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Mono is teh suxxors

Aug
30
2008 in Epic Fail, Mono, Bug Reports, C:SI and WTF.

Yup, that’s right, I said it : The Mono rollout blows goats.

The plan, as given by Linden Lab™, was that existing scripts would not need to be recompiled to Mono, and could continue to run as they always have :

Unless scripts are explicitly converted to run on Mono they will continue to run on the existing scripting engine. There is no automated conversion to Mono and all existing scripted content will continue to run on the original scripting engine as before.

That is a ~~great~~good plan, and if it had worked as intended I would have had no problems with it. The problem is, of course, that it doesn’t work. Epic Fail.

Anyone who has tried to duel since the Mono server rollout knows what I’m talking about : The swords can take upwards of 5 seconds to switch state from block to attack or vice versa. Apparently the "run on the original scripting engine" part was left behind in favor of a "run on a (mostly) compatible scripting engine" philosophy.

While trying to come up with an interim fix, I tried compiling the C:SI scripts already in the Taketori to Mono, with mixed results. Some scripts *still* don’t compile (and why the hell would they roll out Mono when everything still doesn’t compile?!?!??!), though most of the ones I tried did compile. The difference was noticeable, so I gave a few Mono-compiled betas out to get some feedback.

From what I can gather by that feedback, I’m not going to get away with such a quick and easy workaround : The scripts still have a very noticeable delay when switching states, and do not perform at all as well as the original scripts used to.

To say I’m upset and discouraged would be an understatement. In fact, a good way to demonstrate how irritated I am without a long litany of curse words is just to quote one of Judo’s comments (emphasis added) :

Judo Jung said:

So I am curious, what is the game plan now given that C:SI is effectively broken? Are the developers going to work on mono, and will we have to wait until the scripts have been rewritten for mono to fight again, and if so, any estimate of how long that might take? Or will there be any attempt to deal with the block latency problem using the existing script? Without C:SI, SL is a bust for me!

Thanks

Yeah.

I’ll re-iterate that Archanox is working on the long-term solution of refactoring the scripts into a real working system under Mono, though of course there’s just now way of knowing how long that can take. I wouldn’t make any bets on it being in the immediate future, though.

Until then, I guess we can somehow try to let Linden Lab™ know of the problem and how it affects close to twenty thousand people in-world, but given their very poor history of responding to such issues and the ever-dwindling avenues of communication I can’t promise that would be any quicker. Maybe all of us together can make enough noise to be heard, who knows?

I will work on trying to figure out how to either beat the existing scripts into some semblance of a workaround, or see what options might be available to get everything working as well as possible.

We will do our best to get this issue resolved as quickly as possible, and we will keep you all informed as we go.

In the meantime, I have suspended sales of the Taketori, as I don’t expect that I’ll have enough time to respond to the anticipated customer messages about buying a broken product

[UPDATE]

This comment was left on the "What in the world is wrong with Second Life" post :

Babbage Linden said:

The only issue I know if which affects scripts running on the original scripting engine in 1.24.3 is that state changes are incorrectly restricted to 1 per frame. We have a fix for this issue which will be likely rolled out next week. If the problem is due to something else, please file a bug on the public JIRA here https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-1276

Babbage Linden’s latest blog post is : Mono Launch

I’ve been working on a workaround, and I think I have found out something interesting about the cause. I have several beta testers trying out some changes, and I’m working on creating a repro case for Linden Lab that focuses on just the problem at hand so that I can provide them with as much relevant information as possible.

Thank you, Babbage Linden, for taking time to brave these hostile waters and leaving a comment. It is much appreciated!!!

Popularity: 42% [?]

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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.

18 Comments

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?

Popularity: 31% [?]

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WTF - Password required to read SL Blog?!?!?!

Jun
18
2008 in Rants, JIRA, off topic, Epic Fail, WTF and Second Life.

8 Comments

Check out this dialog I was just presented with when I opened Firefox to read some of today’s blogosphere buzz :

Okay… "Apparently there’s a picture or something in that blog post that is hosted on JIRA, which is causing the browser to ask me for my password", I thought to myself, "I should go to the actual blog post and mention that fact, I bet they’d appreciate that". Well, easier said than done :

Naturally, comments are closed. Well, it’s not my problem, and I don’t have any real responsibility to try any harder than that to tell LL when they screw up, but I would like to point out the irony of a blog post about Payments by Bank Wire which appears to be phishing for my password

PS: The authentication dialog looks the way that it does because I’m using Firefox 3 with the Nasa Night Launch Theme.

Popularity: 80% [?]

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Taketori sales halted until further notice

May
30
2008 in Server Issues, Epic Fail, Asset Server, C:SI and WTF.

3 Comments

Due to Second Life being full of fail and the Lindens taking several hours to finally even notice the problem, I’ve disabled all sales of the Taketori Katana until further notice.

Once I’m convinced that Second Life has returned to some semblance of stability, and that people can no longer continue to take advantage of the fact that my network vendors are scripted to err on the side of customer friendliness - delivering a product to the customer in certain circumstances sometimes even after a refund has been given due to Second Life hiccups, then I will re-enable sales.

Popularity: 44% [?]

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