SL Journal: January 14

I am currently making a cinema in preparation for the Robostudios premiere of their documentary on Second Life, and so spent most of the day building. It was pretty painful: I have things rubber-banding on me, which means they were repositioning themselves, reverting to their previous size, position and texturing on some occasions.

Days like today require an extreme amount of self control. Placing a cushion on the seat for the chairs in the cinema required me to rotate the cushion five or six times before the positioning “took”.

I had had a problem with my map for a couple of days, so that if I clicked into it or tried to use the landmarks from it, I would be logged out with an odd message about mangled network data. Having downloaded the new “First Look” viewer, I found that this problem had been resolved, although later experiment showed that this is only the case while using First Look, because I still get logged out if I use the normal viewer.

First Look is a new move by the Lindens in beta testing things on the main grid. It requires a separate download from the website, but logs you into the main grid when you use it, along with some fairly luris warning flags that you are logging to the main grid. It is always difficult to know whether changes currently are due to bugs, due to overload on the asset server, or due to something you’ve done yourself. In the case of the new viewer, I found it hard to know how many of the “changes” I noticed were due to my imagination, problems with the asset server, or the new viewer.

It seems to me, as remarked by Falk Bergman, that transparency is handled better in some ways and not as well in others. Transparency has always been a problem in SL, as the client doesn’t handle the relative positions of transparent items well. In the past I have noticed that a plant with an alpha channel, placed in front of a window with an alpha channel, will cause all sorts of weird effects, with the window jumping forward to subsume the plant from some angles. That sort of things seems to have been overcome with the new viewer.

On the other hand, the ice cathedral, which was relative flash-free in the normal viewer, suddenly seemed to be appearing and disappearing as I moved around it using the First Look viewer.

Things got gradually worse during the day, to the point where even my patience was exhausted. I saw chats on the Concierge Information and Mentor channels fly past, talking about failed money transactions, problems with building, problems with teleportation and problems with moving around, even on empty sims.

There was a message in world from Claudia Linden explaining that search had been disabled while they tried to sort out the problems. Looking at the Linden Blog, it seems that there is a problem with assets and teleportation more or less every day, which is then flagged as “resolved” until the following day. It really doesn’t seem resolved to me, it just ebbs and flows according to the number of concurrent users online. Yesterday there were over 25,000, which must be a record I think.

My SL partner, Oclee Hornet, was working on a new build… I had better check with him that it is OK to publicise it here. It’s very complex, and very challenging, but should be very impressive too, when finished. He was driven nuts by the fact that texturing was misbehaving. Select ten prims, texture them. and they initially appear to take the texture, and then half of them revert back to the previous texture.

I listened to him cursing in Skype, as we generally talk to each other through the free internet voice program while we work. Eventually, he couldn’t take it any more, and logged off from SL.
I had some really weird behaviour, where if I stood up from a pose ball, I ended up in limbo off the coast of NCC sim, spinning around. Eventually, unable to search, unable to teleport, unable to build, and unable to listen to any more complaints, I logged off.