Second Life Bits 2014-14

Facebook Photo Blocking – You may remember that Facebook blocked image posting from Second Life™. No real news on this. Oz Linden tells us the changes have been made to comply with what FB said needed to be fixed, but no word is available on when the feature will come back.

Bugs that are Cocao related are causing problems for a significant number of Apple/Mac people. The Firestorm Dev’s and Linden Dev’s have no one to put on these problems. So, on the Mac is side experiencing lots of pain and it looks like they will for some time. The newer operating systems have fewer problems.

Firestorm has an April 1 thing coming. Expect FS Support to abandon the in-world group for about a week as this spoof works it way through. They are implementing full on Duck & Cover. You have been warned. It will be interesting to see how many people bite.

Third Party Viewer Rankings – I’ve mentioned that the ranking is sorted by disconnect rate. Once Oz has the rates, he then picks the most popular release version by which has the most minutes used and uses that version’s rate for the ranking. So, it may not be the most recent version that is being ranked in the listing. We have no way to know which version of a viewer was used for the ranking.

This also makes a problem for mobile users. Mobile devices typically sleep apps. This kills their disconnect rate because they don’t really disconnect. But, at some point the servers drop them. So, for mobile viewers the data for the disconnect rate is really distorted.

HTTP – how is it going? Some weird reports. As more peeps upgrade to 4.6.1 FS is getting more complaints. I’m using the Interesting Viewer and I have complaints.

Monty Linden says there are still HTTP connection limits. But, the Lindens are not seeing  overloads, meaning few people could be hitting the limit capping.

Latif and Jessica are pointing out that people are finding texture loads for avatars and prims are stalling in viewers using the new HTTP. I have not run into that. Those that have are turning off HTTP or switching to an older viewer not using new HTTP. It seems to solve the problem. But, that process is HIGHLY misleading.

Some are setting MeshUseGetMesh1 to true to clear the problem, basically turning off the new HTTP. The result is great for them. But, is horrible for the rest of us. Consider setting MeshUseGetMesh1 to true as a last resort.

The change to MeshUseGetMesh1 or an older viewer circumvents the problem, which is good for the individual user. BUT… the developers need information to solve the problem. This means we need to use the problem viewers long enough to capture some logs and send them in via a SL or FS JIRA bug reports. Otherwise we will live with this problem for some time.

Avoid the idea the next version will be better or fix the problems. That won’t happen if the dev’s can’t figure out what is wrong. As of Friday the Lindens see no problem. Using the new Interest List RC Viewer I see a big problem any time I am around more than 6 or 7 avatars. Until that information gets to the devs, nothing is going to get better.

Oz thinks the high PING is indicative of network connection issues. However, Ed Merryman points out he can turn off avatar rendering and his PING time improves.

You may know the viewer reports what some call Fake PING times. Fake PING is measured by sending a UDP packet sent to server. A busy server will drive that time up by being slow to response.  Fake PING is a viewer calculated value.

Real PING is what we measure when we use the operating system’s PING command. If you open Help->About… and get the IP address of the server your avatar is in and PING that address from the computer’s command line, you will see the difference in the values. Real PING is the actual time a packet travels from network card to network card.

A highly misleading aspect of the current viewer performance is seeing poor performance in a viewer. It could well be the network misbehaving. By the time someone re-logs or installs a viewer, the network conditions have changed, not may change, have changed. That is the way things work.

That leads the less knowledgeable to conclude changing the viewer fixed the problem. After all that is what they changed and not they see a different result. But, they might have gotten the same result by logging off for a few minutes.

Also, when switching back to an older version of the viewer, people seldom clear the cache. So, the first viewer having problems was doing the heavy lifting by downloading the region. The next viewer has a full cache to start off with. So, if one is testing the viewer, you really need to clear your cache between viewers so they both start off with the same work load, instead of one having a cold cache and the other a hot cache.

I will also point out that this last few days communication systems have been coping with a massive solar flare. It is hard to say now much effect this has had on the Internet, but it has had an effect.

BUG-5537Male Avatar chest rendering broken – chest shows bigger for onlookers, than to oneself – effects attachments and all worn mesh types.

So, Man Boobs, Moobs, are broken. I haven’t noticed this problem. I just thought man boobies had come into style. I mean who would know?

Tomorrow is April 1. Remember!

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