Limbo dancing

Prior to my, umm, sabbatical from the hurly-burly of SL, regular readers may recall, I was having frequent problems with what I called the "blue limbo" problem - this blue limbo being, basically, where I was left when I tried to log in.  The world around me would start to load, and then give it up as a bad job, leaving me hanging around - more or less incompletely loaded myself - unable to move, with my ping time (the time it takes my client to communicate with the server, you can check this out yourself with Advanced>Performance Tools>Statistics Bar) pegged at 10000 milliseconds.  Which is a lot of milliseconds, to be sure.

Well, returning to SL, I was getting this same problem, still, repeatedly.  (It left me in a no-animations default posture at one point - literally crucified upon a login failure.)  So I revived my old support case in as tactful a manner as possible, and much submitting of zipped log files went on, and...

... well, no definite conclusion has been reached, but I'm getting the problem rather less at the moment, and I think I'm beginning to understand why.

Basically, it might be a case of too much rubbish in my inventory.

Well, you know, duh, some might say, and not without due cause.  After all, my inventory is not inconsiderable in size.  And it is rather noticeably over the recommended limits. Let's face it, I have very nearly enough shoes, which is going some.

However - other people with similar building and shopping habits have accumulated even larger inventories than my 50,000 or so items, and still manage without getting limbo'ed.  So, why am I getting this?

I still don't know for sure.  But, the first time I shook myself free of it, it was by deleting my outfits folder, which contained a number of broken links - links to clothing items which the system couldn't resolve, for reasons best known to itself.  And I'm beginning to suspect that the whole problem rests on a more general expression of this.

Basically, what's stitching me up (according to the guys working on my support case) is a timeout, where queries to the database regarding the components of my online self take too long to resolve.  If I'm coming into SL with my inventory empty after a cache clear, I don't get the problem, implying that it lies somewhere in the lengthy process of reconciling the items in my inventory with the records in the database.  Something, somewhere, is taking too long to add up.

So, I've been on - well, you couldn't quite call it an inventory purge exactly - but, at least, a slimming session of conceivably dodgy assets.  Very old freebie items that I haven't worn or used in ages have been zapped - including a pair of boots that persistently threw up those "broken links" in my outfits folder.  A lot of old notecards got the chop - and we know that there's an awful lot of different things can go in a notecard, right?  Calling cards were purged - including some from people I know have had accounts deleted, or have otherwise left SL under a cloud: are those assets which are hard to locate?  A lot of landmarks have been painstakingly removed from shopping folders... including several folders that I got from closing down sales, where in many cases the sims relating to those landmarks don't exist any more.

Now, it may be that I'm barking up the wrong tree completely here.  All this slimming down has brought my inventory down to somewhat under 47,000, and it may be that that's simply a safe size to have, with my particular setup and connection.  But... I have a feeling it may well be worth while removing assets from inventory that I know might be problematical.

Anyway.  We shall, no doubt, see.

I don't have a thing to wear!

Well, no, that's not strictly true.  All my clothes are still there... there have even been some additions to the clothing folders, what with finding some mesh items that (despite the evil that is Standard Sizing) can be made to work.

What I don't have any more is my varied and extensive Outfits folder.  Let me explain....

I have mentioned, in previous posts, what I called the "blue limbo" problem.  Basically, this means that when I log in, it's in a semi-disconnected state - I can't move, can't communicate, my ping time is pegged at the maximum value, and the world around me is partially or (more often) completely unloaded - nothing but blue sky and blue sea.

This happened enough to be annoying, was fixed for a while, but has been back with a vengeance since my return to SL.

So, I went to the lengths of filing a bug report... but, more pertinently, also went to the lengths of examining my log files.

The thing is, when you log into SL, a whole host of things happen behind the scenes to get you inworld (or not).  And these things are recorded, by default (on my Win7 box) in C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Second Life\logs.  (The AppData folder is invisible by default, you may have to Take Steps to see it.)

Studying the text file in there called SecondLife.log... well, it is long and complex, and if you're not intimately familiar with the viewer's source code (and I'm not) it's not all that meaningful.  But, as I scanned the lines of text with my jaded eyes, a few things leapt out at me.

One of them was the fact that errors were being returned relating to outfits - specifically, "broken links" in the outfit folders.

Now, as we know from previous witterings on this blog, outfits are individual folders containing, not actual items, but links to items in the inventory.  However, those links are, themselves, entries in your inventory, and in SL's databases... and, if something has gone agley with them, things can go wrong.

Was it possible, I asked myself, that the system was spending sufficient time and effort chasing its tail, following invalid entries in broken links, that it was timing out on completing other, more important tasks?  Yes, I answered myself, this was certainly a possibility.

So... track down the broken links and remove them?  I thought about that.... I could get which objects they referred to, after all, from the log file.  But I had a lot of outfits.  (How many?  We shall soon see.)  I rather blenched at the idea of trawling through them individually.  Besides, many of them needed updating anyway - they used old skins and old eyes, or something equally naff.  So.  Time, Glorf, I said to myself, to bite the bullet.

So I selected every outfit I wasn't actually wearing at the time, and deleted them all.

I crashed, of course.  But, when I logged back on... some 13,000 items lighter in the inventory... I was logged in properly, straight away, and had a darn sight better performance than usual.  Whether this was down to the elimination of broken links, or simply to the reduction of my inventory by something over 20%, I don't know.

But things worked, for a time, and I was a happy Glorf, though a Glorf who had to trawl through actual inventory folders to find stuff to wear... Then the viewer sent through its automatic update, from 3.5.0 to 3.5.1 - and, next time I logged in, blue limbo again.

So it wasn't that... or it wasn't just that.

Well, I shall persevere.  But all this demonstrates, I think, just how many cans of worms you can open, trying to fix a software problem.

It also raises several other questions, such as why those darn links got broken in the first place.  The items they linked to are still in my inventory, and haven't been moved out of the original folders they came in, nor have they been edited or otherwise fiddled with, by me at least.  So what happened to get them unlinked?  (The main culprits seem to be two pairs of boots - one a freebie set I could happily dispose of entirely, the other a Steam Hunt prize of quite excessive sexiness which I should be sorry to sacrifice.  What's so problematical about them, though?  Answers on a postcard please.)

Plus ça change...

I celebrated the feast of Saint Stephen by getting my foot crushed between a very heavy church door and a similarly solid piece of ecclesiastical architecture.  Various complications, too tedious to record, duly set in, with the result that I haven't been taking much of an interest in anything for the past three months.

I did, however, manage to get back into SL for my third rezday, and was welcomed back by several...

... including SL itself, in its own inimitable way.

I installed, as is oft my wont, the latest dev version, and duly reappeared inside the hallowed halls of Oxbridge.  There followed a quick tour of my properties (still, amazingly enough, all going strong), at the end of which I decided to change outfits.  Bad Idea Glorf.

It seems that there are changes afoot in the world of baking avatar textures; more is being done on the server side, less on the client side.  In theory, this should be all to the good.  In practice, I changed outfits, went to visit Caledon Burroughs and the much-missed Tali Rosca... and found that, though I looked fine in my viewer, to everyone else in SL, the whole baking process had got as far as my underwear and then given up.  There I was, unknowingly parading around wearing nothing but a smile and a thong.

So my triumphant return to the shores of SL took the form of... spending several hours skulking underwater with my boobs out, trying to figure out what was going wrong and how to get it fixed.

(Pictures are not forthcoming, this is still Not That Sort of Blog.)

So.  Welcome back, to and from SL.

Maddeningly incomplete

OK... so, I can understand why the viewer comes up, at login, with a list of my favourite places to log in at, on account of, y'know, this is what I tell it to do.

I can understand it not doing that, because clearly the malicious viewer pixie has flipped the bit that says "show favourites at login" - it is annoying and it shouldn't happen, but if LL chooses to install a malicious pixie into their viewer, who am I to argue the toss?

What I don't understand is why it only shows some of the list.  Sometimes.  Not all the time.

Are there a couple of places it disapproves of?  Are two of my seven favourites places which are not the In spots to be Seen At?  I can't think of any other even semi-sensible reason.... Well, no, maybe I can.  The missing places are the oldest and the newest of the entries on my favourites list.  Maybe there is some sort of fencepost error going on with the database query, and the top and tail of the list are being chopped?  It is strange, but it could happen.

Not for the first time, I wish LL would just fix this crap.

Catznip is catnip?

Tried out the (fairly) new Catznip third party viewer last night... actually, I was pleasantly surprised.

I've always been a bit leery of the TPVs, for several reasons.  The absolutely relentless promotion of Phoenix/Firestorm by their advocates evidently works, in terms of attracting "market share", but it is very wearisome to those of us who don't use it... frankly, the sheer rudeness of some of their more vocal supporters is offputting in itself; I've had otherwise reasonable people tell me I'm an "amateur" for not adopting their viewer.  One of the reasons LL cited for eliminating that TPV feature that tells you what viewer people are in was that new users who hadn't switched to Phoenix/Firestorm were being verbally bullied and abused over their choice... and, you know what?  I believe it. 

I was also around for the whole Emerald fiasco, which doesn't help... and, besides, I want to keep up with the latest advances in viewer technology, and (as I think I've said before) these are more likely to come along in the official LL viewer than in a TPV - particularly a TPV whose main selling point is "basically, we are never going to change the interface".  And, let me reiterate a point here, too; unless you're used to it, the old V1.23 interface sucks.

So, no Phoenix or Firestorm for me (actually, I did try Phoenix, once.  Besides the overall suckiness of the old-style interface, the default colour scheme struck me as eye-bleedingly horrible.  I know you can change it... or I could just, y'know, use something else, which I actually prefer!)  But Catznip seemed to be interesting, and I decided to give it a little whirl.  As I said, I was pleasantly surprised.

For a start, it is a V3 based viewer, none of the old (sucky.  Did I mention it was sucky, yet?) interface about it.  So, I have my outfits and my received items and my flexible toolbars, and niceties like legible fonts and menu bars that aren't a horrible clutter.  Also, the big thing that Catznip's dev team seem to be touting, above everything else, is stability.  This viewer clocks up enviably low crash rates, and the developers seem to be enthusiastic about that, and think it is something to aim for.  I approve of this.  I've said a few times that, had I the choice, I would happily declare a moratorium on new features for six months or so and put all LL's dev teams onto fixing the damn bugs already.  Since my system is prone to falling over in a gentle breeze (I suppose my running the bleeding-edge dev version of V3 doesn't exactly help there), I am in favour of a dev team that regards Not Crashing as a priority goal.

I didn't explore all of Catznip's features last night (I only had a few hours, and most of that time was spent in traditional SL things rather than testing viewer features), but I formed a more or less positive impression.  My frame rate was lousy (it always is) but it was slightly less lousy than usual, and I didn't crash.  The IM interface was a bit more old-school that I would like... but that was offset by the profiles viewer also being old-school, and that I did like; as an inveterate profile perv, I have always found the new, slow-loading HTML profiles an irritation, and being able to get a quick view of people's groups and interests came as a welcome flash of nostalgia.  (So, I couldn't read anyone's Facebook wall profile feed that way... big deal.  Does anyone have anything remotely interesting on their profile feed?  I know I haven't, and I use the darn thing.)  I didn't find some "standard" things in TPVs (area search, object derender); I don't know if they're not there at all, or if I just didn't look hard enough; either way, since I don't use them, I didn't miss them.

So, yes.  Catznip.  I think this one may well supplant Singularity as my go-to TPV of choice.  When I choose to go to a TPV at all, of course, which will not be often.  But I can live with this one, I think.

(Don't) talk to the wall...

The uncertainty over the existence of my block list continues... as does that bizarre bug, the one where you don't get offline messages unless you have a currently-non-empty block list.

As a result, as often as not, when I log in, I spot an unaccountable silence in my communications window, I give a nearby wall the Cut Direct, and as soon as the block goes through, a deluge of messages (I have reached the point of having my offline IMs capped) comes washing over me.

On those occasions when everything works, therefore, my block list shows a collection of snubbed walls that may be enough for some sort of record.

I have to wonder where, if anywhere, these things are on LL's priority list of Stuff What Ought To Get Fixed.

Seeing things

I think a malicious fairy is living inside my viewer and flipping switches or otherwise fiddling with the settings whenever the mood takes them.  I but recently restored my ability to post snapshots on my profile feed (which is just about the only thing I ever use my profile feed for, in any case), and now I find that my draw distance has been upped, slightly, from the absolute rock bottom minimum where I usually keep it.  Well, until now.  I have been wandering through Fantasy Faire with this slightly-enhanced draw distance, and have not been crashing any more than usual, so I think it is safe and I will keep it.  So, serendipity at work there, then.  In your face, malicious viewer fairy!

Talking of Fantasy Faire, it is now in its closing weekend, and I am wandering around it scarfing anything nice that I can afford and missed first few times around.  It occurs to me that I didn't show enough snapshotting love to Meandervale:-

It's not as dramatic as some of the others, but it is really a very nice build.

Sort of quiet and elegant and restrained.

Which, I admit, is more than you can say for that particular outfit.  But never mind.  Anyway.  Meandervale, some more shots of.  It's nice, go see it while it's still there.

Crash test dummy

I'm running in the latest (available) development version of the viewer at the moment, and right now I am spending rather longer than I would like staring at a seized-up screen and/or the SL crash logger.

There always seems to be a trade-off between speed and stability when it comes to the viewers, and this current version is leaning rather heavily towards the speed side of the equation.  While it's working, I'm getting (what I consider) reasonable frame rates, even on my clapped-out computer.  While it's working... but rather often, it isn't.

Of course, some people may be asking, why am I using the LL viewer at all, why have I not "upgraded" to a TPV...?  Well, there are several reasons, some of them better than others.  One of the less good ones is simply reverse psychology, in that I have long since had it up to here with people telling me how great Phoenix/Firestorm are, and I can't help feeling that if I used those, I would wind up joining some sort of cult.  Perverse, perhaps, but there we are.

On a more serious note, sticking with the V3 development line seems to me my best bet of keeping up to speed with innovations.  Firstly, although the viewer code is open, the server-side code is not, and so the official viewer is likely to be the first one to synergize with new developments on the server side.  Secondly, the TPVs are, in some ways, predicated on not innovating - specifically, they are sticking with the V1.23 style interface that so many people (but not me) know and love.  So innovations from the TPV side tend to be what I consider bolt-on bells and whistles, and thus stuff I can happily live without (especially on a machine which has, as it were, limited space for bells and whistles).  The useful or desirable innovations tend to make it into the official viewer sooner or later; sometimes, indeed, in a better form than the TPV devs come up with.  Compare and contrast Emerald's old extra-attachment-points system, for example, with the flexible system we have now, that allows you to add multiple attachments on one point, and lets you pick which points you use.  I know which method I prefer there!

I will also be heretical, in a small way, by saying that, unless you've spent a lot of SL time getting used to it, the V1.23 interface is not actually all that good.  I started in V1.23, although V2 was already available at the time... and I switched over to V2 with almost a sigh of relief.  I find the old-style screens cluttered, the menu bars over-populated and poorly laid out, and I never once squelched to the bottom of one of those pie menus without muttering "Why can't they put the options that aren't greyed out at the top, dammit?"  And some of the TPVs, frankly, compound the problem with even more clutter, with some truly appalling font choices (any font where I can't tell the difference between a lowercase L and an exclamation mark is a bad font), and with default colour schemes that make my eyes scream for mercy.  Meanwhile, by now, all the real defects of the V2 interface have been addressed, and V3 is a good, sound, and highly customizable design.

But, then, people do get used to things - I have noticed this a lot with Open Source software, where the user base overlaps with the developer base and so development is geared more towards what people are comfortable with.  I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing - in many cases, it's a good thing - but it does seem strange, sometimes, to be looking at software products which, however sophisticated they may be "under the hood", look as if they should have a "Best Viewed With Netscape Navigator" decal on their interfaces.  As a largely Microsoft-based programmer myself, of course, I have had to get used to the idea that my UI will be completely revamped every eighteen months or so, and I will just have to suck that up and relearn everything.  So maybe I am less likely to become attached to a particular sort of viewer!  (I may be the only person who kind of misses the V2 sidebar - it did hoover up a lot of my on-screen clutter into one place!  But I'm not losing any sleep over its demise.)

So, anyway.  I'm sticking with V3, and hoping to stay up to date with changes in SL.  But I could do without all the crashes, thank you very much!

Viewer attack

The viewer decided to hide my favourites and empty my block list today... it is getting above itself again.  (This sort of thing really needs to be reported, I suppose.  If I could reproduce this behaviour reliably - and if the JIRA wasn't full of snotty little trolls - I would file a bug report.)

Anyway.  Construction in Burroughs continues; I have sneaked some "Flannan Isle" references into the undersea base part of the tower, because there is little I love more than a literary reference most people won't get.  (My Linden home contains what is probably the most obscure such reference ever, being accessible to precisely two people, one of whom doesn't do SL.  Never mind.)  I may also have been roped into another project of a Caledonian nature, of which more, if it happens, anon.

Grr!

The viewer strikes once more... this time, resetting the switch that makes my favourite locations come up on the login screen.  In fact, resetting it twice, since I switched that option on as soon as I noticed it was off - and now it is off again!

The "favourites" thing has been iffy for a while in any case, since one of mine simply didn't appear in the list whether it was on or off.... I'd assumed this had something to do with unexpected characters (parentheses.  I am a parenthesis addict.  I'd seek treatment, but I don't want to be bracketed with the mentally ill) that I had in the name... but, when I added Caledon Burroughs to my favourites, the full list came up.  Briefly.  Before the viewer reset itself.

Anyway - this is becoming annoying!  What other preferences is the viewer going to switch without asking my permission?