Request: Feedback mechanism on viewer region change
needsĀ info
Journey Bunny
This weekend (particularly Sunday 6/22), I experienced disconnects every handful of teleports using SL Viewer, Firestorm, and Alchemy viewers alternately. While that's an immediate inconvenience and concern, it's not the root of the problem:
The problem is that I don't even know there's a problem. As is
always
the case with networking issues, "everything else" was working fine; video streaming in web browsers, connections to SL and other websites, Discord servers etc so I was not having an overall internet outage... but then, I can't really do
anything here. If there's a problem on my end, I can't tell; if the grid is struggling, I can't send you anything to determine what might have been bottle-necking.When I have a viewer crash, at least I get a bugsplat thing, right? But what happens when I go to teleport to a new region, and 20% of the time, I get a progress bar just sitting still at "Requesting region capabilities" or region handshake? What's really happening under there? I know that after 60 seconds, it'll time out and "Quit" the viewer, but that leaves me with nothing to tell you about what has happened. Nothing crashed and yet, something's wrong~
I've heard many (including Lindens) refer to region changing as an indecipherable and scary mess of spaghetti code, but this is the lifeblood of the platform, and it seems to have phases where error rates go through the roof (anecdotally, during the half-day I had these issues, various group chats indicated I was not alone). A thousand little cuts in silence, and it's hard to know what to report and how.
The request here is a bit nebulous, I apologize, but that's because I don't even know what LL needs, but please add something to the viewer to log region changes in some way that is meaningful to you, and that presents itself when the viewer times out and disconnects. You know that screen where I can choose to view IMs offline or Quit, when I have a timeout? Add something there, please, to open the region change log folder. (And pls make a region change log, even just to track the most recent change; it sounds as though this one area of SL activity could use better investigation). That way, when things are acting up, there's something to send to support that hyper-focuses on the specific region-change that caused the problem. I could attach that here, or send it to customer support etc.
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Atlas Linden
needsĀ info
Atlas Linden
Journey Bunny, so we can further investigate your particular TP failure:
The next time this reproduces can you log out, and then zip up your viewer logs folder. This page tells you where to find the logs folder: http://community.secondlife.com/t5/English-Knowledge-Base/How-to-report-a-bug/ta-p/733545#Section_.3
Next, log into https://support.secondlife.com/ and click the "Submit a Support Case" in the right column, then choose Issue Type: āā¦ā and type ālogs for canny issueā and add the link to this canny issue. Click the āAttach a fileā link at the bottom and attach the zip file.
Leave a comment on this canny issue once that's done so we can take a look at the logs.
Journey Bunny
Atlas Linden Thank you for the info! The teleport issues lasted all weekend but have been fine the rest of the week so far.
Peculiarly, the date modified (and the timestamps in those logs) suggest that they would nor help in any case; almost all are from 4/7/2025.
But I'll keep an eye there on future TP disconnect issues--any chance the relevant OS folder could be launched by a button on the "You have been disconnected from Secondlife" modal box?
Atlas Linden
Journey Bunny that's odd. Have you by chance not used the official Second Life viewer since that date?
And in regards to your request, I will unfortunately have to refer you to my previous comment.
Atlas Linden
Hello, and thank you for your feature request.
Incoming suggestions are reviewed in the order they are received by a team of Lindens with diverse areas of expertise. We consider a number of factors: Is this change possible? Will it increase lag? Will it break existing content? Is it likely that the number of residents using this feature will justify the time to develop it? This wiki page further describes the reasoning we use: Feature Requests
This particular suggestion, unfortunately, cannot be tackled at this time. However, we regularly review previously deferred suggestions when circumstances change or resources become available.
We are grateful for the time you took to submit this feature request. We hope that you are not discouraged from submitting others in the future. Many excellent ideas to improve Second Life come from you, our residents. We canāt do it alone.
Thank you for your continued commitment to Second Life.