Oh, I just want to share one extra detail. Yesterday, whilst I was searching for land, I was also testing an improved model of my Blitter (a non-physical personal movement device). This appears as a sort of back-mounted device, and has much smoother movement, though it can have issues with sim crossings, which is something I need to take a closer look at.
Regardless of that, in certain areas I encountered the horrific two-hundred-metre ban-lines that I have complained about before, and of course I was unable to stop in time to avoid hitting them. However, I noticed that I was actually able to move into the banned area and in some cases through it - not easily, it was slow and jerky, but I was most definitely inside them for some seconds. I wonder why this might be? The Blitter is really a fairly simple non-physical vehicle and such a thing should theoretically not be possible.
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June 26, 2006 at 4:54 pm
Desmond Shang
Another odd bug.
The nasty bugs are the ones that unexpectedly change behaviour over the course of days, weeks, or months.
This brings up an interesting sort of natural selection that seems to be encroaching.
So - what of our creations? The brittle ones, the ones that cannot suffer the slings and arrows of serendipitous oddness, simply don’t survive.
Those things that do survive, do so with survival mechanisms - the tram and monorail re-rezzings being a prime example. I checked the monorail page, and yes, there were some faults today, which have apparently been recovered by the re-rezzer.
We have no way of knowing what bugs are coming, but I think we *do* have a way of knowing what features will assist in survival.
Re-rezzing, or perhaps we should call it ‘death and rebirth’ - already defends against a vast class of bugs.
What more will come? I suspect variances in generations - if type X is failing, rez Y, or rez Z until one solution can carry forward. Inevitable.
Though I suspect the blitters, trams, ducks and slugs will have a bit more of our not-so-divine guidance, until said solutions have become commonplace over time.
These 200m ban lines won’t change our cultural landscape much - just our technical one. Like the bugs, what they will do is force the evolution of scripted vehicles that allow us to penetrate them, and suppress the creation of physical vehicles of all types. Natural selection in action.
June 27, 2006 at 9:14 pm
ordinal.malaprop
Redundancy and failsafes and not writing brittle, finicky scripts are of course important, and to be honest that is the trick with scripting in Second Life; it is not so much the language, which can be grasped quite quickly, but knowing all of the possible problems and being able to compensate for them.
The idea of evolving devices, though, does interest me, though I confess to having a background and a lifelong interest in such things as evolutionary algorithms. For instance, to take the example of the tram in Caledon: each tram could have a genome which determines such parameters as its speed, its movement timer and so on. The longer a particular genome survives, the more the rezzer favours it. When it does die, the rezzer picks out a new genome based on merging all of the most successful ones, plus a random mutation factor to keep things evolving. Such a system could keep going for years, no matter what changes are made to the underlying reality. And that is but a simple example.
August 1, 2006 at 1:45 am
Elde Eponym
Far be it from to contradict your wisdom Madame Malaprop - but an error occurs in your logic. Such as system can indeed persist for year, so long as no changes to the underlying reality cause the rezzer itself to cease to function.