Sunday, April 6, 2008

Now this is the worst SL news you will read this week.

Nicholaz gives up on patching viewer.

I am fumingly angry. This is a clear example of management incompetence at Linden Labs. For many of is 1.19 is unusable. Hiring someone to fix crash bugs should have been their top priority, if not Nicholaz, then someone.

5 comments:

  1. Well, they expect us to upgrade our hardware I suppose. But they forget that not all users come from countries like US/UK where upgrades are more easily affordable.

    On the other hand I'm also wondering why some people say they have amazing performance with the new viewer and others (with similar hardware specs) report crashing every 10 minutes. What's up with that? Doesn't make sense to me at all!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I don't know, I am not a techie. But what I do know is that fixing memory leaks and similar crashes is a major issue. Over the weekend some in the press, with the sneer typical of guys with hard drives full of porn, blamed sex for SL's problems in being accepted by the outside world.

    The reality is that it isn't so much the "burning man" syndrome, I mean the transvestites haven't hurt New York as being a center of finance, but the crash and burn syndrome, that are the problem.

    Thought on hardware upgrades. Many people can only afford to upgrade their comptuer every few years, not every few weeks of the SL release cycle. Even people who can afford to upgrade are affected by the problems.

    I, like many people, play SL on a lap top. For me a hardware upgrade means I would have to buy a new computer. It isn't a 200 or 300 dollar trip to the local geek guru, it's a 2000 dollar decision. So even people who are willing to pay money to stay in sl, are being faced with nasty choices.

    So there is a large user base for whom upgrading is not the solution.

    The attitude of ignoring crash bugs will not fly in corporate America.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I stuck with 1.18 until it was forced on us. My every 10 minute crashes on 1.19 came while couples dancing in an admittedly over primmed environment. Still, that's where my friends were and those were the conversations I wanted to have.

    Thank you, Lillie, for untangling me from 1.19 and talking the considerable time to walk me into Nicholaz' patch. My av can dance and I can enjoy the elegant light shows of Yedo.

    ReplyDelete
  4. While I have a lot of sympathy for those trying to run SL on older laptop hardware it is the case that most laptops are aimed at business users and 3D graphics capabilities has never been a strong point - indeed you always have to pay a significant premium to get decent 3D capabilities. So if you're playing SL beyond casual involvement then picking up a desktop for it makes a lot of sense. It's not even an expensive option - I have had the latest version running quite happily on a recycled 1.5Ghz machine with 512Mb Ram, a nVidia 6200 card and Ubuntu linux - hardware that cannot have a resale value of more that $150. True if you want the full delights of Windlight then increasing that card to a 7600 is a good move, but even then it'd be quite feasible to but together a small desktop PC capable of playing SL at maximum quality for a very modest price tag - especially if you use Linux and don't pay the Microsoft tax.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Actually Lillie, it's more you buy the right laptop with the future in mind. I was looking at a $700 USD laptop from Asus a couple weeks ago that would run SL just fine, as well as most modern computer games...

    But most people would opt for a HP, IBM (Lenovo now), DELL, etc... Which don't optimize themselves for anything outside business use with impressive specs that arent' needed and cost as much as $1000 USD more.

    It's a matter of people general buying into the sales hype because they have no idea what to buy... Sadly as I used to work retail PC sales, I can say the attempts to educate people generally failed... People don't care to know what suites their needs and instead continue to buy into the sales hype...

    It's sad, but true...

    ReplyDelete