WE WANT PHYSICS AND WE WANT IT YESTERDAY
Last few weeks the cries have gotten louder and louder and ppl are complaining and moaning and even leaving InWorldz cos … Heck, the Founders are just wasting our time and money and they keep postponing the new physics engine.
Now you all know I’m NOT tech minded and Tranquility , bless his geek mind, do try to explain but for us non geeks it’s often resembles the teacher in Charlie Brown on a good day.
So I thought Id try to explain what exactly its is that has physics delayed this time… the Assert Servers …
Dear blessed assert servers, the servers that hold .. well… everything in a virtual world. Everything you buy, import, build. Everything you rezz on your region is connected to the assert servers as well.
Remember SecondLife? Yea we have almost all been there, almost all of us were “born” in SecondLife and I dare you to tell me that you never ever in your entire SecondLife existence havent lost something due to Asser Server malfunction of some kind.
Now a few months back Tranquillity (InWorlds co-founder and coder extraordinaire) noticed a problem with the assert servers and the restarting of regions. He could see that this had potential of being a huge one if he just ignored it (LL style) See in InWorldz the regions are set to 45K prim value vs the 15K prim value in SecondLife. Now keep that detail in mind as we move on in this story .
Ok, so I use to own some regions in SecondLife, just a small Estate nothing big. I was also a member of the Concierge group and lots of creators and small, medium, big Estate owners were in that group as well. I learned a LOT from all of these people in my more active time in Second Life.
It was/is a daily occurrence that someone lost something in SecondLife. Either from their inventory or when a region had restarted. Now let me tell you a story of region restarts in SecondLife.
As a region owner / Estate owner you have the ability to restart the region. Its equals restarting your computer when you have run it to long and stuff is hogging our memory (very basic terms) So … we have an Estate, regions are built on, things are rezzed out, things with scripts, textures, sounds, animations etc etc, These all take up memory on the server they are at and are also connected to the assert servers that keep track of; Textures, scripts, animations, who owns what, who can do what with what objects, permission on objects set by the creators etc etc.
Ok so things are starting to lag on a region, so you go and hit the restart button. And wait …. and wait ..and wait …. *snore yawn * and finally .. yay it comes back online! Now minutes .. hours .. later you get it by IMs; “My TV is missing?” “My dog went poof?” “Half my house is gone?” You go “ARGH oh no not again please” So you investigate. Are the stuff no copy (please god in heaven let it be copy), is it their viewers that are wonky? .. Some people do not log in everyday or maybe only once a day or they might be on vacation or out to visit Aunt Mathilda for a day or two and wont discover their stuff went poof till days after.
So yea you can do roll backs, but then another problem arises. What if its 12-24 hrs ago the things went poof? What if others on the region have rezzed stuff in the meantime? Now those things will go poof if you roll back (at this time it’s where you start pulling your hair cos ppl are angry as shite and want their stuff back !!)
Now this scenario is bad enough on regions that has only 15K prim values… imagine this on a 45K prim value region… Yay fun times … Restart and half the stuff has gone poof in the assert servers. Brilliant fucking brilliant ! Just want you need!
You have built an entire region of your dreams and on a restart stuff has gone, just vanished. Now sure .. “Rollback” .. yea but what if half that stuff was no copy? .. Well tough titties o you .. its gone forever.
I can’t count the endless times I heard stories like this from Estate owners not to mention Merchants that have ppl IMing them like crazy to get substitutes or IMing them cos the assert servers wont cough up what they just spend 4-5-6-7 $ buying.
How about this for fun; You come home, jobs been crap, kids having a bad day, wife all PMS and you finally sit down and log in. You have planned this al day .. you wanna relax, go sailing, flying, shoot someone in the RP group you’re in. So you log in and … the damn inventory wont rezz, so you clear cache and relog …. still nada .. ok .. so now you start asking around and gets told “You need to log into an empty region to let your inventory load completely” .. Ok fine, you grumble cos you just wanted to relax and now you have issues up your wazoo …. So yo relog again and log into an empty region you got the name of .. Hey .. not working … the region is being restarted and its stuck in limbo or taking its sweet time getting back online, so your landed at a region where there are tons of ppl and chatter and crap and you still cant get your inventory to bloody load. All of this sound familiar?
Personally the first time I experienced a major loss due to the assert servers in Second Life was after I had a party on a region I just bought. I had rezzed out 30K L$ worth of things for the party and next day when I went to collect it … it was gone .. poof vanished. And yea it was all no copy stuff. To bad so sad little Lady. LL didn’t give a crap and the merchants ? well it’s really not their fault is it?
So all of these scenarios are what Tranquility is working very very hard to prevent from happening in InWorldz. It’s not because the don’t care, it’s because they do care. It’s not because the Founders think Physics are not that important it’s because they know exactly how important it is. How important it is for people to sail, fly, shoot, and so on but they also know that is not gonna happen if people can’t get to their boats, planes, scooters, guns cos the assert server gone ballistic of if the roleplay region you go to just got restarted and half the builds are missing cos the assert servers decided they had a bad day .
Hang in there cos Physics are round the corner and Tranquility is working very very hard to get YOUR stuff secured so you can spend 2012 goofing about with what ever physics stuff you wanna goof about in.
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[…] I don’t have a top-end Nvidia card or Vista/7. It does point to the relevance of a post by Lady Sakai concerning the fact that it is taking Tranq a little longer than previously thought to introduce […]
ladysakai
ladysakai 
Well explained.. I feel for the land owners who get IM’d about missing stuff and it’s not their fault. They can lose money in reimbursing or rentals lost.
Hi Bradd
Im glad you like my post as it was you that pushed me over the edge to make it 😉 I had been thinking of it for a while now but you sorta forced me out the door . Yea I feel for them as well… its really not our fault when things go poof but we sit with the crap when it happens and as mentioned on twitter today. People really dont give a crap about the tech explenations. They want it to work end off.
Lady S – Congrats! You have made the most profound well laid out statement “yet” about the non-existence of the Physics we all long for.
Your support for the founders, especially Tranq (bless ‘is little ‘eart!) is echoed by my thoughts. It is a helluva lot of work to do to try to get those asset servers doing what they should do and as you say, they have to be right before we can move forward.
SL used to and still does drive me nuts and already with InWorldz one can see the leaps forward in twelve months that in some respects has overtaken SL.
InWorldz is definitely home for me and for many of us.
Thanks for writing such a supportive and explanatory Blog
Hi Anna
Your most welcome 🙂
I felt I had to as Ive been talking to some people in world and they are frustrated untill I take time to explain exactly what it is Tranq is doing. In a non tech way. Once they hear what poor, shoddy assert servers can do they all take a step back and go “oh I didnt realise, no Id want that to be fixed first” So yea. Explain it to the common people like myself and we understand and we will support. Not that Im saying the Founders dont take time to try to do just that but sometimes to many tech words creep in and ppl shut down and stop reading/listening.
I can say that its only cos of my years in SL and mainly through the Concierge Information Group Ive learnt so much from other Estate owners and merchants and that some of them have been willing to explain things to me tech-dunse that I am 😉
For years and years I defended the Lindens .. the Lindesn that was walking among us trying to help best they could. As years went on and the top brass kept making hairbrained decisions and not focussing on the core issues, like crap servers, I felt like just giving up. I still support the Lindens that are honestly trying to help but are facing the same as the rest of us. The top brass that just dont get they have to fix the backbone of the patient and not keep looking for a new cute colour nailpolish. Well its does make for a pretty looking corpse but other than that *shrugs*
I have been here well over a year now – and have not missed the need for physics – I know my artists are in the wings waiting in baited breath for it – because what can be created in “The Arts” with physic is mind blowing. We have major plans At Alexanderia Kingdom region – Where Gulliver Travels, Creative Power, Wizard & Wizzy’s Workshop, along with Acquarella: After the Apocalypse.
Major additional works will be made on those art sims and new Major productions will start with new artists and new sims as soon as physics is introduced – but we will wait – just the anticipation – is always a way to drive one a tad bit crazy – cause we plan and our planning list grows wild with the anticipation……
Jeri Rahja
Hey Jeri
Ya Im like you .. I really dont miss the physics as such but I do understand the need that some have for it … Im sure your artists are just iching but good news is that it wont be long and then while they are bedazzeling us with their workk they can do so knowing their stuff wont go poof on them 😉
Lady Sakai —
I run standalones and minigrids, both on home computers, and with OpenSim hosting companies, and never had assets disappear. And I just checked with OpenSim core developer Justin Clark-Casey, and he says he hasn’t heard of asset vanishing problems with the latest versions of OpenSim.
I did have temporary inventory loss issues on OSGrid during one of their recent upgrades (they were moving the entire database over from one version fo OpenSim to another) but they were very fast to restore everything.
About a year and a half ago, OpenSim underwent a very major refactoring, which significantly increased stability and performance. All hosting companies (with possible exception of ReactionGrid) and most grids (with exception of ReactionGrid, InWorldz, and OpenLife) are running a post-refactoring version of OpenSim. Other benefits — more secure hypergrid (for those who like to have it on), media-on-a-prim, mesh support, NPCs, Bullet physics, etc…
Another advantage of running OpenSim at home — or with an OpenSim hosting company — is that you can export your entire region and inventory whenever you like.
That’s not an option for closed commercial grid, of course. If you’re running a proprietary role playing game, you don’t want folks exporting your exclusive content. But for people, schools, groups, companies using OpenSim for meetings, events, creative building, collaboration, etc… it’s good to have some regions under your full control.
Merchants in particular should be running private regions or grids as warehouses and manufacturing facilities, and upload their finished products to closed commercial grids for sale. That way, they will always have the original regions, and can make as many backups as they want.
Meanwhile, I hope that InWorldz wll find a way to take advantage of all the work being done by the wider OpenSim community. It’s not particularly productive to have to redo all that work yourself — but the more time they spend improving core functionality, the further away they get from compatbility with mainline OpenSim. And the more time, and money, they have to spend on solving problems that have already been solved. Getting back on track with the standard deployment of OpenSim will allow them to focus their resources on improvements over standard OpenSim — making their grid better than others — instead of simply on catching up.
Hi Maria
Things that are NO COPY do vanish in SL when we do restarts. Not all the time but sometimes it goes poof. Now the why and the how you have to talk to someone that is a coder about not me. I can only tell you what goes on after the fact when it is gone and no amounts of rollbacks will make it appear again. Talk to any Estate owner in SL and they will tell you that they have had at least one incident of this during their time of business. I dont know of the tech stuff in OS so I have a hard time commenting on that. I do agree that seeking compatebility is the future for various grids be they open or closed but thats its a different debate 🙂
Maria, either you were mislead, or you just don’t understand what was said, or whoever said it doesn’t understand. Refactoring has nothing to do with code improvements. When done correctly, refactoring has no functional effect on the resulting code. It is simply a cleanup of ugly code to make it more readable for the developers who have to work on it. It has NO effect on reliability. Here, in more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refactoring
InWorldz has been refactoring the old Open Sim code for about 18 months now, as well as replacing most of the major systems of Open Sim with entirely rewritten, scalable, and much more reliable components.
The asset storage system was completely replaced about a year ago with a high-performance super-scalable replacement for the Open Sim code.
The Phlox script engine is the envy of all virtual worlds, including Second Life, providing flexibility and performance orders of magnitude beyond any other engine.
The storage for all region data has also been completely replaced with an entirely new scalable system.
And most recently, the poorly-performing inventory back-end system used by Open Sim completely replaced with an entire new, highly-scalable and flexible “NoSQL” inventory system, based on the same technology used by the largest and most scalable systems on the internet (including for example, Facebook). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Cassandra
These are all critical foundational services that must be scalable and reliable prior to expansion, or things start to fall apart when the usage grows past a threshold (the way Avination servers more or less collapsed when they approached 1200 regions earlier this year). Instead we now see Avination on a steady decline since April, having lost nearly half it’s regions, has lost about half it’s regions since then. InWorldz has avoided advertizing until this critical work is complete, exactly for these reasons.
The foundation must be solid before you invite hundreds of new regions onto the grid. Due to the world-of-mouth spread of reliability, it’s a bit of a race against time. However, at least for InWorldz, this work is almost complete now, see the “Quick Progress Update for November 2011” here, http://inworldz.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=10798
As for you not seeing any inventory loss on your standalone and other machines, it’s not a matter of who hasn’t seen loss, it’s who has. Running a single-user standalone server doesn’t generate the kind of scalability problems that a commercial grid will have. Open source developers such as Justinn also won’t see it; you have to be an operator of a high-load grid. Avination certainly saw it earlier this year. Second Life sees it fairly regularly as well. It is a fundamental mistake to equate a few positive tests with the lack of failures everywhere. InWorldz has been closely monitoring their core servers, asset, region, inventory servers, watching for the warning signs of a system under stress, and taking preemptive action to prevent problems as much as possible, so that end users will not see these. This is why the focus has been on replacing these non-scalable Open Sim components with entirely new, high-performance, scalable server components, while most of the other grids have been waiting for the Open Sim developers to do the same. But they probably won’t ever see these issues on their test servers, and standalone servers.
As for being unable to export whole regions to for use on other grids, that is a *feature* of InWorldz, offering protection of intellectual property for content creators. It is *the* required feature that allows InWorldz to benefit from such a great collection of shops and products.
Great post Lady. I think Tranq can take as long as he needs. I know he wants this just as much as anyone else, if not more so.
I think part of the problem with SL is that too many partly-fixed bugs are swept under the carpet and the fact that Tranq doesn’t do that is why InWorldz gets my cash and my love.
What can be worse than building on dodgy foundations? (rhetorical obviously).
I’ve been here a long time, I can be patient when needs be.
Hi Soror
Thank you 🙂
Yes Tranq has said several times that he is as anxious as anyone to get the physics engine online.
The special thing with IW is that they refuse to push things out they know wil fail or break at some point. That is comendable to say the least. Now if Tranq had the staff that LL has things would be looking differnt now but they dont so things are moving slowly.
IW could do that same as LL did and get investors in, sure but we cant forget what is going on at LL and how its affecting SL that we know and love. SL is not the SL I was born in and that is sad indeed 😦
what about the Phlox thing? is that part of the physics?
i know that the Bullet Sim physics module thing is moving forward and a focus of the OpenSim developers and i am waiting for that myself
physics is the only thing i miss from SL and i am sorry to hear your frustration with it for InWorldz
the standard physics in OpenSim (i think it’s ODE) is lacking compared to SL
be patient if you can and smile if you can’t – if this is our biggest problem in life, then life is good =)
Hi Ener and welcome to the nuthouse 🙂
No Phlox is the script engine that Tranq build from ground up 🙂