Cartoon of The Day: Rezzing Dinner Problem

 

 Taken at the SL23B. How is a guy supposed to eat with only a skull for a face? Maybe that rezzed before the rest of his head did.

 

By Bixyl Shuftan

 

Reader Submitted Picture: "Oh My God!"

 

 From Zada Bury in Johnson, "OMG ... and Rezz Zones ... ON ZINDRA !!! Total unbelievable !"

 

Rez Zones For Boats in Bellisseria

 

Among the various activities in Second Life one can do is boating, whether it's a small sailboat or a big yacht. But finding a place to place one from your inventory isn't always easy. Fortunately, the other day in Bellisseria group chat, Abnor Mole offered a list of locations.

 

[11:58] Abnor Mole: If you're looking for a place to rez a big boat... here are a few: 

 

[11:58] Abnor Mole: SSPShell Yeah (118,116,26)

Sloop John B (58,91,26)
 

Buffalo Springs (155,94,26) 

 

Running Bear (221,105,26)
 
SSPRum Tug (106,74,26)
 
Treeowatoor (33,28,26)
 
Bridle Path (208,38,26)
 
Itsa Fluke (124,162,26)
 
BelliHub (167,168,26)
 
Pegleg Channel (193,114,26)
 

Merrymount (33,54,26)
 
Salmon Eddy (154,129,26)
 
Eyrie (131,227,26)
 
Oukranos (126,124,26)
 
Port Cullis (124,129,26)
 

Baxby Gulf (255,53,26)

[11:58] Abnor Mole: Coral Waters (132,93,26)
 
Norse Auk (151,93,26)
 
Whiskey Bay (171,22,26) - next to Fairgrounds
 
Light of Aurelia (194,125,26)
 
Sunrise Pines (227,156,26)

Maiden Rock (81,170,26)

[12:01] Abnor Mole: Rez zones for large boats

Checking one out, I found one happened to be right over the water, and I fell in. So be prepared for a possible bath on heading over. Other residents reccomended slightly different locations, such as Freddie Harrington (Freddie Venus) "We just rezzed a big yacht here also SSPRum Tug (106,87,22)."

 

It should be noted that notecards of boat, car, and airplane rezzing places around the Linden Home continent are occasionally posted in the Bellisseria group. 

Happy boating

Bixyl

Grid and Viewer Glitches?

 

 Lately it seems my alt Rezzdarnnit is living up to his name.

It's been a little more than a week since the February 1 outages that took out a number of sims for a while, caused people to have problems logging in, and other problems. Since then, I've heard of, and to a lesser degree experienced, a few issues that aren't just the usual lag. Some people are taking longer to rezz, longer to see others rezz, longer to see sims rezz, and some trouble logging in.

  

The news isn't *entirely* bad. Since upgrading my Firestorm on the day before the required update, my frames per second is sometimes quite a bit more than it was before, at least when there's few to no other avatars around. 

Checking the Grid Status Report, there was a mention of a long-running issue "Online Friends Display Issues," for close to a month, " We are aware that some of our Residents are currently experiencing issues with online friends not showing correctly. Our engineers are hard at work to correct this behavior as soon as possible; however, there may be an extended time frame before this occurs." 

 

This hasn't been the first time the Grid has had more than the usual amount of bugs. During Second Life's move to Amazon Cloud servers, there were many to the point Linden Lab was asking for patience for the many weeks it would take. What could be causing these issues, we don't know, yet.

Hopefully things will be fixed soon.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of The Day: "Red Hot"

 

 

 Taken at the Happy Vixen. This avatar took a while to rezz on my viewer, resulting in a mostly red appearance. It left me guessing for a few moments what she really looked like.

Bixyl Shuftan 

Cartoon of the Day: Cloudy Avatar

 

 

 Taken at Club Cutlass. Firestorm's a good viewer. But sometimes no matter how much time passes, someone's avatar just won't rezz. And in this case, it looked like the pink bunny here was moving around an orange cloud instead of dancing. So what else could it look like and be? This came to mind.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Reader Submitted: "Raccoon Riding an Orange Cloud"

 *

From Alden Cortes, whom saw someone doing this year's Fairelands Quest, though with only Cheeky having rezzed while the rest of the avatar still cloudy, it looked like the raccoon was flying due to some kind of magic instead of  being on someone's shoulder. It got more amusing when questers were in groups, "Just saw about 6 in a bunch (laughter)."
 

Fantasy Subcontinent Appearing South of Bellisseria

 

The land that will no doubt be the future home for the Fantasy-themed homes for Premium account residents has arrived. Hearing reports that the sims were now up, I checked the map around the Bellisseria continent, and there wasa a patch of landmade up of many dozens of sims.

The sims had various names. Some were quite fitting for a fantasy-themed area such as Laughing Witch, Halfling Hill, and Moon Bridge. Fairy Tails sounded more humorous than fantasy. And some such as Bunnyhug, Otter Lake, Digerido, and Ginseng could fit in other places, though still noteworthy. One, SSPE2539, hadn't been given a real name yet.

The sims are still closed to public access, so our only clue to what they look like are the examples at the Second Life Birthday. Maybe it's because they're new on the map, but checking it, they're often a solid light green in color, or invisible with only the name showing there should be a sim there.

On Bellisseria itself, the northeastern tip that's just off the continent of Satori, on the sim of Buffalo Springs there's a new airfield and dock at (199/83/36). So people can rezz a plane and take off, or rezz a boat and sail away. For those who like exploring around either continent, or a liesurely sail or flight, this is a spot to check out.

More information on the fantasy-themed Linden Home area will be available as it comes in

Hat Tip: Daniel Voyager

Bixyl Shuftan

Map Issues (Mostly) Fixed, New Sims Visible

After months of not working properly, the Second Life map is more or less back to normal. For months, one couldn't zoom out more than a little without the sims turning invisible. If a sim changed it's appearance, it wouldn't show on the map. And if a new sim appeared, such as the Chalet Linden Home ones that connected Bellisseria with the eastern mainland continents, it would be invisible except for it's name. Naturally, many residents complained, and even the Moles were saying they were inconvenienced. But for month after month, despite the efforts of Lindens working on the problem, including a greater effort after the move to the Cloud was completed in early January, the glitches remained. There were a couple resident-made maps that helped with the panning out problem, but the others remained.

Finally few days ago on April 15, Linden Lab announced on the Grid Status Report that they were on the verge of finally fixing it.

We know it's been a long time! Thank you for your continued patience. We finally have a fix in testing, and look forward to rolling it out soon! 

But it wasn't until yesterday, Monday April 19, in which they announced the work was done.

Hooray! We have a working system for generating map tiles again, along with a few other fixes to maps (zoom). We're still monitoring the results. Thank you for your patience during this long wait, and happy navigating. 

 It should be noted that sometimes the map still glitches a little when used. A time or two when I was trying it recently, sims did turn invisible when panning out or zooming in. But more often, they would appear normally, occasionally taking a little time to rezz. And there are other glitch issues, such as the group chat issues which have made communications between numbers of people a bit difficult at times.

So this means that any sims with big changes, like the sign over Raglan Shire, are now visible. And any new sims, like Bellisseria's Chalet sims on it's northeast, can now be seen. So now planning that boat trip across the Blake Sea or the Straits of Bellisseria will be much easier.
 
Bixyl Shuftan
 

Cartoon of the Day: Beauty Mud

 

Taken at the Home and Garden during Patch Linden's interview by Saffia Widdershins. Most everyone, Patch included, was taking a while to load. And at one point my viewer was showing his face half-rezzed in a way that reminded me of a certain product some women use.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of The Day: The Invisible Man's Luck

Taken at the Second Life Birthday. This one guy took a while to rezz, at first appearing as just his clothes. The exciting thing about being invisible is no one can see you. But that can also be the bad thing unfortunately at times, such as when you're crossing the street.

By Bixyl Shuftan

"Unscheduled Maintenance" Leads to Avatar Glitches Inworld

If you had trouble with your avatar loading properly yesterday, or not loading at all, you weren't alone. In Discord and Facebook, residents were saying their avatars wouldn't fully rezz. As it turned out, Second Life was having "Unscheduled Maintenance" at the time.

At this time we are undergoing unscheduled maintenance that may cause some avatars to appear as a cloud for an extended period of time. We expect this issue to clear up gradually over the next hour or two, and inventory is not affected by this maintenance. Please note that at this time relogging will not resolve an avatar appearing as a cloud and mass relogging may extend the timeline for resolution. We thank you for your patience, and apologize for the inconvenience. Please follow this blog for more updates. 

At 12:14PM SL time, Linden Lab declared the problem resolved.

It was two weeks ago that the Grid had a number of times in which avatars would crash and be unable to login for a while. Sunday the 28th was the worst day, blamed on DDoS attacks, but not the only day.

Image Credit: Brandi Streusel

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day: Laggy Pants

Taken at Frisland. Don't you hate when your underwear rezzes before your outer clothes, or even worse, your skin and "bits" rezz but all of your clothes take their sweet time.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day: At the SL12B

From the SL12B Auditorium. No, Catboy Qunhua didn't *really* say that.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

Taken at last week's Creations for Parkinson's event, one avatar's face just stayed grey after the others came into view.

By Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: "Project Interesting" Promises Better Rezzing Priorities

Recently on the official Second Life blog, Linden Lab announced the latest step of their "Project Shinning." This development now available in the new official viewer, promises a more sensible, or "interesting," way for objects to rezz. Hence the name "Project Interesting." What it promises to do is replace the seemingly random pattern of objects rezzing to a more prioritized one where those which are larger and closer to your avatar appear first.

... this project will greatly reduce the load and time it takes to draw objects in regions. Put simply, this means scenes will appear more quickly and smoothly as you move throughout Second Life. ...
We’ve already made the server smarter about sending the important, "interesting" stuff first, and today we’re launching a release candidate for a new Viewer that does a much better job of storing and managing the scene data on your computer. This will not only improve the speed at which a location loads, it will also help with overall Viewer performance.

It's a problem most of us can relate to, how often the objects most important to us are about the last ones to rezz, such as a door that remains invisible and can't be opened to let one through. So a development like this sounds good. But recalling what Server-Side baking did to the Second Life experience of residents with older computers, some can be pardoned for asking "what's the catch?"  And indeed, resident Bay Sweetwater suggested Project Interesting doesn't quite work well with Mac computers.


For the complete blog post, Click Here. Or Click Here if you're having trouble seeing the video.

Cartoon of the Day

The tires rezzed last when this car slowly came in to view. That made me think of street thieves whom shove blocks under cars, pop the hubcaps, and take off the nuts to swipe the wheels.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

This was actual dialogue by Holocluck Henly at Bay City during it's birthday celebrations. Maybe what he was looking at explains his avatar's "lockjaw."

By Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan