Second Life Region Crossings 2020 – What’s Coming?

This is an informal test and I use the word ‘test’ very loosely. I just wanted to see what the commotion about crossing in the new AWS servers was about. There is no hard data in this experiment. My computer and connection are irrelevant IMO. The Viewer is Firestorm 6.4.5 Beta, which I used because I have it setup to work with OBS.

I started my trials in Blake Sea – Half Hitch, Aditi (SLURL). If you search for the region in Aditi, include the Blake Sea part.

There is a long 1 sim wide run from Blake Sea – Azimuth to Blake Sea – Bering of 17 regions. That is a 4.352 kilometer run or about 2.7 miles for the metric challenged. Plenty of room to max out my Bandit 380R (The Mesh Shop – Map URL).

I want to mention The Rubber Bunny. That HUD on the left is made by Kaliska Dismantled of Rubber Bunny. Kaliska makes easy to modify HUDs for various boats and vehicles. I’ve bought a couple (L$49). Plus making some fun vehicles. Among them hovercraft which are a novel SL driving experience.

I think the Bandit 380R is great fun. I love the engine rumble. Reminds me of a nitro burning rail. It could use a bit better camera control.

BACK to the CROSSINGS…

At the start I rez in Blake Sea – Half Hitch. Then figure out where I need to go to get the 17-region test area. Drive up to a starting point making a few slow crossings, about 10 knots. For sailing 10 to 15 knots is common.

TM: 00:53 – If you watch the mini-map/radar you can see when I cross a region boundary. For all practical purposes that is the only way to know you’ve made a crossing as these slow crossings are otherwise invisible. Notice the boat is not “flashing”. More about flashing at TM: 08:20.

TM: 01:30± & 02:06 – You may want to rewind and replay the slow crossing at 1:30 and the bit faster crossing at 2:06.

These were my first two crossings. I was surprised by how smooth and fast they were. Even after what I had read in the SL Forum.

TM: 02:30 – I start my first run and begin speeding up.

TM: 05:22 – I was busy playing with the boat and figuring out the run-up to here. This is where I planned to have a good view of the wake as I crossed a region at the Bandit 380R’s max speed, about 55 knots. But… the region crossing failed. I hit a dead region… or at least one that was not talking to the region I was leaving. You’ll see it took a few seconds for everything to settle out and end up with my avatar detached, frozen, and the boat poofed. Relog and restart.

TM: 05:46 – I get restarted and head back the way I came. I jump up to max speed and zoom across the regions. Notice the boat is flashing. This usually happens at the crossings. More on that later. I am doing great until…

TM: 07:07 – Then the engines fail. I am clicking everything trying to get going again. I ignore the gauges which tell the story. I ran the engines at max until they overheated and shut down. I didn’t know the Bandit 380 would do that. (I had only had it a couple of days.)

TM: 07:48 – I clipped some out. It took a couple of minutes for me to get it going again. I didn’t figure out it was overheating until I was editing the video and ACTUALLY looked the gauges, other than RPM and speed.

I really like the sound of those engines. That tipped the scale for my purchasing this boat over P&W Design’s similar cigar boat.

TM: 08:20 – Flashes… On this second run, I noticed the boat flashing when crossing regions. I suspect I only saw this on the second run because I was headed into the sun and the glade on the water was passing under the boat.

Since I can go frame by frame through the video, I caught what was happening. The boat disappears for a frame as it crosses the region boundary. Playing in real time it happens too fast for the screen and viewer to actually show it.

TM: 08:29 – Here I tried crossing regions quickly by circling the four-corner points.

TM: 09:00 – I did get some longer crossing times when I did rapid crossings by clipping the corners near the four-corners. You can see the wake showing the pause in crossing. But it was hard to tell if I had found a slow region or not. But not all the crossings in the area have the delay.

TM: 09:30 – Here I sped up the video, about 600%. I was doing near four-corner crossings and trying to make a diagonal crossing from a SW region to a NE region. A bit boring. The worst I saw was a little delay. I know there is an unfixed bug that will crash you if you enter a second region before you are in the first region, which happens if you hit a four-corner point exactly… or close enough.

TM: 10:24 – Return to dock.

This isn’t an arduous enough test to glean test data from. But I think it shows how well the new region crossings work.

I am impressed.

2 thoughts on “Second Life Region Crossings 2020 – What’s Coming?

  1. I think that , since they fixed some glitched sims about a week ago, the general experience in ADITI has been very good (in regard to sim borders).

    I have been, and am continuing, to express one major caveat. The ADITI servers are barely breaking sweat as ADITI is grossly underpopulated and under built (under scripted). The real test will be when this goes live in AGNI. Its not at all clear how much of the good performance is due to cloud servers and how much to improved server code and how much to lower traffic.

    So – here is the REALLY GOOD NEWS (maybe). Since Tuesday, sim borders in AGNI – Blake Sea have been significantly improved. In a Trud 12m (not exactly the lightest boat on the planet haha) sim borders have been just about sub second freezing (versus 5 – 7 seconds before). And zero falling off over three races (versus an average , for me, of about once per race).

    Yeah its just a couple of days and there’s lots of time for LL to f**k it up. Its also odd that there was no roll this week just some “backend maintenance” (that caused chaos while it was going on Tues morning, we abandoned our races).

    I think its important to keep testing Blake in ADITI to ensure no bugs, but the performance assessment will have to wait till AGNI goes to the cloud.

    Would be good to hear from the experts!

  2. I wonder if this will revive interest in using 2nd life as a travel emulator. Also reviving more continuoud ground-level building and landscaping. Thank you for your post!

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