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What in the world is wrong with Second Life now?

Aug
28
2008 in Epic Fail, Kick a Linden in the junk, Havok 4, Bug Reports, C:SI and WTF.

I got an interesting IM this morning :

[07:00] Silver Csak: Dear Robby, The wave and the taketory dont work right in the Shadow sim,,,,,, starting in block position then to kick, then back to block,, takes about 7 seconds if it works at all,,,, pretty serious problem on this sim,,,, but it works fine everywhere else. Would you tell some one about this please,,,,,, thanks Robby..

Now, I’ve never heard of anything like this before, so I logged in for a bit to check it out. Turns out, Silver’s right : It is absolutely painful to go into and out of block. It seemed as if all script state transitions were spotty, and the weapons controlled like mud when going from block->attack, ready->attack, ready->block, etc, etc. Many times, it simply didn’t work at all.

But it’s not just the Taketori and Wave that were affected. I even had trouble when using the Cursed Spirit. The account I used didn’t have all of the weapons, so I wasn’t able to test more than those three, but what I encountered was absolutely abysmal. The Taketori was worst of all, and the Cursed was best, but none of the three had anything even remotely resembling good performance.

So I went back to my home sim to test. Same results, I’m sorry to say. I was flabbergasted. Surely this couldn’t be a general problem, right? I mean… I’d expect hundreds of people to be raising hell over such poor performance, but I’ve not really heard anything that would indicate such widespread problems.

I still had a bit of time to test before I had to return to work, so I headed to Samurai Island and Edo to check things out. While performance was still relatively lousy compared to what I was experiencing before my recent break from SL, it was at least an order of magnitude better than the last two sims I’d been in. I started to feel a little better, thinking that I wouldn’t be too surprised if a couple simulators were having problems. That is, until I teleported to another sim.

So far, three out of four sims were so bad that it was simply not even worth trying. I can’t state that strongly enough : I would absolutely not try to have a fight in those sims. You couldn’t pay me to waste my time, even, because there’s absolutely no question that it would be nothing but an exercise in frustration.

Just to be sure, I tried yet another sim. Same thing, the performance (and by the way I noted that the ’sim stats’ display for all of the sims showed near-perfect numbers) was so bad that I gave up within thirty seconds. This is exceptionally discouraging, because just a couple of days ago I was having absolutely no problems whatsoever, and the difference was as noticeable as hitting a brick wall at 50mph.

The only anomaly I noticed was that the Samurai Island estate simulators were running a difference version of the sim software (as indicated by a popup notice), but everything else appeared fine.

So, anyone know what this is, and when it started? Did I just miss out on knowing this because I’ve been out of touch? Is this a known issue?

What the hell is going on here?

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Taketori V1.0.7 is teh suxxorz?

Aug
17
2008 in Testing, Bug Reports and C:SI.

45 Comments

Some people seem to think so, at any rate. I’ve gotten a few comments to that effect, though to be honest they didn’t make as much sense to me as I’d like, due to the fact that at least one of them was sent by a person that does not speak English natively, and I had trouble understanding exactly what he meant. But the basic message seemed to be "it’s broken".

I looked at the source for the update, and it would appear that while I had thought I was using the same code that a few testers had gone through not long ago, I was in fact using a slightly different version. It is not obvious to me why the few minor differences would cause any problems, but just a few minutes ago I released another update with the code that I thought I was using in the first place.

So, if this latest "latest update" is still broken, I’d love to hear why and how, and I will look into it immediately and see what I can do about that.

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Working on it…

Jun
15
2008 in Software Development, C:SI and omgbots!.

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I know I’ve been out of touch lately, for a number of reasons (some of the pretty good ones, too *smirk*), but I was reading the daily Coding Horror blog entry this morning and it contained a little observation so obvious and powerful (yet frequently ignored) that I had to immediately act on it :

And yet over and over, I’m gathering stories that point to the fact that programmers do not want to write code out in the open. Programmers don’t want their peers to see mistakes or failures. They want to work privately, in a cave, then spring "perfect" code on their community, as if no mistakes had ever been made.

One of the unfortunate consequences of this trait, which I exhibit just as much as (and maybe more than) any other developer I’ve ever met, is that for very long periods of time it will appear that I am doing absolutely nothing with regard to C:SI, while the truth may be that I’m just in "dark mode".

While the aforementioned blog post has more relevance to professional software development than to in-world scripting, it at the very least demonstrates to me that I could do a much better job of communicating what I’m doing "behind the scenes" rather than giving the appearance of doing nothing.

So on that note :

I’ve been reviewing the comments on my using bots for testing post, and compiling those into a more formal (in the sense of ‘do these steps’) list of tests to be performed, as well as trying to understand the whole ‘what makes a balanced weapon’ subject, and am beginning the process of working on updating the bot code.

This will likely be a long-term ongoing project, but if it’s at all interesting to people I could post about my progress here. I’ve also been considering posting periodically about how I implement various things in the bot code in case anyone else is interested in the subject, but I’m not certain I want to do something like that until I get some issues worked out (which is, of course, the whole point of the subject mentioned in the first paragraph, lol).

In any case, I just wanted to let people know that I’m recovering just fine, and *am* working on stuff, even though it probably doesn’t look that way

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OMGBOTS! - Using bots for unit testing

Jun
05
2008 in Testing, Software Development, C:SI and omgbots!.

26 Comments

It’s been one of those days… On top of still dealing with the stress of Albertsons.com losing my order and having all of my grocery money locked up and unavailable for a week, I’m still working on my RL project even though I’ve been at it since about 5:00 this morning.

And yet, a conversation I had with Ayame recently keeps coming back to me, even while I’m working. She’s got some ideas and some projects she’s working on which utilize bots built on libsecondlife code which will, I believe, be a very nice benefit for the C:SI community. I’m going to be assisting in any way that I can, and I’m quite excited about the idea.

Thinking about her ideas keeps bringing me around to the idea of how I could do so many things with bots to make my own life easier, unit tests being a prime example.

I’m still very much trying to come up with more objective methods to determine whether a weapon is balanced, and I can think of several ways that automated testing via a bot running a predefined script of actions can assist in that process.

Unfortunately, my schedule being what it is, I haven’t really had time to think on this too deeply. The technical details of how to implement the tests are not the big challenge, really. The big challenge, as I see it, is coming up with a valid and reasonably complete list of tests that should be performed for all C:SI weapons.

I will continue to think on this topic as time allows, and should have some time this weekend to really dig into the topic, but I wanted to post this now in order to elicit feedback from the community as well.

I know that many C:SI members are software devs, and even many who are not have repeatedly shown that they have a pretty solid understanding of ways to test the weapons for balance and "correctness", so I’m asking anyone and everyone who has ideas to go ahead and submit them.

So whatcha think, got some good ideas for ways to objectively test C:SI weapons for balance and correct function? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

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