Category: Viewers

Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.

OnLive, the company providing the SL Go service, announced on Tuesday, February 3rd, that they had implemented a fix for the issue that prevented users of their SLV version of the viewer (the version based on the Lab’s code) teleporting anywhere when using SL Go.

As I reported on January 30th, because of the frustration the problem was causing, OnLive extended a free month’s use of the SL Go service for all users with an active subscription.

The news the the fix had been made broke on the SL Go support group when Dennis Harper, OnLive’s SL Go Product Manager announced, “I’d like to announce:  THE SLV TELEPORT ISSUE IS FIXED AND LIVE ON  PRODUCTION!”

The problem initially started around week 3, with a handful of users initially reporting problems in teleporting, but only when using SLV  – the version of Firestorm running on SL Go was unaffected. However, this gradually spread until anyone using SLV could not teleport.

By Friday, January 30th, the Lab had traced the issue down to something going wrong within the handshaking between the two simulators involved in a teleport attempt, although at that stage, what was initially triggering the problem had yet to be determined.

Further investigation revealed that a recent server-side update involving a cleaning-up of the code related to how avatars are handled during region crossings (see my week 3/1 SL project update) has triggered the issue. Essentially, the update removed the ability to have a single quote (“‘”) in the viewer’s channel name. Unfortunately, the channel used with SLV had been called “‘Onlive”, and the presence of the quote lead to teleports failing.

Once the problem had been identified, OnLive were able to make a small change to the SLV viewer via a command line change, and after some extended testing, were able to deploy that change to the production SL Go service.

As a result, any users employing the SLV viewer on SL Go (whether via computer, iPad or Android tablet)  should find teleports are once again working as soon as the log-in to the service; there is no requirement to re-download the SL Go client or anything.

I’ll have more news from OnLive ans SL Go coming later in the week.

Important note: The SL Go service is to be shut down on April 30th, 2015. For more information, please read this report.

If you’re an SL Go user, you’ve probably already seen the e-mail, but just in case you haven’t…

The company has been writing to all SL Go users to let them know that an issue in the SL Go Second Life Viewer (SLV) currently prevents teleporting (although the problem doesn’t affect the Firestorm viewer on SL Go). “SLV had been running fine for months,” SL Go Product Manager Dennis Harper informed me. “Then all of a sudden… people can’t TP!”

Why this should have happened is unclear. Nothing has been changed at OnLive’s end to cause the problem, and while the Lab has also been involved in investigations, no reason or solution has yet been determined.

As a result, OnLive pro-actively sought to contact all users with an active subscription and offer them a free month’s subscription to the service, as noted in the official e-mail, which reads in part:

We understand your frustration and apologize for the inconvenience. We will give all SL Go subscribers a free month of SL Go to make up for time lost. The next time your subscription renews, you will not be charged.

Our goal is to continuously improve the SL Go experience. We are committed to our community in Second Life and hope that you will continue to enjoy the benefits of SL Go.

Note that the offer applies to all SL Go users with an active subscription at the time the e-mail was sent, regardless of whether you prefer to use the SL Viewer or Firestorm with the service – so while the teleport issue may be a nuisance, there is something of a silver lining to the problem, thanks to OnLive’s commitment to their users.

There’s also further good news on the horizon. Not only are OnLive working as hard as possible with the Lab to fix the issue, they’re also in the process of preparing to update the SL Viewer to the most recent viewer code released by the Lab. No date is yet available for when the update will occur (as OnLive understandably want to get the current problem fixed first), but Dennis assures me they’re keen to see it deployed – I’ll hopefully have more on this in the near future.

About SL Go

SL Go is a streaming service provided to Second life users by OnLive. A subscription-based service providing the means to access Second Life from a low-end PC or Mac computer,  or via and Android tablet or an iPad with the full graphical riches of a Second life viewer running on a high-end computer. In addition, Firestorm for SL Go (currently only available for PCs and Macs) allows the same degree of rich graphics access to OpenSim grids.

If you have a need to access Second Life while away from your main computer, or if you have a low-end system on which you might like to run Second Life with all of its graphical richness, SL Go might well be worth a look. To find out more, and take a free 7-day trial with the service, follow this link.

If you already have an SL Go account, don’t forget use can also get information through the in-world SL Go support group (profile link) in Second Life.

Addendum on the Issue: At the TPV Developer meeting on Friday, January 30th, Oz Linden confirmed that as a part of on-going investigations, the Lab’s QA team have turned up the logging and have been testing the service themselves in order to generate stats on the failures.

They believe they have found the point where things go “really wrong”, which lies within the handshaking between the two simulators involved in the teleport attempt. However, what remains unknown is precisely what is going wrong between the SL Go SLV, and the simulators in order for the simulator / simulator messaging to go so wrong. OnLive’s engineers are also trying to isolate any possible cause for the issue (which does not affect users running Firestorm on SL Go) as well.