Performace issue woes

I feel like a broken record about this. I think it’s safe to say that the constant problems with Second Life is now status quo. Everything from network problems, database issues to hardware failures are constantly occurring at Linden Labs.  Same old lag, different day.

Now I’m probably one of the first one to cry foul when this occurs for the umpteenth time, and we all wonder why they bother developing new ideas, functions and features while they are still huge service problems that never seem to get fixed. So why don’t they just stop future development and pool their resources to just fix the problems we are having now?

I used to agree with that line of mentality, but people seem to think that everyone who works at Linden labs all have the same work skills, and are some how interchangeable. As if you assigned more employees to a given problem it will be fixed faster or better? While every employee at LL can be treated as a resource, they aren’t interchangeable. You simply can’t move the office secretary to I.T. and have her fix a networking problem.

This isn’t like some RTS game were you can move all your engineer/workers to fix or repair a single object, hoping that it will be fixed faster. Linden employees are not generic workers who are interchangeable. If this were the case they wouldn’t have a web page looking for new employees.

This also dosen’t mean all of the Linden Employees who don’t have the proper skills at fixing the current problems with Second Life should just sit around and do nothing with thier thumbs up thier asses. They aren’t getting paid to do nothing, they need to do something with the money we pay them. So just because there’s a handful of people working on “Wind Light” project which many people deem unnecessary, doesn’t mean it’s taking anything away from the work that is being done to keep SL up and running every day.

Rock Band, and SL issues

Seems like the Lindens are posting nothing but “login, databases, and stability” issues every time I read the Linden Blog. There’s never a day that goes by that there’s always some big problem that’s either localized to a particular sim, or a massive issue that requires several hours to fix, while everyone else sits and waits for it to be fixed.

But who fucking cares.. it’s become status quo now for these issues to keep occurring and never actually getting fixed, just patched over. It’s like constantly patching a pot-hole on a street, when there’s a big sink-hole under it. Right now I don’t much care. I’m playing Rock Band bitches!

Rock Band is all the hype. Guitar career is incredibly easy if you’ve been playing Guitar Hero. I’m playing on HARD mode on RB, and I’m easily 5-staring songs. The Fender Stratocaster is slicker than cat shit on a flat rock. It plays so good, and feels right once you’ve gotten used to it. Playing bass is even easier but there is no solo career for that. However what makes up for that is the drumming, which is awesome, but tho haven’t figured out how to go into overdrive, I think it just happens on it’s own. Also there’s sining which I’ve not dared tried to do my self, I’m a bit self conscious about that. Maybe if I started drinking some beer before hand. Hmmm…

Guitar Hero III on PC (sux0rz)

IT SUCKS!

It’s a perfect port over of the console version of the game, but the game suffers from fluctuating frame-rate that from silky smooth to WTF? Even dumbing down the “video” features like removing the crowd, and disabling “physics” (what physics are there in GH3? Judy Nail’s bouncing boobs? Isn’t that pre-rendered in mo-cap?).

It seems to slow down depending on what view the camera is looking at at the venue you’re at. Some angles are simple to render, others can be harder depending on how many objects are on screen.  Using star power also makes the frame rates drop, which is really annoying since it makes me miss notes on parts I know by heart!   I bet this game runs smooth when after you beaten the game, you’re playing “Through Fires and Flame” while the credits roll. Because it’s just your character playing the song while standing on a tall platform, as the camera orbits around it.

Anyway it makes game play totally impossible when the scrolling notes just skip frames as if it’s catching up with the song like a portly encoded Divx movie. I wouldn’t mind it if it had slow frame rates if it was CONSISTENT, not up and down framerates, so you can keep your timing and rhythms correct.. but this absolutely won’t cut it.

The only way to to make this game work well is to dumb the graphics down to 800×600, or lower, but then everything looks like shit, even the on screen TEXT looks slightly garbled. It might help if I could remove anti-aliasing, since it’s very apparent that it’s being used on this game, but I have to manually disable that in the nVidia drivers in control panel. There were no advanced video settings in game as far as I could see.

Oh and I’m picking up Rock Band tomorrow. neener neener!

All I want for Xmas is…

Here’s my Xmas wish list:

• Microsoft Points
  (to buy DLC songs for GH3 and Rock Band!)
• Assassin’s Creed
• Call of Duty 4
• Mass Effect
• Ghostbusters

Nevermind about CoD4, I just bought it Sunday night, and while I was getting that I saw 4 big boxes behind the counter labeled “Rock Band bundle, Xbox 36o.”  I knew they already had them, and one of those suckers is MINE MINE MINE!  but I didn’t nag the GameStop guys to let me have it now, though I did mention I already pre-ordered it.   Tomorrow….. 

Who broke Xbox Live?

Okay I sit down to my Xbox 360 and fire up for some GH3. I have my unit automatically sign me onto XBL after it boots up, but it’s showing me that I’m only signed on to my Xbox, but not online to XBL. WTF? I try to manually loggin to XBL, and after a moment my dashboard reverts back to no gamer tags signed on. It won’t let me sign on any gamertag let alone login to XBL.

I hop on my PC and live.xbox.com comes up with screwy script error messages. Does it in FireFox and IE. I asked a friend who is also on XBL and he couldn’t get on his 360 nor the website. Other Microsoft services seem to be working, like hotmail and Live Messenger. even www.xbox.com works, but loads in slowly.

Hope it’s nothing serious like some crazy denial of service attack, or Microsoft’s buggy software crashed on them.. or more likely a security expliot to make it crash. So something’s fucked up… it’s not my router, it’s not comcast. Microsoft is b0rked.

<few hours later>

Xbox Live on the web seems to be fully functional, but geting on XBL from my 360 is sort of hit and miss.   Ironically when I was able to get on XBL via 360, XBL set a message out saying they will be performing maintenance to the service early tomorrow morning, and the service will be down for an hour.  This makes me think something seriously broke earlier today, they got it mostly back online, but they need to replace hardware.  That’s merely assumption though, but this sorta thing happens often with online communities.

Guitar Hero, and Rock Band!

I finnally beat Guitar Hero III on HARD, and I’m already half-way into expert. when I first got this game I jumped right into hard mode in career mode, but beating the final boss, Lou was a bitch, and I started to hate the game (or at least battle boss mode). After playing though Easy, and Medium, seeing a videos on you tube (there’s tons of them) watching how they beat Lou on hard, and then watched TRS podcast and Dan talking about how he did it, as well as reading endless forums posts about it, it’s bascially down to luck, but it helps to know the songs too.

You have no control as to what powerups you’ll get, nor what lou gets. And since Lou gets the first powerup attack, you’re kina fucked from the start. You’ll have to be lucky to get an attack you can deal with, like amp overload. If you know the song patern well enough amp overload shouldn’t hamper you much at all. Bascially you need to save up three power up attacks and play 2/3rds into the song before you unleash them. You need to use them one at a time, during heavy note sequences on Lou’s side of the board.

ess than two weeks is Rock Band. From what I heard Harmonix is having a hard time keeping up with the demand for Rock Band. The supply is low and will remain low into the new year. They said the only way you’re gonna get the game is if you preordered and camp out for the game on Monday the 19th. I already pre-ordered, and I might even camp out for it on Monday, when it comes out Tuesday on the 20th.

I’m assuming the “full bundle” will be in short order, I don’t know if the game disc it self will be in slow supply. It’s easy to mass produce game discs, but large hardware bundles aren’t (especially three controllers in it). After all you can play Rock Band with your Guitar Hero controllers, in fact you’ll need to if you want to have a “full band” since the bundle only has one guitar. You’ll need your guitar hero controller guitar to play Bass. PLUS all of the RB controllers are USB devices, and yourXbox 360 only has three USB ports, so you’ll need the wireless Les Paul guitar from GH3 to have a full four (player) member band.

The touch of death

Friend of mine acquired a 2nd 360 that he knew had already failed with the three red lights of death. With Microsoft’s extended warranty, he figured he could get it replaced or fix at no cost and be able to have a 2nd 360 on hand for quick LAN match games.

After two weeks he got the unit sent back to him and it worked fine for less than 24 hours, when it starting freezing and giving the three red lights yet again.

This is disturbing considering I just got mine replaced two weeks ago before his was apparently “fixed,” and it led me to think that they AREN’T properly fixing these dead 360 as I had assumed they are. This made me think that my 360 will be doomed to failure sooner or later. However they always send me a completely diffrent 360 to replace mine, where as my friend always gets his 360s fixed, and the same one sent back to him.

Though it seems like they didn’t do jack shit to his 360 this time around. This particular 360 previous owner had opened up the unit removing the “warranty stickers” that shows if the unit’s case has been opened. Thing is that Microsoft doesn’t really care if these stickers are broken or missing, as long as the DVD optical drive hasn’t been “hacked.” Since they shipped it back with a new set of these stickers, as well as a new face-plate for which the old one had a broken hinge for the USB port flap.

My friend immediately called up Xbox support to get it fixed again. Then later we turned it back on after an hour cool off, and it ran for a few moments till it froze again. Then hours after that he had the idea of using the “Towel Trick,” and we let it bake for about 20 minutes, power cycles the unit, and it WORKED FINE.

I started playing it with a few rounds of TF2 for a solid hour, and it worked fine. I even power cycled the unit thinking it would die soon after, but it came back on like a champ. I even went a head and set it up proper for this time zone, and stuff.

Every 360 I’ve ever seen (and touched) with my own eyes has had the red ring of death, except for the unit I own right now (which is a refurbished unit, so presumably it had failed before). I’ve even seen demo units at a local TARGET sit there in the display case with the red flashing lights on it.

Microsoft won’t issue a recall on 360s, because that can only happen if these are posing a safety threat; as if they caught fire, or pose an electrocution threat, etc.