Second Life group chat will continue to be borked

 By now, pretty much everyone who belongs to a group in Second Life has experienced chat frustrations. Whether it's one way chat (you send text to the group and never see replies or your own text), massive lag or group chats simply stopping altogether, it's gotten ridiculous. Of course there are several JIRAs filed on the issues and people like myself continue to open support tickets to keep this issue at the forefront for  a solution. After all, communication with others is pretty much one of the main reasons we are in Second Life. (Naughties and buying shooz aside ahem.)

So imagine my surprise when I got a response to my latest support ticket where a Linden actually says: "The solution we currently have in place will result in this issue returning intermittently." I mean wow, just wow.

Here is the complete response:

Hello Snickers Snook,

Thank you for contacting Second Life support, and for your patience. I am sorry to hear that you have been having issues with your group chats! I understand how frustrating this has been. The solution we currently have in place will result in this issue returning intermittently, and we encourage you to continue to reach out to us whenever group chats begin to misbehave again!

In the meantime, we were able to initiate some updates to our chat servers which should remedy these issues and errors. Thank you for your patience while we work to find a more permanent fix for this issue.

Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns!

Best Wishes,

xxxxxxx Linden

Talk about mixed messages. What astounds me is that a tech company that can deliver complex graphic renderings and stuffs can't get something as seemingly simple as group IMs right. 

So yeah, group chat will continue to be borked. Deal with it foo.

Alpha Mask bug triaged by Linden Lab

The bug I reported via the JIRA (see link below) is apparently serious enough that it has been "triaged" by Alexa Linden. I believe that means it's a "must fix ASAP" sort of thing.

http://snickitty.blogspot.com/2013/11/weird-transparency-alpha-in-second-life.html

Weird transparency / alpha bug in Second Life

Second Life citizen, Tempus Heart, read an article on my blog that I wrote a long time ago about alpha channels, alpha sorting and transparency. He was experiencing odd behavior with some of his own creations where the alpha channel, instead of rendering at some % transparency, would go completely black. So, thinking I was an expert on the subject (big mistake LOL), he contacted me in-world.

After finally understanding what he was talking about and doing some of my own tests, I've confirmed that there's some sort of bug present in Second Life's rendering that's causing textures with very light transparency (say 10%) to lose that transparency and go completely black. But ONLY in the presence of 100% transparent pixels! Talk about esoteric.

To illustrate the problem, I put three boxes with different transparency texture samples in front of plywood cylinders with a dark blue solid background behind the whole mess. The textures on the prims were done in Photoshop as solid black layer shapes with each "band" having its own layer opacity setting and saved as PNG files. (Click on the image to see full size.)

The top box illustrates the problem. There are three bands in the box. From left to right they should be 100% black, 0% black (100% transparent) and 90% black (10% transparent). As you can see, the 90% band has gone completely black.

Now if we take away the 0% black (100% transparent)  band (2nd box), the 90% black band renders correctly.

Just for reference, I've added a stepped box at the bottom with bands ranging from 0% black to 100% black showing that with multiple transparencies, the box renders correctly.

Weird huh? Anyone have any clues as to what's going on? Tempus has tried various viewer settings (Firestorm) and lighting combos to no avail. It seems to be a server-side baking issue. I'm seeing the same behavior on Cool VL Viewer.

Reported as a JIRA bug here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-4601

Oceans have gone dry around my Second Life house.

Wow talk about a major graphics failure. Not sure what's causing this but the water has appeared to disappear around my home in Second Life.

Second Life Marketplace Direct Delivery fails

I continue to hear nothing but problems with the Second Life Marketplace since Linden Lab officially launched "Direct Delivery". In case you don't know, this change eliminates in-world "Magic Boxes" and replaces them with direct uploads from the seller to the Marketplace.

While seemingly a good idea on the surface, so far it's been a disaster.

• Items have been mismatched
• Images of items from one seller show up on another seller's products
• Items can no longer be edited -- they are stuck.
• Some items are stuck in permanent upgraded listing mode meaning the merchant can't "unlist" it from being featured. Yet, the merchant's account continues to be dunned for the upgrade amounts.
• Some items never make it into the marketplace.
• People have LOST their items including all the great reviews that went with them.
• Editing and updating items has become tedious.
• Support tickets are not being acted on. Customer Support blames the software and says they can't do anything. The Commerce Team tells people to file support tickets. WTH?
• By my count, at least 100 JIRA items (bug reports) have been filed relating to Marketplace issues since Direct Delivery was formally implemented.

On top of this, it has slowed down the Marketplace a LOT. Searches are taking longer, the Marketplace itself often takes 20 - 30 seconds to simply show up, and browsing for an item can be pure torture.

While Magic Box deliveries can be a little flakey at times (mostly because of offline regions), they worked about 99% of the time. I think in my 4 years of using various Magic Boxes, I might have had a total of 4 completely failed deliveries.

Under Direct Delivery, I am hearing about failed or borked deliveries from my fellow merchants ALL the time. It's a deluge.

So it's a good thing I haven't switched to DD yet. But come June 1, unless Linden Lab relents, I'll have to. That's doomsday for Second Life Merchants aka the day when Magic Boxes are supposed to stop working. Uggh. LL, are you TRYING to kill commerce in Second Life? Seriously folks, why did you do this?

Prims and other items lose creator name

A few days ago, one of my old shapes I created from scratch and use constantly suddenly started giving a "Failed to find body part in database" error when I tried to wear it. Fortunately, my backup alt had a copy which I was able to use. HOWEVER, I noticed on both copies in inventory, that the creator was listed as Uknown. Wearing the backup shape (full perms to me), did nothing. Using Imprudence, I should have been able to export it. No luck.

In checking other shapes (most derivative of my original one) ALL of them are now creator unknown. In fact, when I mentioned the issue in the SL Merchants group in-world, several others suddenly found their prims had changed from themselves as creator to Unknown.

As a merchant, this causes several major problems. One, it appears that I really didn't make the items when in fact I did. Two, people who might want to refer a friend to something I created will not have that information in their version of the item, And finally, I cannot export the item using an inventory backup tool (ie. as in Imprudence) because I am no longer the creator.

So, I opened a JIRA on it. Please check your own creations for this glitch and if you find them, let LL know in the JIRA and/or via support ticket.

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7123

Transaction black hole at Second Life Marketplace

In the push to migrate everything out of XStreet SL to the Second Life Marketplace, some major problems have cropped up. One of the biggest is the lack of a clear trail between the customer's purchase, the delivery of the item and payment of the merchant.

A pJira has been opened on it. https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/WEB-2920.

The problem is all transactions go through an intermediary account - Marketplace Linden. It's similar to how the XStreet SL system worked but the reporting is not right. The transaction ID the customer gets is NOT the same as what happens when the merchant is paid. If you look through the Jira issue, Sassy Romano has done a great job of showing where things get lost.

I know the Linden Lab programmers are working long and hard on SL Marketplace but seriously, it looks to me like the migration has been pushed too fast too soon. While I had the occasional delivery glitches with XStreet SL, I could solve them fairly easily because there was a clear trail between the transaction as reported via email and the Magic box delivery. Now it's sort of all muddled together.

Several merchants are reporting not even seeing the money going into their accounts -- which is very disturbing.

LL, you have to fix this before shutting off XStreet.