07.30.07
Help Wanted (or: The frustrating elusiveness of reproducibility)
Nothing makes testing and debugging a more frustrating experience than not being able to reliably reproduce a bug. It’s this exact reason that Torley asks quite rightly that people put as much specific detail into their JIRA bug reports as possible. The more details, the better the chance that someone at LL will be able to consistently cause the bug in question to occur.
This is an essential part of debugging: it’s impossible to investigate the cause of a bug without being able to observe it occur “in the wild”, and the more observations of the bug that can be made, the better the chances of determining the root cause, and ultimately producing a fix for the problem.
So it is to you, my brave and helpful testers, that I come looking for your assistance in tracking down a few nefariously difficult bugs in the Able Edition. I am asking for help because I have been unable to reproduce these bugs myself, and so I have very little chance at being able to fix them.
Here are the Frustrating Four:
- The “Partial Parcel Muting” Bug: When you visibly mute a parcel, some (or perhaps many) of the objects in that parcel remain unmuted indefinitely. This could mean that a muted building has pieces of the floor and walls that remain visible. Or muting a link set with many objects mutes only a few of the objects.
- The “Flashing Object” Bug: When you visibly mute a parcel, some of the objects in the vicinity of that parcel begin to “flash”, that is, they begin to cycle rapidly from being visibly muted to being fully visible, and back again.
- The “TP Without a TP Screen” Bug: When you TP someplace, perhaps more frequently within the same region, you arrive at your destination without ever seeing the standard TP screen with the blue progress bar.
- The “Double TP of Death” Bug: This is probably familiar to you regardless of which viewer you use, but I have had reports that this bug happens much more frequently with the Able Edition. This is the bug where you TP someplace, arrive there, and then immediately re-TP to the same place, usually resulting in your avatar getting stuck and forcing you to relog.
If you have seen any of these bugs occur while using the Able Edition viewer, please let me know! The more information you can provide, the better. For example:
- Does this problem happen consistently? If so, what are the specific conditions under which it occurrs?
- Does this problem happen with the Official 1.18.0.6 viewer as well?
- What are your bandwidth settings? (Maximum bandwidth, current bandwidth in use when the bug occurs)
- What are your graphics settings? (Draw distance, graphics card memory, which advanced graphics options are enabled/disabled, etc.)
- How much packet loss do you see when the bug occurs?
- Does it happen only in specific regions? If so, which regions? And where specifically in those regions?
Even if these problems don’t happen to you, that would still be helpful to know, along with some information about the kind of system you’re using. Feel free to post here, or IM me inworld, or email me with any information you have that might be helpful.
Thank you all very much for your help!