Fluf Fredriksson

Well it's back to conjecture time. My best guess is that EEP itself probably isn't the problem, but either the EEP roll out or the server change on the 20th March pushed things over the edge and exposed problems that had already been introduced in both the LL viewer code and sim code. There's no way LL will want to admit defeat and roll back the EEP changes, so now they are stuck trying to fix the underlying problems which they weren't previously aware of. I say both viewer code AND sim code, because despite LL's official announcement, you can still cross hundreds of sims using Henri's v1 based "CoolVL". Even during all the current TP / crossing disconnect problem. I managed the entire H7 Yavascript pod route using CoolVL without a disconnect (well over 2 hours of constant sim crosssings). Using Firestorm at the moment the absolute maximum I've reached is 45 minutes of Yavascript pod riding before a disconnect. Usually it's 10 to 20 minutes. So viewers based on LL's current viewer code (like Firestorm) are far more ready to give up and give you a disconnect message than an ancient v1 based viewer. For the record, I'd only recommend CoolVL if disconnects are your main priority. It still has problems with teleports sometimes at the moment (although I think less often), and I'm sure many people would rather stick with their current viewer and suffer the disconnections than try and deal with CoolVL.

People who regularly cross sims aren't usually heading for an event. They are either using vehicles on road / water / air to travel around the continents of SL, or are simply flying around or wandering on foot to explore the continents. So your survey would prove that there's no need to fix sim crossings at all (and ignore all the people who regularly try and cross sims)

A bit early for 100% accuracy after the "should reduce" sim roll out fix. But.. It is about a month since all this became a noticeable problem, and it's all we have so far. I'm not sure if it has improved TP's yet. Hard to say with such a random problem. But it looks like it hasn't helped with sim crossings at all. It's a bit worrying that LL keep emphasising they are working on Teleport Failures, and never mention sim crossings. Presumably they hope that if they manage to figure out the cause and fix TP's, it will magically also cure sim crossings. While the two things do have a lot in common, there is a main difference. You can increase network timeouts for TP's and people won't mind waiting a few seconds more (if that helps fix it), but if you do that for sim crossings, you further degrade an already sometimes unpredictable experience. Vehicles have time to de-rez or travel to the next sim while you're stuck waiting, your avatar has time to fly over 3 more sims with no control... Sim crossings are dynamic, teleports are static. Predictably for tech problems at LL. It's not looking great one month later. It's worrying they still don't seem to have any real idea what the root of the problem is, even though it must be something they introduced over the last couple of months or so. It's a worry that they seem fixated on trying to fix Teleports and not Sim Crossings when both are a problem, and both will cause people to "log out and leave it". Oh well. Here's to the next "should reduce problems" fix.

If you're using an old version of Singularity, it will crash you roughly every 15mins. Try the new "nightly" updates. If you aren't using Singularity, you have problems. Even with the current mess, you shouldn't be crashing that often.

Ohhhh ok that explains it! Thanks! Shame I had to raise a support ticket and quote the reply on a forum to find out exactly what's going on, but hey I got there in the end. :) (Why can't they put that in a FAQ somewhere? And why did it take LL support over a week to figure out they couldn't reply on it either?! We may never know)

Well maybe the original person who raised the JIRA bug and the Linden's can still comment on it, but nobody else can. I'm just relaying the reply I got from LL. It looks weird to me as well, but don't shoot the messenger. Nobody has commented on it for quite a while though, so it looks like the support ticket reply is "correct enough".

Afraid not. I sent in a support ticket about it. Reply is that it has been marked as resolved. I hope it's ok to quote this here, can't see why not:

I have news! I can't comment on the JIRA bug either, and apparently it's because it's been marked as "Resolved" ..? Which I'm hoping is some kind of mistake!? Because you're right, it doesn't seem to be resolved.

All the joys of forum troubleshooting in one thread. A vague summary? It is a recognised problem, LL have accepted it as a bug and are working on it. As Whirly said above, a potential fix has been rolled out to Magnum, Bluesteel and LeTigre servers with a call for users to test if this works for them only when tp'ng (not sim crossing) between those types of sim. Which is of course very difficult for the average user to test. Do you know a few random sims on those server channels you could test without ever accidentally tp'ng to a region that isn't on those channels? I don't. So bug fixing seems to have stalled, and nobody seems to be testing if the new fix works or not. When it comes to SL, correlation doesn't always equal cause. DeepBlueJoy for example may have upgraded to an animesh viewer at around the same time the new bug became a problem (around 20th March). Viewer crashes (white screens and crash to desktop), are almost certainly not related to the known bug LL is working on. That seems more likely to be at the user end. The bug also seems to come and go. It's possible to have a glitch free night, then constant disconnects the next day. Allegedly, turning off the sky (ctrl+alt+shift+6) helps cure or reduce the problem for a lot of users, but I don't know if that's still true since the partial bug fix rolled out to 3 kinds of server only. At the moment we have an SL grid running "fixed" and "unfixed" server code, and I haven't seen anyone yet figure out what effect that is actually having on Windlight capable viewers (with or without the sky turned on). I've given up and resorted to using CoolVL, which I'd hesitate to recommend to anyone. If you remember the old v1 viewers you may get a buzz of nostalgia, but the developer has some quirky ideas on what to implement (or not) in the viewer. Examples: the minimap is almost useless, touch events are "quirky", it's slower to load assets than v2 viewers but it does get there eventually, and it might take you a day to figure out how to get a chat bar in the local chat box. But at the moment it does seem to disconnect less than WL enabled viewers. Even with all the fun of new LL recognised sim/TP bugs, it's still worth checking your system isn't contributing to the problem. Amongst other things to check: Is your router / computer using fast reliable DNS servers? If you have an ADSL filter, is it starting to burn out? Is your router itself stable? (difficult to test that one!) Is it worth asking your ISP/Phone provider to check the line for noise? At the moment though, you can probably assume that even if all those sorts of sources of disconnects are fine and working as well as they ever did .. you will probably still get some SL disconnects. But for now we wait to see if LL rolls out the theoretical bug fix it has on some servers to all the other servers, at which point most users will know if it actually fixed anything or not. Then the shouting may commence again.

Only if it looks like it has the shortest pay back time at the meeting though :)

I said it could be done, but it won't be done. It's expense not age or complexity. Yes the EEP roll out is a complete and utter failure, but it's done to generate more revenue for LL (by selling lighting environments). When your project is driven by accountancy then trying to generate more money will always come before spending money. You think SL is messed up because of it? Look at the real world some time. Same problem.

And now back to the current problem. Which is still weirdly random. Some night's I can slide though literally 100's of sim crossings with no problems. A couple of nights later I'm back to "PING!". And this is with no windlight enabled at all. I'm sort of praying this is because we have a "maybe" bug fix on some servers and a "not fixed at all" bug fix on a bunch of other servers, but even so it doesn't make much sense. For all the armchair critics out there, sim crossings (and teleports to a degree) have always been a special issue with SL. It is nothing like as easy as you might assume it is. You're trying to move a 100% customisable avatar from one (nearly) 100% customisable sim to another, all the time you are trying to keep IM communications / group chats running smoothly along with a bunch of scripts. It's not at all comparable to "my MMO can do it! why can't SL?". Yes in theory it could all be re-written from the ground up, but you're looking at dev time in the 100's of hours to do that ("big cost"), and when it's working mostly ok, it works mostly ok as it is. So why pay the big cost? It looks bad at the moment because EEP (and I still think possibly other changes), have screwed up the baseline of "it mostly works ok". When it (I pray it) .. gets back to mostly working ok, nobody would dream of investing 100's of hours of dev time in to fixing it. Ideally maybe, but this isn't an ideal world. Sure. Politely nag the Linden's. I think they have bigger problems though (and they won't get addressed either). EDIT: Thinking about it, 100's of hours is way too low, it's in the 1000's of hours.

I doubt it's net neutrality problems. Though hey, chuck it in the bin of possible guesses, why not? Europe here though, and Monday night? Made the entire H7 Yavascript route with no disconnect. Last night? Disconnected so often that my account eventually got locked out. On one account tonight? Regularly disconnect on 3rd or 4th TP attempt. Other account (the one that got locked out last night!)? Completed the entire Yavascript T1 loop with no disconnects. It's like Russian Roulette.

No that doesn't sound weird at all! Usually I ignore the specific time to log in messages as well, and it all works fine. Not this time. When I could eventually try to log in, it got stuck on "Requesting region capabilities", so I had to log in to a random sim name instead of "Last location". So it appears perhaps my saved account details didn't know which region I was in? New to me, and yes, definitely different.

Well since the great *maybe a fix* only rolled out to LeTigre, Bluesteel and Magnum servers, even if it does fix the EEP related problems, sim crossings are still messed up, and for general SL use, TP's are still messed up for many users (but not all? Huh?). I know of some users who don't seem to have any trouble with sim crossings and TP's. They are mystified why I keep disconnecting. Until now I've fallen back to using a viewer that has no clue at all about Windlight/EEP, and that was working ok ... until today after the updates to LeTigre, Bluesteel and Magnum servers. It could just be coincidence, but I'm back to significantly high sim crossing failures again, but now I get them even when I use a non-windlight capable viewer! YAY! (raises fist!) "Progress!" Maybe because the fix is only rolled out to some servers? Who knows!? But it ain't good. The whole thing is a mess. It doesn't make logical sense to blame the sim code alone when some users are having no problems, but others are disconnecting regularly. Also rolling the fix out to some servers and then asking users to test it is just crazy. A list of say 12 of each kind of server for people to hop around would have been helpful for the truly dedicated? I gave up. Trying to randomly TP to find Bluesteel servers I kept disconnecting, and since I can't comment on the JIRA entry anyway (LL support ticket still waiting to find out why on that one). What's the point in me trying to test it? And the icing on the cake? Even if this was 100% fixed tomorrow. We'd still have messed up skies, lighting models that change from sim to sim, and mainland day time all over the place for months. It's a complete and utter mess up from just about any angle you care to look at it. EDIT: And it just gets better. Apparently I disconnected so much that the account I was using got locked out for around 5 hours (and yes apparently it means it). I've never seen that before in all the years I've been in SL. Also I've noticed that when someone gets disconnected on one of these new failures, they appear to still be logged in for hours (until you send them an IM in fact). This doesn't just look like an EEP problem, this looks like something is probably also messed up on the account servers. (Or the EEP errors are so bad and continue for so long without proper disconnect that they are messing up the account servers?). Anyway. It's the first night in a long time I just give up on loading up SL. Until this gets fixed it's just a nightmare.

Ah Linden Land, the longest topic of confusion ever. (If they actually wanted more people to buy mainland, they'd do well to spend some time explaining this a lot better!) An attempt to explain (Being a condensed version of all the land questions I keep having to explain to people). Ok so now you get 1024 "free per month* if you go premium. So you can have a 512m Linden Home and 512m on the Mainland as well without paying anything extra per month, but you do have to buy the land on the mainland. To check your options on land, go to your SL Dashboard, and click "Land Manager" on the left, then "Land use Fees", and you get a nicely confusing couple of tables to stare at. The bottom table shows you how much extra it will cost you *per month* to own more than 1024m with a premium account, and it goes in steps. Here's where it confuses most people. Say you decide you can afford 1024m per month ($7 per month), now you're looking for 2048m because you have 1024 already, and now you can have 1024 more. It makes sense for most people to have all that land on the same sim (region) on the mainland, because then you get the combined prim use of all the land. The land doesn't have to be adjacent. So if you are paying $7 for 1024+1024, you could have 4 x 512m parcels in one sim, and you could use all your prim allowance just on one of the 512m parcels. BUT. If you have a 512m in 4 different sims, then each 512 is stuck with it's own 512m prim allowance. The Linden Land searches suck. Some good answers here on why and how to begin to get around it, but here's another factor. Say you are looking for 2048m in one sim. The land searches can help you find parcels that are exactly that size, but in some places you might find 4x512m parcels all nicely next to each other that you could buy and join up, or a 1024 and a 726 and a 128! You get the idea. Alonya Su's method (above) for finding land (actually looking for it where you want it on the map) is therefore about the best way of finding a bargain that everyone else missed. One lazy method is to hop on a yavascript pod, then bring up the map with land for sale highlighted, then just cruise around looking for yellow blobs. (Bonus points for annoying Prokofy Neva). Another note in that vein is .. if you wanted that 2048, but found a 4096 you loved, you could buy the 4096, divide off the bit you want, then either abandon or sell the bit you don't want. But for that month, you'd have to pay the land tier for the 4096 even if you only had it for 5 minutes. It's also worth noting that paying a monthly fee for land on a premium account isn't a straight good deal. The cost you pay per m2 varies depending on which tier of land owner you are. People paying for 2048 or 4096 tier, pay the worst ratio for $/m2 (closely followed by 8192 & 16384). People paying for 32768+ tier or 1024- are paying less per m2. Why does that matter? Because people with the large amounts of land tier are usually the ones that rent it out, and that's why sometimes you can rent mainland for cheaper than you could get it as a premium account. But beware the mad maths of SL. If you're a premium account paying 0 tier, you get 300L$ a week, and you have 1024m for nothing. If you want to find rented land cheaper (and not be a premium account), you have to calculate the cost in L$ of being premium per year minus the 300L$ per week, and plus the cost of the amount of land you want to rent. Only then can you actually tell if it's cheaper to be non premium and rent, or go premium and pay tier. Right now, after the increase to 1024 free per month, it's almost certainly cheaper to go premium and pay tier, but when the land owners have reduced rentals to compete again, it's going to be a close call. The only other factor to consider then is "How nice is the land owner? And will they vanish one day?" Hope that helped!

LOL. I do have to admire Prokofy in some ways. I left SL for about 4 years+, came back .. and the rants continue, just the same as they ever did. It's like nothing changed at all in Prokofy world. There's something admirably dependable about Ol' Prokofy Rants. On the other hand. I use those annoying pods (and SLRR tracks and trains) quite often. I've seen one stuck SLRR train, but it's stuck on it's own track, not annoying anyone as far as I can see. I've never seen the yavascript pods stuck as P suggests, and I've spent hours on them. (If I know I'm going to be stuck in IM's for a while, it's nice to have the scenery roll past while I type). Also .. if you spend enough time exploring them, you do develop a feel for how much of SL is laid out. Landmarks become familiar. The whole world seems to shrink a little. Fairly often you can TP to a shop and think "Oh I know where this is". I don't think I'd have got that knowledge of the land without the pods and trains. Once again Prokofy, you're welcome to your long posts, extreme views and polarised opinions. I'm glad you have them. Keep doing it! (But it doesn't mean you're always right).