I don't know if voice is the culprit, but since the big drive to get voice installed, there seems to be a major collapse of service on Second Life. Outages, inventory problems, and so on.
There are other virtual worlds, if one day Yedo is gone, and I am not to be found, you will know that I've found a new home some place.
Uh... Are you kidding me? Before voice was launched SL was already majorly collapsed due to bugs and stuff... I think voice is one of the LEAST buggy features in Second Life!
ReplyDeleteThe HUGELY visible bugs in SL are THE biggest reason that people didn't want Linden to spend time to develop anything else: Windlight, etc.
Nate dear, just look at the blog.secondlife.com, and count how many service outages from voice there have been. My own experience is that trying to use voice in a crowded area is a frequent....hmmm I can't say "cause" because I don't know that, but lets say it seems to be strongly corrlated with crashing.
ReplyDeleteAnd when I log back in again, voice doesn't work for me. I'm not alone in observing that many voice bugs are associated with crashing.
I know you are a big voice booster dear, but the evidence isn't in your favor on this one. And that does not count the bugs that have not been fixed because of the fixation on voice.
My own belief is that the rise of Kaneva, and the need to divide bots from live players, is driving the push for voice. Kaneva has content handed out for free, and is a "chat" system that tries to connect users who want rl contact. LL seems to be trying to cut off that market growth, believing that people stuck here are stuck here.
I don't know if these things are true, they are my observations. I would also say that the LL land dump, if not planned, is certainly convenient, because it forces a whole class of people who are in sl now, to sit and wait through the bottom of the land market. It is entirely possible that LL just needed the money, they certainly don't need the land in play, but it does seem to be very convenient for leaving people with heavy sunk costs right at the moment when the platform performance has been worse that awful...
One day the virtual world market will "prove itself" and the next day Microsoft, Sony and Google will introduce their flavors. (they are already working on versions)
ReplyDeleteIf Linden Labs doesn't fix it's shit, they will simply be dismissed as the "cute" but unreliable virtual world.
The Apple Lisa of virtual worlds.
After all, it's only "fun" if it works. I am losing too much inventory at random for my smile to be very wide.
I hear you Casius, but LL isn't the VR for "the rest of us," as I am told Apple called Macintosh.
ReplyDeleteA friend tried Kaneva and he said "Myspace with avatars."
Voice has just been released so I'm sure there are going to be a few problems with it. And it looks like they're fixing it rather rapidly if you can see the multiple maintenance periods during it's first week of release.
ReplyDeleteWhen Voice goes down for maintenance the SL servers stay up because they're NOT connected. So how when the SL servers go down could it be cause by the voice implementation? That doesn't make any sense!?!
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ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteSorry... triple post.
ReplyDeleteIt is not about whether somebody likes the voice feature or not.... everytime they implement something big this happens. And it happens because they can test it in beta as much as they want but once it comes in real use it is completely different story. We all heard about scalability. Something might work for couple of hundreds people but nobody knows if it will work with 40 thousands on the live grid.
ReplyDeleteAnd that is happening because the grid is never ment to be used by so many residents. That is why we signed that open letter, and that is why so many residents are saying that basic things should be fixed first and then to implement new features like voice, sky and whatever.
"Voice has just been released so I'm sure there are going to be a few problems with it."
ReplyDeleteThere are more than a few problems, and these problems are clearly being compounded by the previous wave of problems, which now seem to be back in force after having had some fixes put in place, and creating waves of new problems.
My own experience is that inventory problems are related to crashes, and that therefore that which ups the crash rate, ups the inventory loss problems.
My problem is not with voice per se, how could it be? But it is with this implementation of it, which seems to be rushed in place, forced into people's existence without proper community buy in, and lacking the kinds of tools for land owners/managers that would be appropriate.
Yes there are people who are completely opposed to voice, but there are far more people, I think, who are opposed to the way voice has been implemented, and the problems that have been left to bleed while voice has been implemented, than who are absolutely opposed to voice itself.
Apologia for the poor quality of implementation seems to correlate with denial of what are problems that even SL boosters I have talked to admit: namely the instability of the platform driving people away. Remember, the rl people I work with want voice, and they are, by and large furious at a platform which is unstable.
Given the choice between voice now, and stability now, most people, even voice boosters, want stability now. Given the choice between this voice and some better one later, many people, myself included, would be very happy to wait 6 months to get good voice, rather than have the costs of voice dumped on us now.
Voice may not be the root technical cause of many of the problems, but the focus on voice is certainly the root cause of other problems not being fixed. When coupled with what seems to be an SL "financial crisis," as one more knowledgeable friend of mine called it, the level of pure anger and depression among key content providers in SL is at an unhealthy level.
Right now LL has a monopoly, and many of us are stuck with it. However, when a viable exit becomes available, many people will take it. I may well be one of them when that moment comes.
I did notice last night when they disabled voice game wide for maintenance the game was a lot smoother, and when the re-enabled voice it was lag city.
ReplyDeleteI've been resisting and resisting saying anything about this on any of the blogs I've been on, but here goes....
ReplyDelete@nate, they didn't have this problem with sculpties... they didn't have this problem with flexi prims... They didn't have this problem with removing TP hubs and allowing full point to point TP. Hmmm... Voice is implemented and suddenly... WOW problems... shutdown after shutdown. Lag wherever it's used even though there's supposed to be "no lag since it's on different servers." Seems pretty clear to me what the issue is. It's voice. ;)
There will continue to be problems and there will continue to be fixes and, as this:
http://tinyurl.com/ywpshv
and a number of other polls have indicated on many other sites...
VOICE IS UNPOPULAR and UNWANTED.
For me Voice=off. Up yours, if you don't like it.
I would understand the pro-voice crowd not getting it if it were one poll or one blog, but it's not. It's happened every time there's been a mention of it on a site. The blog.secondlife.com site is full of negative comments for *every* voice posting.
Yes, over time, it may get better.... until they come up with the next intrusive feature to implement. Oh wait, they're already working on that... it's called "Identity Verification." ;)
I can't wait to see the bugs in that one. *wry smile*
Anony Mouse
"You'll have to type if you want me to talk to ya!!" ;)
"no lag since it's on different servers."
ReplyDeleteI cannot be 100% sure about this, but....
it is not different servers, it means that voice (the data that handles sound information) is not streamed through the same servers that handles the rest of the world. But, the rest of the data connected to voice IS on the same servers.
Voice is not only sound, it is also (for every avatar that has enabled voice): position and rotation, individual settings and all the similar things. Those are coming from the main database (which is a mess already) and they are additional queries not just at the moment of voice initialization, but during the whole conversation.
To make it more visual: let's suppose that you an me are on the same sim, in the reach of voice and both of us turned on (voice option, I mean). We speak. If you move, you will notice that as you move my voice is fading in or out depending on the distance. If you turn around the position of my voice in stereo image will change. To do that, part of your SL client than handles voice have to send a query to the database (the "main" db which handles the rest of the sim) and to receive a response about my position. And it has to do that all the time, repeatedly, many times in the second. And it is not just my position. If there are five people with vouice turned on, it has to check all of them, all the time.
I agree with you dandellion, I did notice a huge difference in Lag last night when they had voice disabled game-wide, to when they turned it back on.
ReplyDeleteWell, I haven't been around very long, but for all the ONE week I've been here, SL has been one of the clunkiest cyber-experiences ever. I fled here to the internet tonight after another annoying experience because I felt sure that on the internet, I could actually get somewhere.
ReplyDeleteSince I've tried to get on SL, it has been crashing constantly, & refuses to teleport on a regular basis. I've been unable to get any consistency in my avatar (which keeps balding out and changing clothes of its own free will), and I frequently even cannot walk forward OR back. I had a party to attend on SL on Wednesday and spent four hours trying to get to it -- to no avail. I'm pleased to hear that it's not just me. I'm not pleased to hear that those who oughta be fixing whatever's wrong aren't fixing it.