Discovering reality

This blog is being brought to you courtesy of the “teleport and crash” bug in Second Life. Really, I should be building. However, I logged in, everything was fine until I tried to teleport, and then I was disconnected from Second Life. Again.

Nowadays the pattern of my Second Life is fairly monotonous. Login, try to teleport, crash. Fix my position in preferences for the place I want to get to, arrive with my feet nailed to the floor and have to relog.

Eventually I do reach the place I want to be, but building — other than first thing in the morning, UK time, when things usually work — can be pretty painful. We’ve recently been working on a sim for a client, and the rotation bug, texturing bugs and connectivity problems have made it much more painful than it ought to be. Some days, I have just given up and gone off to do some family history.

I am finding I have enormous packet loss in some places and not in others.  The party line form the Lindens has always been that this is the result of my poor connection somehow — I remember one of the Lindens giving a little talk about the red bars in the corner of the screen in the Linden radio show.  This makes NO sense if it is locational in Second Life though.  If I have no packet loss in our sim, NCC, and then 247% packet loss on the mainland, and this is consistent, then it surely can’t be my connection at fault.

I like to incorporate the best of SL products into our builds, and so I patronise a number of SL stores very regularly.  However one or two of them have become a very unpleasant experience, so much so that although I love shopping in SL, I pile up the shopping lists until I can’t avoid going.  That’s a sign that things are not the way they ought to be.

Everytime I have criticised the platform, there has been a clamouring of fans pointing out how innovative and wonderful Second Life is… and I know that it is, that’s why I am still there after three years and trying to build. But when you are trying to work in Second Life, crashing every time you teleport is a huge pain.  Eventually even a convinced addict like me discovers that reality it less frustrating and goes off and does something else.

So… I’m back to the fourteenth century with the family history, and have royal blood. Just call me your majesty….