arabellajones
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Posts posted by arabellajones
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The Chalet line runs right to region edges at each end, the sort of unfinished edge that you see if a neighbouring region were down, similar to most of the edges of the Chalet sub-continent, and that stretch on the north edge of the Log homes sub-continent (which has a similar rail ending on it). Doesn't really mean they'll ever build anything, but, unlike the south and east edges of the Log homes sub-continent, it's unfinished.
The Big River through the Chalet and Stilt sub-continents does look a possible feature for that northern edge. Any rail link would need a compatible Linden Home theme north of the Stilt homes. (Americans only seem to do long over-water bridges for highways, though there was a rail link to Key West.)
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I can't recommend using the lines west of Hawkesblood. The only rez zone I have found after that is at Bridle Path, and there are track glitches. You can run a locomotive from there, and eventually reach Hawkesblood, but the journey from there to Bridle Path fails before you reach Gully Wash.
Officially, SSPE regions are not yet completed and there are no guarantees that anything in them will work. What I have seen of the Chalet line, which does run through some named regions, suggests that the Bellissseria Rail completion is distinct from the Linden Home completion/access.
While there are some good new SLRR-compatible models, too much depends on the scripting of the VRC generation, which struggles with the land permissions of the Bellisseria Rail. I have done some scripting for the locomotives I have built, but getting around the land permissions problem is way above my pay grade. Mesh, used carefully, can greatly reduce the LI, but you have to pay close attention to LOD models.
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I'd class the pop-ups as a reminder for people who already know. They have the same weakness of assumed knowledge as the setting for "Bandwidth", which only applies to the UDP traffic, now mostly used for command and control signals, and has nothing to do with textures.
I've been worrying about it, the descriptions (there are at least two in the Firestorm Wiki) are a bit vague about just what the sliders do, and it all comes across as a bit of automatic magic. It also needs vendor-specific graphics cards extensions in OpenGL before you even see the controls.
Anyway, here's a link. Good luck, guys, I think you'll need it.
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50 minutes ago, MBeatrix said:
Not rude, just disorganized.
It's an old meaning of "rude": Roughly made or done; lacking sophistication. Goes back to middle English and was the original meaning. It's what Shakespeare meant by "rude mechanicals".
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SSPE1457 is a definite end-of line. It also, with the coastline of Rigmarole, matches well with a likely water link to the new Fantasy sub-continent at SSPE2539.
At the moment the speculation is on Hanshin region as the other likely connection area, only a one-region gap. The new sub-continent has several clues, including an apparent web of waterways for small boats, and a few regions which have a slightly different look. But we know, from the Chalet regions, how much the big river changed as airfields and the railway were added. And that was well after people were moving in to the Chalet regions.
I would like to see useful rez zones along all the rail routes. The standard scripts have a 20m jump-to-guide feature, but I have not found anything within that distance between Hawkesblood and Bridle Path. There are stations and passing loops, though obviously not yet finished.
Looking at the timescales of what has happened, I wouldn't be astonished if it took until the end of the year for trains to be usable on the Chalet line. Look at the dates on just this thread.
Bridle Path had the track visuals in early May. The Chalet regions have been visible since mid-April, though that's as much because of the map-fix, I think. They were announced at the end of March, with first signs of construction about 3 weeks earlier. Daniel Voyager was able to report on the rail route across the Log Homes sub-continent in February, six months ago.
I think this Chalet Homes line has progressed a bit faster than the Log Homes section. The aftermath of the move to the Cloud slowed a lot of things. The map problems, and less reliable sim-crossing, make my perception of the timing of the rail developments unreliable.
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I've noticed, a few times, that default positions for the name tags get in the way of seeing voice indicators. I'm not sure if there's anything else of the same sort, essentially part of the avatar rather than a scripted attachment, but these built-in display items need to be considered together, or we'll fix one problem and create another.
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Dp we have some sort of accepted term for the two sorts of edge we see on these developments?
Hydrant and Lavon are clear examples of one sort, with the region edge having the rail line and land surface going right to the boundary, looking exactly as if the next region's sim server was being restarted. Most of the north edge of the Log Home sub-continent is the same (even a region where a rail line hits the edge in the same way). We can speculate about where the rail line might be extended to, but I am not holding my breath while I wait.
The east and south sides of the Log Home sub-continent, and most other continent edges, have a modelled land-water boundary, though land control and building by Residents can often be seen going right to the region edge on the older parts of the Grid. With the Protected Land nature of so much of the area of the Linden Home regions, some of the water edge looks a bit narrower than it needs to be, but it's still a continuous and usable water route.
The Stilt regions, by their nature, don't have this distinction for the edges.
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Meanwhile, Linux users are left so far up the creek without a paddle that they they have to walk.
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SSP?
in Linden Homes
On 8/4/2021 at 12:02 AM, Nika Talaj said:It looks to me that there is something unique about the water in the fantasy continent. I cannot swear to it, because the map isn't fully updated, but ... all the creeks and streams ... am I wrong or are they completely interconnected, like the road networks in other continents? The campers have a lot of streams and creeks, but they are not fully interconnected. It looks to me as if, except for a few tiny ponds, you can get between any two points on the continent via a meandering boating expedition.
The only possible blockages might be posed by dense vegetation in regions like Mirror Pond, Toad Pool, Jacksprite ... it will be interesting what is actually under those canopies!
Get your leaf-canoes ready! GlimmerBelle waterways are not deep, but they look EXTENSIVE.
The SL18B demo area had some bizarre glitches with the waterways, but if they can do this it would be good.
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2 hours ago, MarissaOrloff said:
Vivox servers go down with the tides sometimes I think. My main could be out but my alt is fine and vice versa. There really isn't much you can do about it except to "hurry up and wait"
It is best to use the Windows version with Wine. Linux SLVoice (Vivox 3.2) is over ten years old now and not supported. The 32 bit Windows binaries are included with the Firestorm download (Vivox 4.6). Just make sure Wine is installed and to activate it go to debug settings (ctrl alt shift S) and change FSLinuxEnableWin32VoiceProxy to TRUE and restart Firestorm.
It's odd how the Firestorm people don't mention the different version numbers, and how that wine method loads a vaguely-specified add-on module and then doesn't work. I do have a version of Firestorm I can run under wine, 64-bit Windows, and voice works on that. If you haven't noticed, they really discourage you from using 32-bit Windows code. I think Linden Lab have already stopped supplying a 32-bit Windows version.
I suppose it is worth trying, but when it doesn't work, as comprehensively as it just didn't for me, it feels like a dead end. 64-bit Windows has been a default since Windows 7 came out in 2009. Offering a 32-bit-only option seems ill-advised.
Relying on voice to "involve" your customers is looking a bit stupid.
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Vivox, and SLvoice, still feel problematic. As I said, above, suddenly everything started working, without me making any change to my system. The voice indicators sometimes work, sometimes dont, and I know I have changed nothing.
Then the new Firestorm version appeared. I downloaded it, started using it. That could, I suppose, have messed up voice, but it didn't. Voice works, the indicators, showing who is speaking, are still unreliable.
I am resigned to mentioning a problem, trying to give details of my experience, and getting swamped by suggestions and solutions that suggest nobody has bothered to read my description.
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At least we are getting info about what is happening, but I do feel a little grumpy about the erratic updates. I'm not in the same timezone as Linden Lab, and some elements of the system, here in the forums and the Status announcements, were horribly last-minute.
It did seem as though the restart failures during the Tuesday restarts are something that should be detectable. Whatever shell script is used to restart a region should be sending a signal to a logging system, and when the sim server does restart, it should be sending a signal. I know it's not trivial, but should the Lindens really have to depend on customers to tell them?
As it is, one region was down for about three hours, and restarted almost instantly when a resident contacted live support. Why didn't the Lindens appear to notice?
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The region Restarts have started, certainly before 06:50 SLT. May not be typical, but the restart process had taken at least 20 minutes for the region I had been in. Current users online are about 4000 down on the usual. That doesn't mean so much. I got logged out because of an erratic teleport.
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I think the basic idea of folders-by-year is the least you can do. I prefer to have these as subfolders of a non-system folder. I doubt it's a good idea to let Received, Objects, and Textures to just keep growing, even with subfolders.
Since mesh clothes are so tied to particular mesh bodies, it makes sense to me to organise by the mesh body. Body-type -> Clothing -> Folder for delivery box.
I also run my own Outfits folder. It may have changed, but for a long time the Lindens insisted on a very flat file structure, every Outfit a sub-folder of the Outfits folder. Again, the mesh body type is useful for the tree structure.
To some extent, how you organise your folders depends on how your brain works. Folders-by-year can be awkwardly large. I use the same short prefix for all my alternative-system folders so they sort into a short block
And if you're using a TPV you may have some options you don't get with the standard LL viewer. Check your right-click options. You may not have noticed something. I know I can put a weapon and relevant combat-hud into a folder I can easily add and remove. So the core-outfit is "safe" (no weapon in-hand, visible or invisible), but I can easily switch to a combat/RP mode.
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The internet generally is overloaded with rubbish, such as advertising, malware, and tools to track you. At least the CDN for SL content is pretty safe. I am a bit less confident about some of the the games and tools in SL, which depend on an external server. There have been cases where these were abusive. There are some that are OK. It's not always easy to tell which are which. I remember past incidents, both Viewers and add-ons, which were very serious, and there have been cases, not SL-related, involving such things as web browsers.
Even open-source isn't a guarantee. How many people have the knowledge to check the code, and how many of them will bother to look?
Some people, I trust. Some have blind spots. Some, I don't have a long enough bargepole to not touch them with. And the latter class, the Lindens don't seem to like it if you name them. The biggest problem of today's internet is "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"
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23 hours ago, Monty Linden said:
Okay, the bigger problem of Sad-in-the-UK. 128kbps is pretty much insane. If UDP over a sea cable to a throttled simulator on the west coast of the US is faster than an unthrottled, local (though possibly unpopulated) HTTP cache something is fundamentally wrong. HTTP from Svalbard would be faster.
User changed network provider and problem persisted. Well, if we trust that one provider is not simply reselling services from the other, this tends to point to a local problem. ISP change usually changes the CDN Point-of-Presence and routing to same. Still the same CDN supplier but a good piece of the final hops tends to change.
More a general point, but most of the UK's internet uses the Openreach (subsidiary of British Telecom) physical network, and that has a couple of odd features. One if that most exchanges (the local switching nodes, telephone and IP) are one internet hop from every other. So it doesn't much matter where in the country you are. Ping times to the CDN node I use are around 13ms. I did some runs with Speedtest, all under 25ms, and the UK is effectively one rather small fuzzy blob which confuses internet location tracking.
We do have physically independent networks used by some ISPs for some physical locations. Kcom was the local telephone company for Kingston-upon-Hull, essentially still is. For most of us, the Openreach physical network is all there is, whoever has put their name on the bill, and the set up seems better regulated than anything in the USA. BT owns Openreach, provides their own ISP, but isn't allowed privileged pricing or access.
While it can get a bit geeky, it's not hard to find an IP address to get DNS from elsewhere than your ISP. It may be tricky changing that setting on the black box your ISP provides, but it doesn't depend on more extreme solutions such as VPNs and Pi-Hole. Where it might be a significant barrier is if you're getting cable TV and Internet through the same connection. (This paragraph may not be limited to the UK.)
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10 hours ago, Coffee Pancake said:
I used to run a dedicated SL proxy cache server for everyone in my house that used SL in the period between the introduction of HTTP textures and the CDN. It was a pain to set up, stored hundreds of GB of textures and was only marginally better than the CDN, just wasn't worth the effort to keep running after that.
That's mildly interesting. I am trying to remember how the local, "in viewer" caching has changed. I've been running mine on an SSD, and it is going to be a long while before my connection, running 100% on feeding that, clocks up enough writes to need a replacement. I know some of you have a lot faster connection speed than I do, but my rough figure is an hour to fill the cache. I remember descriptions of how to set up an extra local caching layer, Squid comes to mind, but I think that was long before CDN, and connections were much slower. I also saw talk of using a RAM-disk, in days when the viewer-cache was much smaller.
I suspect a bigger problem is the creators using 1024-size textures for everything. A lot of the time, the on-screen image is never going to be big enough for all those pixels to make a difference. I know the complexity number is an imperfect measure, but I have good-looking all-mesh avatars and outfits that are still under 20k complexity. I have been known to rant a bit about people who have accused me of lagging a sim just because I am a furry.
But enough of that. Maybe the viewer-level caching can be improved. And there is the way texture-caching is done on the GPU card (that's where those big textures can be the killer). But, when you look at cache sizes and connection speeds, where can you get an improvement? That's way above my pay grade. Just make it reliable (and that's where the UDP to HTTP change made a big difference).
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A bit obvious but logging in to a different region often fixes things. But are there any useful tests you can do? There's currently a rather vague warning about problems with the physics data on mesh. Status message on mesh physics problem
Things to check: can you teleport into the problem region, or walk in from an adjacent region? The timing of this thread is certainly after that Status message. So it might be worth a JIRA. But it's just so vague about what the Lindens are looking for.
And UTC just confuses them.
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I can confirm that the RC Restarts have happened.
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Most MC regions were last restarted on July 6th. Some will have had manual restarts since, but a working automatic system would have a lot of restarts today.
Since we don't even have the routine vague warning, it seems a valid inference that the automatic restart system is broken. "'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!!"
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I've been keeping track of the route, which follows the "Big River" through the Chalet regions. We now have station buildings, non-operational track (no guide prims yet) and two tunnels. Hydrant is at the SW end, and the line follow the "Big River" through to Lavon.
Lavon and Hydrant end in very similar style, and it seems very likely there will be new land for both.
After the tunnel south across the river, the next station comes at Artesian Spring.
There is a rez zone on the road which may be close enough to the rail to be useful.
Porcupine Creek has a road/water rezone similarly close to the rail.
The last of the new stations is at Poplar Springs.
The tunnels are similar to the original road tunnel in Seeoraksan, part of the Jeogeot continent, with the same awkwardness about the water level.
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My original problem with Voice, Vivox, and Linux seems to have ended. I have logged in, and Voice is working. I have made no changes to my system since I gave up: all the suggested solutions failing. I haven't loaded new copies of any files, changed any firewall setting since the last time SLvoice three that standard Vivox error pop-up at me. Voice was, some 12 hours ago, still dead to me. And now it works.
It's hard to avoid the conclusion that Vivox servers are unreliable.
It seems the height of recklessness for Linden Lab, for in-world meetings with customers, to be so devoted to using Voice.
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On 6/28/2021 at 3:34 AM, Coffee Pancake said:
I hope they drop the UEFI requirement, that one's a pain in the butt.
How long has UEFI been around?
A long time. But I know my computer doesn't support it. It's still a powerful machine, though it is old.
Linden Lab can't use the power I have.There are world-wide chip shortages. New graphics hardware is insanely expensive.
Windows 11 doesn't really make sense for Second Life, though I can see the advantages of dropping support for BIOS booting
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That Drakeo guy is now stalking me in-world. I decided to block him. He's pushing, as an answer, a viewer version which gets almost no publicity, apparently coming out of nowhere, and that rings alarm bells. Past experiences, I am thinking of the "Brave" web browser and, most recently, the Audacity audio editor, make me wary.
There does seem to be a problem many people are having over what it means to "support" a viewer or a viewer platform. Yes, there needs to be code written: without that there isn't a product to support. But there seems to be an all too common failure, in what we sometimes call "Silicon Valley", though it may not bet the best metonym, to find people who can communicate with humans.
I may write text which is too complicated. It is not unknown for me to use litotes. I know some of you will have to look up what a "metonym" is. But, when I look at what Microsoft and Apple are doing, I think I shall stick with Linux. I won't have to spend any huge sums of cash just for the hardware to run the operating system.
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Bellisseria Railroads
in Linden Homes
Posted
I made a couple of long runs over the weekend, with an experienced rail builder. There were a lot of things we agreed on about the Bellisseria rail nretwork (I am thinking of referring to is as "BR" but that might be confusing) and I learned that a few things in the SLRR/VRC specs are essentially myths.
There are stations and passing loops modelled which have no rez zone. We did experience a couple of total-failure sim crossings, where the vehicle was returned, and the nearest rez zone was a really long way away. Some of these potential sites do seem to be in crowded regions, but when Randalsham Forest has a rail line through, and a station modelled, and is ALL linden land, you would think they can find the resources to support a rail rez zone.
Signalling, including the automatic-half-barrier road crossings, is erratic. Real equipment is built to be fail-safe, it's a core principle of rail safety.. We're coming up on the two-century anniversary of public railways. Trouble is, if something happens to affect a signal between scripts, such as a train sensor and a road-crossing, they fail and don't recover. There's a lot of upper-quadrant semaphore signals on the lines, models of Victorian mechanical technology, and on the real ones, if the operating cable breaks, gravity pulls the signal arm to Danger. Fail-safe. It's a pretty good attitude for programming too.
One of the myths is this one. (I have seen it repeated for roads too.) Michael Linden was doubtful, it's doesn't seem to have any relation to how the region-crossing works (before or after the cloud), but it lingers on the Wiki and in SLRR rail packs. http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Second_Life_Railroad/SLRR_standards#SLRR_track_Region_crossings
And, OK, it's not the real world, but the BR system is full of kinks and bad layout, inviting trouble. You were starting from scratch, and you still managed to have region-crossing going across corners. It doesn't have to be a right-angle crossing of a boundary, but a straight line is more reliable than a curve. No, I don't expect you to follow real-world standards for a curve radius, but the only 50m curve I found a record of on real standard gauge was limited to 5mph, and closed over 50 years ago. This curve is 200m radius.
Oh, and the locomotives were were using were all-mesh, low LI, and low part-count. The old models you can get, the Hobo/VRC freebies, are incredibly primitive and make the region-crossing a lot more work. Old-style: 48 prims and LI=27. Same locomotive and script as a mesh model, with more detail: 13 "prims" and LI=9 (LI isn't a perfect measure, and your viewer will use "prim" for any discrete component of a link-set, classic prim, sculpt, or mesh-object.)
The Chalet line is better for alignment, and sort of OK for rez zones. It'll be interesting to see how it works when it goes functional.