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MarkTwain White added a comment - 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 ??? 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
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:
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: 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.
Thanks for the update, Torley
 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 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... The title "Region Crossings are occasionally slow" just does not do justice to this collection of issues.
Some of them are not occasional, they always happen; and if it was just a bit of slowness it would be less problematic than the following (to summarize): 1) When I am crossing a region boundary in a vehicle, my vehicle should not 2) When I am crossing a region boundary with or without a vehicle I do not want 3) When travelling in a vehicle, and encountering parcel full or land with no object entry permissions, I do not want Did I leave anything out? This is an issue I have long hoped they would fix. I have walked across sim borders only to lose control of my avatar as it walks off into the distance forever.
I've managed to lose attachments a quarter of a way into a sim. Which might suggest that the inter-sim connectivity needs some looking at, if the latency is that high. Perhaps they need to look at the way avatars are transferred from sim to sim, so that they don't have to send quite as much data when crossing borders. I was a fairly avid sailor until last March, because sim crossings were getting to be difficult then.. now they are impossible. I have a good half dozen boats (or more) in my inventory that I don't even bother pulling out to look at let alone use. Lindens need to start paying attention to what their customers want instead of what they feel like working on because it's easier. Fix the broke stuff before adding new (how many manhours were used to create the still-screwy voice system that could have been better put to use in fixing problems that have been with this progam/simulation/game/virtual reality since before I joined up over a year and a half ago?)
I've actually noticed sim crossings have gotten better over the last several months. At one point it got so bad I sold off some land and put up a wall on the sim edge of a parcel because region crossing had too high a chance of logging me off. Flying was impossible, within two or three sim crossings you would ALWAYS lose your plane.
It's not that bad any more. It's still not as good as it was when I started, but it IS improving. I too have seen performance drop since joining just under a year ago. I really enjoy the vehicle side of sl, I like planes, helicopters, cars and boats, yet the most I can manage is flying around or driving in a small circle, border crossings are nearly impossible, which to me at least kind of kills the point of it all.To add to this, it's not like this is a free service we are whining on about is it, it is one most of us pay top dollar for.
with better hardware, and trying crossing between sims with better performance, latelly I've noticed an smaller rate of mishaps during region crossing, althought I must admit I rarely come out of my parcel.......
Right.. I currently have VERSION 1.8.3.5
now this version is somewhat old but guess what I get 0 teleport problems and 0 region crossing problems! How weird is this? The only problems I get are.. RARE walking into ground, but it resolves.. Hmm - maybe you should check the 1.8.3.5 code and maybe fix it? - Just a comment to tell you older versions like 1.8.3.5 work FINE! After that version.. it went all in a pickle. I won't upgrade until It's fixed ever since the upgrades to 1.19 this issue has been worse.
logs added. I confirm, after Havok4 the sim crossing got worse, to the point that we hardly ever manage to cross without needing to relog to
fix the consequences. there are times when this happens even when not using vehicles or attachments. we're experiencing this in 9 regions which suffer no lag, using both the normal and the beta viewers. i just hope this can get some priority ! Some boundary crossings are worse than others, we have a group of 10 islands one full the rest openspace. I know which ones I need to go carefully over the boundary and others which are fine, so does this also have something to do with the server the sim is on and maybe other stuff, as well as the code version of server and client.
For a crossing just to be slow would be good, or rather better than what actuall happens which is that you just keep on sliding through then stop, sometimes back to the boudary others just regain control where you are. One inparticular is a nightmare every time without fail - and that is just walking never mind trying to cross it in a vehicle - and it would be the one with an underwater tunnel crossing the boundary so you end up outside of the tunnel. The evolution of virtual environment has seen massive improvements in content and creative medium that approaches the interactive power of a real world environment, all with the notable exception of the sim crossovers. Seamless transition across these artificial borders is absolutely necessary to render the virtual world as plausible, with the same quantum effect on interactivity that virtual building has done for creativity. Sailors in SL are merely the front line in seeing this problem; the general population, as it develops, has begun recognizing that crossovers are unpredictable (and damaging, a times) jolts back to reality. They do not have the smooth mobility to confidently build larger sim clusters and more creative environments. It is the next logical step to correct these crossovers to get the full sense of world, in the virtual world.
Worren In addition to the latency issues with sim crossings, crashing into banlines continue to be a problem. It is near to impossible to see a banline when moving on a sailboat, then cross a sim right into a banline. Needless to say, flying into the water and ending up on several plots away and having your boat thrown who-knows-where isn't very realistic.
Updated for current server version and rephrased summary. The problem has apparently worsened with the last server update; even vehicle crossing between two new sims with very low frame time (i.e Elbert to Eyharts) results in a full bork where you fly across multiple sims and the vehilce comes off.
Please refer to
something happened. sim crossing is still causing little jerks or short freezing, but got definitely better than the last few months, to the point that i can think of go sailing !
what caused this? not sure whether an update or something else, like a routing optimisation among our regions. looking forward for further improvements - and stability. @Bunnie - we're continuing to work on this. We've made a few fixes that knocked down the most frequent failure points, and a big one is yet to come as part of the
Thanks Soft, for several months I had been spending most of my time in one sim and teleporting to other places. Now that I live in the corner of the next sim (Pavonia) I regularly notice it when I cross into the adjoining sims. Actually, used to live across the linden road from there and the change is dramatic! Nothing obvious in the statistics bar so I am guessing it is data transfer/handoff at play.
Not sure if it is related, but teleports started failing much more frequently too! Arrgh, me pirate ship can't get across a sim to chase treasure without a stumble. And my $4000 custom motorcycle (with me on it) has flown to +100,000, +100,000, +100,000 and farther from SL. I have a Quicktime movie to prove it.
What good are pretty sunsets if I can sail (or ride off) into the sunset? (Oh, and why does the 1.20 RC perform better than regular viewer 1.20?. I've gone back to the RC.) This issue has existed since I joined SL in 2006. Over that time, it has swung back and forth between bad and worse. This issue is still in effect. Repro: 1.20 viewer and 1.24.4 server. I understand that this one face of an underlying architecture issue, but between this and the asset issues, it feels like SL is reduced to a very pretty chat client every 3-4 days.
test cases: Please, LL, show us some of the transparency we love, and give us some kind of status on this issue, as well as the other highly voted ones. From what we see, nothing is really happening with this. a few days some sims (2 full sims, 3 open sims) were joined in the regionmade up by Geometry, Astronomy, Navigation, Tradition. Intention was to make an area fit for sailing. But crossing sim borders at some speed, the avatar is pulled out from the craft.
So the issue still exists. this is one of the worst bugs in SL
did you mention prims go phantom when crossing? bridges to next sim are nearly impossible to make. convention centers get jacked up. DIPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! please fix! builders are really suffering with this I understand that management has finally come up with a solution for this one. As region crossings are a resource intensive operation, a toll will be automatically collected each time you cross a region and the tolls will be adjusted higher depending on how many attachments you have. The highest tolls will be imposed on those using vehicles as these strain the servers to the maximum and result in a reduced user experience. Even as the tolls are imposed, management will be monitoring avatar region crossing and those who use attachments or vehicles with excessively high prim counts or scripts (exact numbers are TBD) or attempting to cross at excessively high speeds (the speed limit TBD) will be given a warning or suspension if warnings are not heeded. This new policy along with the toll revenue will ensure that Linden's very limited technical resources are devoted to improving the virtual meeting space experience for corporate and government customers.
This is my BIGGEST gripe..I love flying vehicles, and the situation has only gotten worse it seems.
This "bug" or whatever we choose call it really irks me. We have a virtual world...and yet we cannot travel except by teleporting and bypassing th world itself. I am EXTREMELY cautious each time I cross a border (no fun flying in just one sim/region; why do it??? it's the travel and seeing all of SL and what people have created that is so cool)...and yet, even with extreme caution (phys or nonphys vehicles) I am crashed every few sims. I put up with it but absolutely hate it. Actually, I have heard of other virtual worlds...and will begin checking them out to see if they offer anything better. Definitely getting worse.
Not a showstopper but really this is a critical issue and I can see why everyone (myself included) are starting to get annoyed by this. From being at the meetings I know that it's a complex issue but the fact that there's been little to negative improvement (depending on the day) id disappointing.
I realise LL are busy, and this is probably a complicated architectural change - but, really LL, I mean come on???? I have been in SL since 2004 and vehicle sim-crossings have NOT improved ONE JOT. It's pretty disgraceful. This destroys my immersion and enjoyment of Second Life no end. Please concentrate on stability and reliability, and not on superfluous unneeded features. Thank you.
Response made to josh viking's comments. Would making the boarder wider help? Allowing more time to pass before the AV actually reaches the boarder. A false boarder, so to speak, remotely sensing the AV before it arrives. Very much an I/O speed problem. Reducing mouse sensitivity in preferences does help, some. Being a programmer is a gadget possible inside SL?
Still a problem on April 5 2009 This seems to affect non-physical vehicle region crossings as well.
Once hand-off fails... I can't teleport home or away. I'm sitting in space in a region that doesn't seem to acknowledge that I'm there, requiring a relog. (and often incurring the 5 minute can't-log-back-in penalty). I usually request region reboots when I notice this happening and it seems to go away for a while after that. To be sure this is indeed another of SL's very sensitive issues and until addressed will continue to be the same.
I have land on 2 adjoining sims and its frustrating to say the least when one can travel west and fall through the cracks yet travel beck east and pass over with little or no problems. Flying seems to have the least affect with only a minor "twitch'" being noticed most of the time. It should be given some priority and we (the CUSTOMER) should be kept up to date with on going advice re this problem. I note with interest that the last notes from any 'Linden' was several months ago even if lindens are not truly involved it would be nice to know that they acknowledge the problem and be the 'Transparent' company they have always said they would be. Hiding from it doesn't fix it Wasn't this supposed to get better with the implementation of LLNet instead of worse?
"This" has definitely been getting worse especially in the last couple of weeks.
Specifically, very slow Sim border crossings, and various forms of "crashes". IMHO This issue is now getting critical for sailing, and Im sure it must be a problem for the various flyers out there too. How do we get Lindens to take notice and actually do something. Actually assigning someone to it might be a good start. Perhaps we all have to just start filing tickets every time theres a problem (and reopening when they fail to answer in a meaningful way). Failed region crossings has gotten far worse in the last fw weeks. I have an autopilot driven flying ferry system that goes between two full-SIMs approximately once every 10 minutes or on demand. I used to see around 10-15of the ferries in my Lost & fround folder, or about 7% failures in 24 hours. Now I see nearly 100 of them a day. That is nearly a 50% failure rate. Almost all of them are reported as objects that have fallen off the end of the world, but with the coordinates clearly in between the SIMs. Example:
Second Life: Your object 'Faery Ferry (30) - gateway' has been returned to your inventory lost and found folder from parcel 'Gateway to the Faery Crossing' at Wildefleur 124, 257 because it went off-world. Additional failures occur with great regularity. I now find vehicles stuck just past a region crossing point no longer physical. Manually settting the vehicle back to physical awakens it to go to its destination. Region crossings are now routinely causing loss of the physical attribute. Now I can work around this problem by haveing a changed_region event kick a timer to keep seting the the physical attribute for several seconds, but I believe the Lindens should investigate why crossings have gotten much worse lately. Added a few more Sim crossing prbloms I have come across in the past few days and the fact that server 1.27 has made things far worse, and its with any version of SL's veiwer, even using Openlife's veiwer, so its not software on our ends this must be hardware on LL's end. Linden invest in Firewire dam it.
I added twonew evils that have been occuring recently. Now on a region crossing, the vehicle is sometimes switched to non-physical. The handoff process fails to retain the vehicle's physical status. This occurs to vehicles whether or not it has a sitting avatar. I have a cross-region ferry system that sometimes go riderless and I now get a steady stream of autoreturned vehicles that have stalled just after the SIM crossing point. I have also located vehicles in this state, and after manually changing them back to physical can get them to continue on their programmed glide path.
The other evil is the loss of all dynamic positioning upon a SIM crossing. In a multisit vehicle, each avatar is moved from the sit spot to a seat using llSetLinkPrimitiveParams to change their position. Upon a SIM crossing, their positions either reverts to the defined sit spot, or the avatars get randomly positioned. This happens every time. Both of these new evil are easily reproducible., though the loss of physical is strongly correlated to the Linden internal network load. Note that this problem does not involve packet loss to the viewer because it can happen to riderless vehicles. It is all an interaction constrained to the participating regions. Let's bear in mind that region crossing is more than just data transfer. The encoding and decoding of the serialized objects entails a lot of work (much more than it should), so the latency and throughput of that operation is a factor too.
This situation continues to deteriorate.
Now I'm getting a viewer crash after a region crossing failure. I wonder out loud if the target region server now has to do a query to figure out if I'm adult enough to come in. In any event, this is still a huge problem, and is rendering piles of vehicle content nearly useless on an intermittant basis. If somebody did this by design, it would be considered a griefer tool. I know fixing this properly will be hard. It's not some trivial little patch, You need to make passing of objects much more efficient. XML isn't cutting it (and why anybody not fresh out of school would think it would I have no idea). T h i s s t i l l v e r y s e r i o u s l y n e e d s t o b e d o n e. Viewer crash after region crossing failure
Some thoughts...
I guess the server-side sim crossing procedure is like this: 1. the agent meets the sim border All these steps require more or less time that seem to cause unpleasant side-effects. One solution might be having passive copy of all attachments and scripts of the agent in the all surrounding (max. eight) neighbor sims of the current one. State changes (diffs) of working sets of each attachments and scripts of the agent could be replicated to all the neighbor sims with rate depending on how likely it's the agent will cross the sim border soon. I suppose it should be quite easy to estimate the sim crossing time based on the velocity vector of the agent. When the agent crossed the sim one of the passive working sets of the vechicle contents would be changed to active and the old active working set to passive. On the other hand I believe the strange side-effects can be fixed without making fundamental changes in the sim crossing procedure, but that would require deeper understanding on what is happening in the server side. Who knows if only priorizing the current marshalling/demarchalling process over all the laggy scripts of the sim would ease the problem because the problem seem to be more prevailing on the border where either of the sims is laggy. Since so many great communities (like sailing, riding, driving, and flying) suffer from the sim-crossing problems, it's shame the issue is not getting more attention but even getting worse and worse in the course of time. the status of "open, critical, unassigned" pretty much shows the importance that LL gives to customer satisfaction...
The latest shenanigans I'm seeing are:
o Fly, sail, or drive a vehicle across the sim border.
The only fix I have found for this condition is a relog. I have experienced it with the standard viewer, Gemini viewer, and now the latest Emerald viewer. This is my setup from the last time I experienced it. If anyone wants me to try it again with the standard viewer, I'll be glad to try to duplicate these events. GreenLife Emerald Viewer 1.23.4 (439) Jul 26 2009 01:02:50 (GreenLife Emerald Viewer) Built with MSVC version 1400 You are at 293517.6, 268676.5, 21.6 in Grand Manan Island located at sim5591.agni.lindenlab.com (216.82.50.147:13001) CPU: Intel Core 2 Series Processor (2399 MHz) libcurl Version: libcurl/7.18.1 OpenSSL/0.9.8j zlib/1.2.3
... I encounter this rather often myself: 1) Avatar ends up at region coords 0,0,0 of the the region. (due to failed/incomplete unsit event?) Many of us are desperate for a more graceful way to recover from this show-stopping stuck state. The root cause may be a nearly impossible to resolve performance problem.. but certainly something can be done to help us get going again without a mandatory relog? This being stuffed into the region corner is a recent development of the handoff failure. I avoid having to relog by then wearing my nifty stop animations and release all controls rose. That plus a TP back to the region I was in before the broken handoff gets me back together again.
Remember that region handoffs are not idempotent, meaning the system can and will break off a handoff right in the middle of what should be all or nothing transfers. This is known, has been known for over a year. My understanding is that several architectural defects will be mitigated when the internal inter-SIM networks move to faster-than-light negative time protocols. We just have to wait a while for its implementation and related general price increases to pay for the system. Having been on SL for nearly four years, I can say that border crossings for vehicles are currently the worst they've ever been in that time frame, decreasing from probably a high point in February, when for a few weeks they were the best they have ever been. On Sunday July 26th, I was having failed crossings 22% of the time, in a stripped down vehicle at slow speeds.
1.The vehicle goes spinning off and the AVs are sent to 0,0,0. 2. In the past we were returned at least to ground level. And still were able to teleport. Now the only resolution appears to be a relog. 3. TP attempts from 0,0,0, fails. Going home fails. 4. Attempting to access the map fails. 5. Attempting to stand fails. 6. Attempting to click and sit on any other object within camera distance fails. As a vehicle developer, nothing is more upsetting than seeing no improvement after four years. But we keep developing content on the vague premise that something will get better, sometime. If this issue is not resolved, most vehicles will begin to be considered "broken content".
The last person at the Labs with any insight into this issue was Kelly, who seems to be busy with shiny toys like HTTP-in these days. From where I sit, it seems clear that the protocol for moving objects between sims needs to be migrated to something like ProtoBuffs: http://code.google.com/p/protobuf/ In the sailing world, this problem is on boats that:
a) Are all mono b) are all lsl c) are made by 10 different boat builders d) are built for sculties e) are built from non-sculpties f) have huds attached g) don't have huds attached h) have one rider i) have multiple riders (seldom more than 3) j) sail in open sims (most sailing sims are open sims) k) sail in full sims l) sail in otherwise empty, or nearly empty sims m) sail in sims with lots of avs It's my non-technical opinion the reason this has never been resolved is that it would necessitate a complete rewrite of the Second Life codebase - one that was designed for dozens of concurrent users, not 10s of thousands. That is not going to happen IMO and the Lindens just look the other way and eventually hope we quit fooling around with vehicles.
There are vehicle makers inworld that have spent countless hours in streamlining LSL vehicle code, reducing function calls, checking sim script usage, then repeat the cycle. All for naught - it's worse than ever. As a vehicle content maker, I'm just about ready to throw in the towel. Torley or any other Lindens still watching this JIRA Issue,
Care to make any comments beyond what was stated nearly 2 years ago? Jacqueline Trudeau said " 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"
Phillip Linden said, in 2006 "We are engaging on a strategy of bug removal over enhancements to improve your secondlife experience. We are commited to disabling new functionality to provide a better grid wide experience" What was seen? Addition of voice, increased lag, periodical but regular disconnects. Until that time, we had been complaining about poor grid performance. Since Phillips statement, that performance has degraded to the point where it is no long a viable grid.....stay in one sim, its just laggy...try to change sims, you disconnect. That is NOT a virtual world, because your world is restricted to 255 x 255 x 4096m. My RL plot of land is larger, and I dont have to scale everything up by a 1.2:1 ratio! I have 26 years in Info Tech....project technical leader, Programmer and full project leadership all over the world. Situations like we are encountering right now in SL are PURELY management related.... NOT technical. If management moves their lazy profiteering asses to provide a QUALITY product, and rides the asses of those techos, these ball breaking bad programs never make it to the live platform. Let me toss some key phrases at you... "Insufficient unit testing".... "Inadequate beta test resources"...."Using the live community to perform beta debug testing"...."Development over support". A truly proffessional programmer directly supports their own product. What I see at LL is an RL version of SL..no accountability, no responsibility....collect my paycheck...."wow, this was a great job to get right out of college!"...."The colors of that are really neat, and it was only 2 terrabytes of code"....I will make one direct statement, without even knowing what the structure is of LL internally..... Your developers outnumber your support coders by AT LEAST 4 to 1. Reverse tthat number....get these lazy ass geeks out there and put their JOB ON THE LINE.... "You have a week to fix this, or find another job".....Better still..start at the top.....MD says to GMs... "you;ve got a month or no golden handshake...fix it, or F off". Watch just how effective that can be.... Anything you DO, can be undone...its all bits and bytes. Get it right The complaints are most valid. The crashes are getting to the point that the region is almost completely unusable. This is not only a boating problem but also affects anyone flying as well. Its been an ongoing situation and is steadily getting worse. Almost weekly we get a survey on whether our SL experience is better or worse in our opinion. This issue deffinately makes the experience as a whole WORSE! Please find the problem to the best of your ability and resolve it. Thanks
WOW Dizzy... Spot on!
I have managed a large SW development team in the past in a situation where the client was getting increasingly annoyed at the number of new bugs we introduced every week. My response was to cut the development team by 80% and manage the process of fixing the major issues - and not introducing new ones. That is what saved the contract. I was also surprised by the number of people on the team that I inherited that understood the "new feature" that they were coding but had no concept of the context and problems that their code was adding to the underlying software. LL needs to be aware that people are leaving the community over this issue. My suggestion (apart from the obvious one - see above).... get the entire development team aware that this is a top priority issue. Being able to exist and move about on the grid has to be one of the fundamental, core, basic capabilities of the system!!! @Icabod: To LL, SecondLife is not a community. It still is their meeting room of the future that they try to sell to educators and corporations. Therefor they could not care less about people leaving, as long as there's a steady influx of newbies.
@Jacqeuline Trudeau
Well, in truth it would not be "a complete rewrite of the code base", it would be restricted to the code that handles object marshalling and serialization during border crossings. Not trivial, but not as catastrophic as you portray. I do agree that LL wants to see how long they can postpone it because it's hard to identify revenue that repairing this defect would generate. Almost all the comments above are true.
Sailing in the SL enivroment sucks big time lately. Sadly neither running 1.23, 1.22 nor snowglobe will have any positive effect on that ! It got worse up to the point that you cannot sail over more then 5 sim crossings without a full crash. I do run the Linux Viewers, which have been pretty stable before (much more then windows actually) but since about 4 weeks its pure F* hell !!! And yes, it does not matter if you walk over the sim dressed up like a newbie with no single prim on your AV or drive a 30-prim boat or an attachable WildWind or ACA Cupper. I do fear to enter any races since i know i will have crashes. So right now i have no clue how to survive the upcomming J-Class Cup races or the ACA event... and that is really sad !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! If you cannot fix it in the normal viewer... release a version for races - i optimized my AV down to AV rendering costs of only 85. Now you HAVE TO provide me with a viewer that will handle me sailing Second Life. One final comment: your current sim and grid performance does not encourages me to EVER change my account to a premium user account. Is that what Linden Labs wants ??????? I am newer than many of the commenters here, and I started reading this blog thinking it was new. I was well into the comments before I realised it started two years ago. OMG! Happy second birthday to this issue post!
Sailing is my peace in SL, and that peace is being destroyed by the fact that I can not last more than a couple of sims before I crash and burn. Please, please, please do something now! I WAS an occassional sailor and sometimes racer (the guy in last place). My RL dictated that I spend less time in SL so I sailed a lot less. I returned to a sailing world after the Openspace apocalypse and found the experience so unsatisfying that I have almost abandoned it.
Adding to the frustration is that all of us hammer the JIRA hoping that a louder noise with catch LL's attention, and there is nothing in the system to indicate how LL prioritizes their issues. Do they hear us? So I cast my vote, and add my voice to those crying in the wilderness. Now I guess I'll go back and mend my sails while we wait for more favorable winds. @Dashiell- This is the public JIRA. I hear that LL has their own internal JIRA (or JIRA like) system that they use to track issue ownership, progress, priorities, status, etc. (which I assume has links pointing devs to the public jira so they can comment/close the issues here).
@{others}- I know this issue has a lot of us steamed up... but it's more productive to get people to vote for it, than to post insulting flames. =) Jopsy's comment to Dashiell is correct; you will see an "imported" notation when a bug passes a triage meeting and is entered in to the real^h^h^h^h internal Jira.
Ever since the introduction of the new viewer (which turned out to be a pain since it was released to early and appears to be full of major bugs, as can be read in numorous blog posts) as well as the introduction of Zindra, I think Linden Labs is focusing to much on other "priorities" at the moment.
The real question now should by: WHY is crossing sim stability so bad since the last 6 weeks and WHAT caused this? I really would like to know if there is a real cause for this and also WHAT it is. From there we may be able to have a clear insight in what Linden Labs is doing, and by telling us, gaining their trust and patience with solving the issues, maybe. And it would give Lindens an insight in what causes the problem and may be able to fix this! So far I haven't heard ANY reasons for it to get so bad lately! Lindens Labs is promoting its grid to large worldwide companies. Trying to have them come into SL and do their businesses in here as well as "adding something to the virtual platform in a unique, creative and innovative way". What do you think when they see their brandnew promotional Mercedes, BMW or their brandnew oil tanker, sailing yachts, jet or heli, disappear just like that, fly when supposed to drive, crash, go to -10.000 mtrs in the ground, not to mention the fashion industry seeing their models run around nakkie all the sudden? Hummmmm, talk about priorities..... you lost me there. @jopsy
sure... I do know that. And yet it cannot be that a service Linden Lab offers is performing so poorly. @all Lindens This region crossing issue drives me insane when it fails, to minimize the vehicle crossing failures I attempt to have my physics enabled vehicles coast over the border. This doesn't always work, if I try to cross a bridge that spans a region border my vehicles get stuck in the road and H4 sees this and violently tosses me out and I have no clue where I will land. No with automatic vehicles like the Particle Lab balloons, I have no control of what they do and Ezekiel Bailly's failer list comes into play.
1.The vehicle goes spinning off and the AVs are sent to 0,0,0. This issue needs to be fixed before it gets so out of hand the entire grid starts to collapse, like how the group chat issue went. @Raymond- Even my particle laboratory balloons fall prey to this bug despite being non-phys llSetPos() powered. (no longer though, they were upgraded to physical yesterday for kicks) (EDIT for clarification: I meant the balloons are no longer Non-PHYSICAL. They still fall victim to this region crossing problem).
A work-around I'm experimenting with is slowing down (and/or lingering) within 5-10m of the region boundary for a moment before going across. Granted at the moment this is partly based on my superstition that physical objects near a boundary get pre-synchronized in the next region. It's a shame llTarget is based on exact points, it'd be nice to use rely on it for detecting altitude or region boundary proximity so the vehicle could be slowed down for a smoother crossing. The worst case definitely seems to be crossing corners, or doubling back into the previous region... anything that involves handing an avatar&vehicle off to another region while a hand-off is still in progress. (I've had to slow my particle lab transport balloons down to prevent double crossings between some stations.) It also seems critical to wait for region hand-offs to complete BEFORE attempting Sit/UnSit operations or it's almost certain to stick the avatar at <0,0,0>. I am a noob when it comes to handling servers in multiple set-ups, but i DO know a LOT about wiring cabls and making the best connections with short latency problems when it comes to the audio industry...... could it be its a mess wiring all the stuff together?
I am just looking for answers, but i think when connecting sims, they should be wired together using the shortest possible connections between either servers in order to get a fast transfer of data..... I would love to get into that server basement of LL to see how its all connected.... I am sure there is a LOT of techs there that should know about routing signals, staying away from electrical power lines with magnetic field induction, use the shortest routing systems..... etc, etc .... Still I really wanna know what really is causing these problems..... Torley? please? Hugz footnote:
I get the idea the wiring is a spaghetti poured with a thick bolognese souce so no one can ever get it right again..... sighs Lamat Lisle:
Imagine that when you must cross a sim border, a little elf needs to write down a complete description of you, what you are wearing and the vehicle your'e sitting on. He puts the first two descriptions in one envelope, and the third in another. He then mails them to the elf in the next sim. When each arrives, the elf in the new sim opens the envelope, reads the letter in side, and build a new copy of you, or your vehicle. Of course, the elves have other jobs too...and in fact in some ways they have to take care of more than one sim at a time. So...even if the mail delivery is perfect (and it isn't), other problems can arise. One of the elves may be too busy. He may be a slow reader, or even a slow writer. The things he builds may take a long time to rez in. The parts he needs from inventory may be slow in arriving. And while all this goes on, your viewer is trying to continue on fantasizing about what would have happened if you had instantatneously crossed that sim border. When the server elf is too busy to talk to your viewer and tell it where you are being rebuilt, you go sailing merrily forward in the process that's sometimes called "rubber banding", because of the nasty way you snap back to where you actually are rather than where your viewer had fantasized you were going while the elf was busy. Unless the whole process falls over...in which case you sail on, and on, and on.... @Lamat- Keep in mind there are 32,000 or so regions online, across two, (soon to be three) major data centers (San Fran, Texas & ?Boston?). Trying to hardwire connections between region servers based on grid proximity would be a logistical nightmare, especially considering that regions can (and do) move from server to server rather easily (fortunately) so that in the event of hardware failure, a region can quickly come back online on a different computer). I believe I heard some time ago that region2region communication was done via multi-cast, not sure if that's still the case. For all I know, LL may try to house adjacent regions on the same server or in the same rack so that communication can utilize local networks more without having to compete on whatever network backbone they may be using. Who knows.
Given that there are 4 full regions or 16 It's certainly impressive when it fails, just not in a good way.
A 5,000 server network is not an incredible feat by modern standards. Allowing it to run as badly as it does might be. It has been pointed out to me that I did not provide a method to reproduce the problem. Here it is:
Rez. Sail. Repeat. I realize all other modes of transport suffer from similar problems. We are all in this boat together Just want to confirm something; and float a question.
Most people are saying its a server issue as opposed to client? (Thats my observation fwiw). And did the deterioration spike after server upgrades a few months back in anticipation of adult content? I just wonder if the additional verifiactions needed on region crossing were the straw on the camels back as it were of the current hardware performance. FINALLY — THERE IS STILL NO ONE ASSIGNED TO THIS ISSUE. So why would we think it will ever be fixed? @Joyofric...because it has finally been assigned an internal JIRA number, and hopefully this means it has attracted enough attention that someone will finally look at it and work on it. I don't know if it still has to go through triage first, but at least it's attracted some attention. I'd say, check the bug triage checklists and see if it's going to be discussed, and go to talk about it.
The "Linden Lab Issue SL-ID and DEV-ID" that Alexa gave seem relatively low compared to others I've seen in the public JIRA.
They've known about this for a while it seems. Kitto's SnowView Train, in Wengen, is a great way to party with your undead friends.
Last night, I crashed from my chariot, but logged back on in time for it to run into me, and keep going. I know the Lindens are working on this, but they need to leave little signposts, in the code, saying how it'd gotten screwed up, for debugging when future generations attempt to improve. I understand the proper mix of Development to QA is 1:1 of Time and Competance. Maybe the various projects could network by qualling for each other. It seems to be a problem more for 1.27, so a roleback to 1.25 might be considered. Will being in the new zindra region in Julianna..trying to drive from this sim, thru 3 Sims. forget about it..I have been not able to drive the linden roads with out crashing each and every time, i pass thru the Sims..like everybody says it is getting worse, I myself pay 125.00 per month in tiers plus my membership that's 1,500 a year to play a game, i have payed linden over $3,000.00 US, for what......Its getting old..and the when you have a problem...and a major problem like this, you get a shit response from SL..SL has to stop all the new stuff and devote its time to get the entire program stable..Then to get the response from sl when a upgrade comes out and shit does not work, "It is the role of the creators to adjust their programs to meet our upgrades.....What a bullshit responce from sl...Lets see every time we screw up you have to figure out what we did wrong and correct your scripts......Like I said it getting old..a good class action suit, would kick them in the ass..any takers out thier....
Over the weekend of 1 Aug 2009, the general consensus among sailors is that the 127.1 release SIGNIFICANTLY decreased the number of bad sim crossings. In my personal opinions sim crossings are at there best in months.
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Bug
Open
Critical
Region Crossings Fail
"open spaces" regions per server, that's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5,000 servers to network together. Given that this kind of thing works at that scale at all is rather impressive.