk is seen as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. It's as if they have all taken the same course, from the same college in Bangalore which teaches those telephone salesmen that solar panels work on a roof which faces away from the sun, as long as you pay them.