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MarkTwain White - 27/Jul/07 08:22 AM
This is a good description as to what we, a pretty large community in SL, are experiencing in sailing. But the problem of course is much broader. All manner of vehicles experience these same effects and even if you are not in a vehicle it becomes standard pain the butt LITERALLY to detach and reattach attachments that go to never never land or you your you know what.
This issue is definitely very big - thanks Bri for raising it.
Also, although I have no data to back up what follows, empyrical observation suggests that the chances of sinking/flying whilst crossing a sim boundary increase with the speed of the vehicle. For the record I have experienced this problem with both Mac and Windows viewers. It is really strange - consider these two scenarios: 1. sub-30 prim tako, my avatar with no prim attachments (other than the tako HUD) 2. 215 prim Trudeau attachable yacht, prim hair, shoes, jewlery - i'm probably carrying around 500-plus prims. What would you think would exhibit the worse effect? it seems to matter not - both are equally as bad in my experience.
A workaround is to use the 'hudlite' or 'hudliter', provided you are experienced enough to use the minimap to gauge wind direction, although these 2-prim HUDs still experience the same effect. And to wear absolutely no other prim or HUD attachments, although obviously this does nothing to mitigate the other problems. In the last week, I have not been able to complete ONE SINGLE LAP of any of the TYC or SYC courses. I used to sail to relax...
I'll testify that primcount on boat/avatar doesn't matter. Bare 30-prim Tako or 255+25 prim sailboat with a complex HUD and a prim avatar? Both feel the same nasty effects at borders.
I've crossed sim borders in better condition with a 200+ prim boat and a 1200 prim avatar in early 2005 than a bare avvie and Tako these days. If my taco hud does not loose any of the information on it when I am racing now I am astonished!
I have at times managed to pass through up to 5 or 6 sims without becoming an open-cockpit submarine, although a quick ducking is normal. I do keep an eye on minimap and try to slow at sim boundaries.
Given that I have difficulty crossing without a boat, I'm kinda delighted every time I manage a crossing when on one. I don't think it's the prim-count. It's just that the sim handover latency generally sucks. Losing the boat when on a cruise is a real heart-breaker. Where to rezz the boat ??? Perhaps Linden water could permit rezzing by all - but return a newly-rezzed object after 30 seconds (15 seconds?) unless the prims are sat on. Maybe the constantly changing wind direction is LL's way of "resolving" the problem for sailors. If they program the wind to constantly head you, you can't actually reach the sim boundary. :) I'll confirm the above has been a problem for awhile, and thanks for reporting and commenting on it. I'm linking it to an internal issue. It isn't trivial to fix; I'll let our devs know this continues to be a hot issue.
Thank you Torley for responding... I must reply that your revised 'Title' says it all.
?? (Region crossings are occasionally slow) ?? I was noting that 'slowness' by the speed today flying across several sims before my viewer tossed me into the bit bucket from hell. After a relog, the sail club members were not as polite discussing loss of huds and several other of my evils list. Maybe a dev or manager will realize our desire to Skype or Fancy cloud is "occasionally" unwanted! I did note the frequency of evils is reduced when using the Able viewer or the Nicholaz. Torley,
Is this some odd way to say that you guys don't have a clue how to fix it and we whiners have to shut up and try to live with it? It's funny actually, we never encountered hud loss before, until a few months ago. You broke something and now we have to beg to get it fixed. Gawd am I glad you guys don't run a real business like a garage. Sorry Miss, we kinda broke your breaks (stopping is occasionally slow) but we will fix it if you get us enough voters. Plonkers. More accurately, it's a very complex problem and we'd like to fix it but it's sadly not so easy too -- a "band-aid" won't do. It's personally caused me a lot of pain because I'm often either attachment-laden or in vehicles. :(
We do welcome Resident efforts to help us fix it. Also to clarify, votes help tell us "You're affected" and want us to fix it and are one of several criteria. For example, content loss bugs, regardless of votes, need to be fixed ASAP, but votes can help draw attention or help us prioritize one issue above other when there are a multitude of "hot" ones we need to respond to quickly. Different people have different priorities, after all. I have had repeated problems with specific sim boundaries, most infuriatingly Tasman -- entering both from the west and from the north -- in the last 3-4 days
What has been different about these soar-into-the-air-then-underground episodes, lately, is that when I regain some measure of control over my avatar, the left- and right-arrow keys no longer work. I don't know what the significance is, or if it's boat-related (yet) -- but hopefully it will help you FIX THIS THING SOON!! Sorry for yelling, but enough, already.... not being a programmer, i wont have much to offer here. but, it seems to matter how fast the boat is going. when the software is running smoothly ( not laggy) , a boat crosses sim borders without any notice or minimal disturbance when going slower , but at faster speeds it sinks deep. maybe a patch code could be built in at sim borders, or in the boat scripting that would "head fake" the computers into thinking a boat or vehicle was really going slow , even though it actually was going faster , as it approached a boundary.
"Different people have different priorities, after all."
Torley, truer words were never spoken. I am sure bringing voice to SL was also a "very complex problem" and not "trivial" to do. Yet LL decided that was *their* priority, ignoring the *repeated* requests from residents to improve grid performance and stabilize content loss as THE #1 priority. Thousands of concerned residents signed http://projectopenletter.com, the gist of which was FIX THE GRID before adding new features that very few are clamoring for. Yes, that even includes your beloved Windlight. Comments here, comments on the blog, comments in the SL forums, comments in 3rd party sites and blogs are wondering just when LL is going to take the priorities of the residents seriously. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- @Jacqueline: Understood -- so that's why I'm going to debunk inaccuracies right now! Behind-the-scenes, there are many, *many* projects in our internal Issue Tracker which aren't shown on the public one, which focus on performance & stability aka "FIX THE GRID". I know more needs to be said about them, and we can sure do a better job of communication -- so responding, stay tuned for Iridium Linden's message about this in the next Second Opinion newsletter, I am sure all of you interested on what progress we are making on that front won't want to miss it. One of HetGrid + Message Liberation's (which you may have read on the blog) benefits is that it enables to test new releases with bug fixes (because sometimes there are side effects) on smaller sets of regions, as opposed to the whole Grid. If things go well, then we can scale outwards. We also intend it to mitigate the historical difficulties associated with "I HATE WEDNESDAYS!" downtime, since generally speaking, the whole Grid won't have to be taken offline for server-side upgrades, but it can be done more piecemeal. We also plan to do upcoming blog posts sharing more about progress on serious issues like inventory loss (which is a priority for many). Again, to EMPHASIZE, there's a lot of work that happens within Linden Lab that we don't trumpet enough, and I'd love to see that continue to change, so for your benefit, you both are aware and can see the effects it has. (IMHO, we need more Lindens to write about what we're doing... otherwise how do you even know, right?) Also please feel free to check many of my own comments on the Issue Tracker; as someone who spends a lot of time inworld, I empirically feel the brunt of a lot of these pains, so count me in. ALSO, WindLight itself is a project which includes many bug fixes, such as rendering optimizations to increase viewer performance & stability. That's part of the whole point, after all -- it doesn't make any sense whatsoever for this to be an "OR" situation when infact, it's more holistic. As an "AND" context, this carries a priority on addressing longtime problems with our rendering engine that've sucked, and contributed to viewer-side lag. Here are some examples of WindLight cleanup, more of which will be shared in our release notes: * Faster, more reliable occlusion culling - occluded regions are discovered instantaneously, so no more random bad frames due to moving the camera too quickly. * No geometry transform overhead on region crossing - results in region crossings being slightly smoother * Faster frustum culling - less time spent determining what's visible, thus better overall framerate * No copy-to-texture for ripple water - objects under water are rendered to texture at half resolution, resulting in better overall framerate * Faster sky updates - the non-WindLight (aka no-shader) skies update quicker Note the bit about "region crossings", which relates to this issue too. It isn't a *big* difference, but it is incremental progress we must continue to make. (Also keeping in mind that with beautiful atmospheres, people want smooth vehicle performance -- again, they are connected.) I'll continue to advocate that more Lindens should share what work they're up to, and in the cases where they're too busy actually doing that work, I'll make time to share what I know about it. I wholeheartedly agree that we need to keep driving forward and improving performance & stability (which I sometimes abbreviate as "P&S"), and to that effect, remember we have around 70%, almost 3/4ths, of our devs involved on issues that directly contribute to those efforts, across a broad range of projects. We don't need false dichotomies -- what we need is better followup, and I'm all too happy to share your actionable concerns with other Lindens, because we -- and I certainly can say this personally -- want your experience to be a happy one. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- "We also plan to do upcoming blog posts sharing more about progress on serious issues like inventory loss (which is a priority for many)."
That would be a good start, Torley. The only thing remotely addressing these issues in the blog lately has been a grid or server monkey's (LL's terms of endearment, not mine) notification that some operational procedure was performed to relieve that day's outage. But excuse us if we take a lot of pronouncements from LL with a healthy grain of sand. We've been enticed with a lot of other things that we've never heard about again. For instance: havok 2 Mono HTML on a prim SL v2 (which seemed to just lead to a redoing of the SL number versioning) I have to just shake my head as I read through a transcript such as this: http://www.slhistory.org/index.php/Town_Hall_4/27/05 I'm all for new features that fix bugs or improve performance, but what issues will be introduced? Unfortunately SL performance has gone steadily downhill since I joined in 2005. I would gladly *GLADLY* trade the performance we had pre v1.7 for the features we have now. We are currently working on creating comprehensive teleport and region crossing failure metrics, part of a bigger project to improve both teleports and region crossing reliability (as they are closely related). This will give us better insight into weak points so we can improve them.
I just wish to add my voice to the repeated requests to make sim crossings smoother. Sailing in sl is a high priority for me and many other sl residents. The gradual deterioration in this characteristic over the last few months has really created a lot of frustration and disillusionment with sl. Please could you priorities this over putting more bells and whistles into sl. I am sure you have heard the cry to fix the grid instead of adding to it over and over again. So - how about it ? We all know how wonderful sl can be right now - with no further "improvements" - when it works :) I have observed over the years in visual chats and my tine in Second Life that it boils down to which resident is satisfied. The Active Resident or the Passive Resident.
The Passive Resident only needs a spot to sit and the features are paraded by. Eye Candy and chat pizzazz offered up. Windlight and Voice are classic passive enhancements. The Active Resident requires a lot more. Participation and more complex objects to hold physics etc.. Business decisions, expansion and the hardware capability favor the Passive resident growth. That futures the server into a basic repository only storing files for the client and doesn't require complex interaction directly with the webserver itself. I am trying to recall the last enhancement targeted to the Active Resident. I fully agree to a fix of this proplem, I enjoy sailing and flying and have water up to Linden Protectet water,. and it is werry bad to cross around the area aroun Tagona Torley's sure right about one thing in particular. This will be a complex issue to resolve. :(
The issue also continues to become more complex as heads are buried in the sand and the problem ignored because it's difficult in favor of sexy new features that then also contribute further to the problem. This is so not just sailing. In fact sailing and other slow moving vehicles are almost the only things we can use anymore it's gotten so bad. Please do something about this!
This issue was meant to be fixed many many months ago with server tech which meant the next sim was connected to before crossing, and it shows as we can get terrain data s we get closer and also avatar/prim data. But trying to cross into those sims just times out. Something tells me this is down to the recent slowdown in inter-sim communication. Sim crossings often timeout and thus you're left seemingly flying/walking forever intot he non-existant horizon, which can be very disconcerting, even creepy and scary for some people.
For an issue that was meant to be fixed alreayd, it's strange it has cropped up again and LL's weak response to fixing what seems to be a major bug, when you have 1000s of sims and going between each one is so troublesome. Failed/slow sim crossings are getting all too frequent, I think they're even above the 50% mark in my recent experience. Changed environment t hardware neutral.
Mercia As the Cannot Stop Flying Issue has been interpreted as only affecting the original poster, and resolved because the original poster says it does not appear to be such a problem of late, I am transferring the Cannot Stop Flying at Region Crossing issue to here, and have updated the Description accordingly.
Mercia It's not just sailing, and not just size, and not just speed. It breaks pennyfarthings and aircraft with equal impunity. Crossing between sims is the most dangerous thing I do in SL most of the time. I'm working on an inter-sim transit system for two estates, and it's simply not possible to get there under present conditions.
Val I am an old avatar (3 1/2 years on SL!). I have watched the Sim Crossing throughut this period and am APPALLED at SL's lack of apparent interest. Folks, this is a VERY noticable issue....involving many of us DAILY!! I am a sailor and pilot in real life and remember when flying and sailing were enjoyable.....well before all of the 'modern' add ons appeared (voice, etc). PLEASE revisit this issue and make it a priority.
Linked: VWR-864 = While this is not strictly a viewer issue, it is a big (and very popular!) performance related issue
Linked: SVC-280 = Not a magic bullet fix by any stretch of the imagination, but it should reduce the amount of data that requires sending when an avatar is passed over to another simulator. Likewise it provides an example that could perhaps be used to improve other chunks of avatar data to reduce message size. Agreed. I've been in SL for over a year. My sense is that Sim Crossing has gotten much worse, even while simply walking or flying.
Just read Lyssa's comment and I agree. This has been allowed to get a lot worse by being ignored, region crossings started getting worse and worse so long ago I can't even remember which version(s) introduced changes to region crossing performance. This is a big problem as the changes that caused the huge delays in crossing are now so far back that undoing them will likely be impossible, if they're even known anymore!
The changes that caused these issues should have been reversed or fixed when they happened, yet resident complaints of border crossing issues seems to keep being ignored when they are raised =( I must say, Bri's descriptions of region crossings are gentle compared to some of my more memorable experiences.
I've flown or sailed across the continents a grand total of 3 times for both. During all three times, several times I've flown off into oblivion, eventually losing my vehicle, then myself, then going into partial lockup, where the world no longer exsists, but the viewer's buttons and such continue to function. There have also been problems with large vehicles, which is to say, vehicles approaching the max link distance, both physical and non-physical, coming unlinked over borders, causing the pilot seat to fly out of the vehicle, and leave a big floating mess behind to clean up with non-phys, and causing a theatrical explosion of prims with physical vehicles, leaving an even harder mess to clean up, as some parts can land a sim or two away. This is a major problem with my TIE Phantom Cloakfighter(physical), which comes in just below the max link distance, as well as Razi Soyinka's Corellian Gunship(non-physical), which has never crossed more than 5 borders before coming unlinked. Even better are what happens when you increase the speed a bit. I have a certain vehicle, which appears to have become my first case of missing inventory, as it is not where it should be, or anywhere for that matter. It demonstrates a really interesting border problem, as it's capable of flying so fast that it actually goes offworld on region crossings, gets returned to your inventory, and leaves you flowing there, the world frozen, but the viewer still fully operable, as was mentioned before. This is probably THE reason that nobody buys vehicles. There are oh so many reasons, from all the no-enter parcels to those aggressive, borderline illegal Home Security Orbs, but this is by far the most common, and one of the most destructive problems vehicles have, and it's a very good chance if it were fixed, vehicles would sell infinately better. Ah yes, that reminds me, another set of issues, can better remedies be devised for failed vehicle crossings into restricted or full parcels than being ejected from your vehicle and watching it fly on without you (in the case of restricted parcels), or having your vehicle returned to your inventory, being tossed back across the border, then having your controls locked requiring a restart (in the case of full parcels)?
PS. I found the original vehicle box buried somewhere with a fresh copy of the vehicle inside. The crashingly fast ship is the R-Type FX2 Shrike. Very pretty, wish it was mod. I could apply lots of neat effects now... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Bug
Open
Critical
Region crossings are occasionally slow
