SL fell down, go BOOM!

Some time before 10:30am SL’s website was loading slowly. At first I thought my corner of the internet was slowing down, it seemed like all websites were loading slowly, but it was only on SL’s website. Except the Linden Blog, which is hosted by WordPress (same as this blog) so that runs fine.

I was able to login to SL no more than 10 mins ago, but now nothing works at all. Just as they fixed the problems from two days ago it looks like all of Second life just collapsed. Logins in world are immediately greeted with a “despite our best efforts…” type message the moment you click on the connect button. But it’s like it’s not even trying to do anything, it just gives up. Web pages take forever to load.

Good Job Lindens.

Loading….

If your L$ balance is only showing “Loading…” then you’re basically dead in the water.  You won’t be able to spend nor RECEVE any L$.  I can’t get tips, nor get hired. I’m not sure how this effects when people pay into vendos, but you might be better off staying offline while the monkeys bang on things.  Relogging, clearing cache, and rebooting might help, but if others are having the same problems, it’s moot.

Also there’s only 17 shopping days left till by Birthday!

Ding dong campers are dead

The era of laggtastic casino camping are now over. About fucking time!

Due to some legal bullshit regarding gambling, after all gambling laws are very wide spread from country to country, and region to region, they just decided to wipe it all clean.

It SEEMS the Lindens went on rampage and manually deleted all objects that were used for gambling. Everything. Entire parcels were cleared out while the campers were still sitting on the walls and seats, unless those were deleted too.

There will be two main benefits from this as time goes on:

1. Lag will be much improved since there will no longer be 20,000 alt avis logged in all the time anymore
2. The value of L$ will increase since now it’s more difficult to make L$.

Others claim it will devalue L$, but they are idiots. The only devalue of L$ will happen will be temporary. Because of those knee-jerk reactions some douche-bags will undoubtedly have, and sell their L$ cheap on LindeX. It’s basic economics, when something becomes slightly more scarce it becomes more valuable. Duh.

Now, also all the free-money-machines have been deleted or turned off because of this. Yet giving out free money isn’t gambling, but since that free money was paid for by the gambling those had to be removed as well. There’s still a zillion alt-zombie campers still sitting out there. This only happened about 5 hours ago as of this post, so hopefully by tomorrow evening the “online count” on the login screen will be drastically reduced. It’s already below 30,000.

I’m surprised they waited this long to do this. The biggest problem all these places had was the total waste in bandwidth these campers caused, which lagged everyone. Any time a casinos moved into a new region everyone in that region would complain in increased LAG when everything was normal before the casino was put in.

No one gives a shit about gambling money aspect of these casinos.. I actually enjoyed them. If ever I had some spare change I’d play some black jack and pad my wallet a little more. It think I made more money playing black jack than I did losing.

But you know what’s going to happen now that all the casinos are closed? Illegal casinos. All a person would need to do is set up a pre-fab casino, drop it some where.. run it for a couple hours, and pick it up and take it away before the Linden Police knew of it. Then later they can set it up in a different region and only the select few will know where it is. Gambling will go on regardless of this new Policy the Lindens made today.

But here’s something that might happen that could bring back a limited number of permanent casinos. Native North American Indian gambling organizations buy their own regions (sims) on second life, and create their own virtual online casinos as they already do around the country. Doesn’t that sounds logical to happen? Maybe even open this up to the big casinos in Nevada to do the same thing, or any other part of the world where gambling IS legal. And if you visit any of these sites you are in their land, and you are legally allowed to gamble as long as you’re on their land… just like it would be if you visited these casinos in RL.

More SL Snafus

It seems some power outages in the bay area are causing problems with SL.  Stipen and group dividend payments were delayed.  Also group liabilities didn’t seem to be delayed as much (figures).  Biggest problem now is logging in is practically impossible. If it’s taking more than a minute while it hangs on the screen giving the message “Second life may appear frozen…” then you’re SOL.

So like, they don’t use power back up units or something?  A power failure should compromise their network AT ALL; this is complete bullshit!  The service is acting as if it just came back online from a big system upgrade. Logins are stalled and often don’t work, but some people are able to get on.  The login screen reports about 25,000+ users..

Strike that.  The login screen is now reporting it’s offline, and doesn’t show the current login count, and I know there are users online looking at my buddy list.  The Linden Blog isn’t saying anything about this, so it must be a new development.  They probably realized something is wrong and they need to take things down.

Well I was able to login an alt, but it’s not going well.  I’m “Ruthed” and all that typical crap you deal with when things aren’t going right on SL.

My Birthday

You all have 28 shopping days left till my Bday (8/16).  Save your lindens my bitches! I prefer Linden cash over material stuff, except for some free no-tier land.

I see grey people

Just a tip, when you see people with no texture (i.e. grey) it’s more of an issue with that users client software (i.e. viewer), than it is with Second Life it self.  Sure this glitch tends to maefest itself after a big update but it’s an easy fix than you can do on your end, but keep in mind it only updates YOUR avatar, not the dozens of other dull looking Sylvania men.

There are two things you can do.  Change your clothes, or rebake.  changing your clothing will work fully if you change all three parts of your body.  Head, upper and lower body.  So if you just change outfits, you probably won’t change anything on your face, so you’ll still look funny.  Going into appearance mode might work, but it’s only a local side change, and others might not see you proper after you leave appearance mode.  It’s really best to just rebake.

How do you rebake?  First you need to go into Debug mode. Press CTRL-ALT-D to bring up two extra menu items in the menu bar at the top, that appears to the right of “help.”    The items “Client” and “Server” will appear. Now click on “Client” then “Character” then at the bottom of that menu, “Rebake textures.”  Then wait about 2 minutes for your new texture image to propagate out to everyone else who’s near you.  Though you might see the change almost immedately to your self.

The reason for all this is the simulators do not render your clothing, your PC (client software) does that and uploads it to the simulator for everyone else to download.  Since avatars wear layers of clothing with some transparencies it has to be rendered into a single texture.  And it would be a HUGE LOAD to the simulators if those machines had to do that.  It’s simply easier for your client to do a simple re-render and send it out to the servers.

Now the problems like this (as well as “missing image” textures) is all due to the lag, and synconiation issues.  When an avatar appears “grey” your client hasn’t download the texture yet.  My theory is that after a big update like we had Wednesday, those textures were cleared away but the simulators think they still exist.  Perhaps with the lag the simulator thinks you already have the texture (not likely after installing a new client software) or you’re just too lagged to get it yet. When you see that white “missing image” texture that’s the simulator saying “I don’t have the texture” so your client shows that white image.

Rebaking should be a hot-key function by now, like everything else seems to be.
Press CTRL-ALT-D again to remove the two the debug menu items at the top so the text on there isn’t too cramped.

Hope this helps!

Fucking BUGS!

I’m sick of the following bugs:

1. “Recent Tab” no longer shows anything recent in my inventory
2. Mute function NO LONGER MUTING PEOPLE nor objects. I have to re-mute the offending object every time I see it again, and I already have said object listed in my mute list three times already. Muting people just doesn’t work period, they are still able to IM me and harass me, so I have to PRETEND to ignore those assholes who bother me day in and day out.
3. Group IMs should cease when I close the IM window. I’m sick of getting messages from the group IM when I have already closed it. Especially when it’s just a message saying someone else has left the group IM. Who fucking cares! I would really like to see an option to ignore group IMs all together. Plus I keep getting group IM messages appear in open chat, with no IM window appearing.  Why are group IMs so fucked up?
4. Constant viewer crashing. Often when I’m looking around an area with my camera while my AVI is stationary. Or often when I’m logging in.
5. General Sim instability. Oh the region went down for no fucking reason, crash the client too while you’re at it!
6. Constantly getting nagged to install the “optional viewer” every time I logon, when I know from the Linden Blog user posts that it has problems. So I don’t want it! Stop nagging me!
7. LAG! I kept thinking most of my lag was due to having my bit torrent client running in the background all day and night. But I stopped using it for over a day now, and the lag IS STILL THERE, no difference! WTF?
8. When hanging out in areas that aren’t really that crowded (say about 10 avis or less) some avatars have no name tag floating over their head!
9. “My Notes” information is constantly getting lost. Some how the “Loading…” text never goes away even after the edit field has turned white (meaning it’s done loading and you can now edit). And after closing it, that “Loading….” text ends up getting saved over your notes. ARG!!

Since Linden Labs has let the viewer into the open source community. Meaning they aren’t fixing these little bugs anymore, and relying on the public to fix thing for free. This might be a good thing, but regardless of how they develop the software, they NEVER seem to fix any of the bugs that effect me all the time.