Sunday, May 30, 2004

The Zone Bug

I finally figured out exactly what goes wrong when the bug hits Island View (and probably a few other zones too). This bug happenes apparently randomly and intermittently, and thus far I have not been able notice any patterns which will cause this bug to happen.

I did notice, that on an earlier login, the zone was fine, and when I logged in again a few hours later, this bug surfaced.

Symptoms:

1. Event Hosts and Zone Ops lose the extended menus under the THIS PLACE button, such as "LAYOUT" and "RECORD COURSE" (for racecourse zones). However, if in a racecourse, the "Race Results" menu is still there and the "CLEAR" button on race result pages appear apparently without problems.

2. People who "sign up" for the event get prompted repeatedly to enter the event even when they are ALREADY physically in the event, ie zone chat box is up, and they are physically within the boundaries of the said zone.

3. Participants do NOT show up in the "Who is in Event" section of the webpage, thus if anybody's causing any problems, hosts do not have the name to ban from the event <--- VERY IMPORTANT!

4. If the zone is a racecourse, the message "Do you want to Race or Watch" does not appear.

5. Upon leaving the zone, the message "You have left < name of event> . You have 60 seconds before losing membership to < name of event >" does NOT appear.

This apparently happened after There fixed the other zone bug, which kept telling people "Sorry your chance to enter < name of event > has expired. You will be notified when it is your turn again" message. I believe the cause of the above problems is directly or indirectly related to this earlier bug which There has fixed.

The crux of the problem seem to be that the zone itself is not recognising people who enter it, hence even if the host (maybe even the owner!) enters, the zone does not know and thus the extended menus do not appear under THIS PLACE.

Interesting Scooter!

I met up with icute today and she has just bought a new Bacio Bike. I've always wondered what a Bacio bike is, and now I know. Take a look at the pic below:


icute76 on her Bacio Bike

As usual Island View screwed up again and I can't lay out a new track which I have been making on paper. I hope it works tomorrow cos I wanna lay out my Wicked Track #5 sometime soon!

On a more upbeat note - I saw one of the recently approved buggies in auctions today.. yay! I hope I get mine soon!

Saturday, May 29, 2004

More good news on Approvals!

Well well... my Pampered Avies T-shirt has been approved! Seems like There fixed the "data merge" problems and submissions are getting approved again!

Word on the forums also indicate that buggies are also being approved and being brought in-world. For example, xX_Ian_Xx has a few he has submitted in mid-April and he's got them. Since mine were submitted in the beginning of May I figure mine will appear sometime next week or probably the week after, ie Mid-June.

Well it's better than nothing, and I'll be so glad to finally see my buggies! YAY!

The Pampered Avies T-Shirt is Auction ID 360598. Take a look and hope you like it.

Friday, May 28, 2004

Wicked Course #4

I made a new course for buggies today, and it's my 4th. So far most people who have gone through my previous ones have said they liked them. Initial feedback from SawSaLL has been really positive.

An old friend, Marzi_Pan popped by Island View too, and left a very positive note on the board. She liked the new course too :)


Timeless jumping through one of the hoops in the latest buggy course


Island View has been behaving really strangely lately too. Sometimes during events the Zone Op options do not show up under This Place. Sometimes, even when there are no events running, the Zone Op options show up! It's truly weird, I tell you! Even LadyInRed, the owner of the zone, is baffled. As usual, There Live Help was not available to assist.

Thursday, May 27, 2004

More on Buggy Approvals

The DAB (Developers Advisory Board) held a meeting and this caught my eye:

BUGGY APPROVALS: A fix was implemented in the approval process for buggies; it will add about 2-3 minutes to the approval time for a buggy. However, the approval team needs to test the new process on a few buggies to make sure the fix will work properly. Unfortunately, the data merge problem has prevented this testing. Once the merge problem is fixed, buggy approvals should proceed.

The "Data Merge" is the process of getting the approved items into the game world, ie to merge submitted data into the live, production There world.

So, apparently there is a problem in the merging process and they have to fix this first before they can fix the buggy problem.

Things are indeed looking up for us! Visit the dev forums to read more about the DAB meeting. The summary does indeed bring hope that There will still be around for some time yet!

Wedding Outfit and Buggies Bug

Yay!

After some shopping, the wedding outfit is decided!



DarkEmerald trying out a wedding outfit, and no
this is not the chosen outfit! :)

Now... all we need to do is decide on the day of the wedding...hmmm. Well she says "We'll see how next week turns out".

Yeah, with all these uncertainty with There and the announcements, nobody's sure about anything anymore. There are many who believes that There will close, and there are many more that will stay until the bitter end.

I'm one of those that will stay, well at least until my subscription runs out next March. Then, I'll see what the situation is before I decide.

On another note - seems that the workaround for the buggy failed. This is what Michael Wilson had to say about it:

So we had problems pushing new developer content (A.K.A., the buggies which we were "testing" the workaround with) last night, so they certainly didn't show up this morning. I understand they're of course trying to figure it out today.

Well thank you for the update! While it may not be good news at least we KNOW what happened. Thank you also for keeping at it. We really appreciate your efforts!

Here's hoping that tomorrow's test works. Well, more next time.

Wednesday, May 26, 2004

My Buggies May Be Saved!!!

OMG... there's finally a glimmer of hope - apparently there seems to be a workaround available to approve the buggies and hence get them into world...

They are going to try the thing out either tonight or tomorrow night, meaning during the shutdown period. Hence there should be a couple of new buggies in-world if it works!

*Keeping fingers crossed*

YAY!! DarkEmerald said YES!!

Man oh man...

I finally popped the question to DarkEmerald, and she said YES!! I'm the happiest avie in all of There right now!

That's me and DarkEmerald in-world. :)


Well after the shutdown, we went back in-world and did some shopping. Like most men, I got my shopping all done in like 5 minutes. Got myself a tuxedo and I'm all set.

However, choosing a nice wedding outfit for DarkEmerald took longer than expected (who am I kidding? I was expecting a long shopping session!). By the time she had to go, her wedding outfit is still not decided on yet heheheh!

Oh well we'll see how it goes tomorrow.


Tuesday, May 25, 2004

Buggies in Limbo!

Well, There hasn't gotten back on the fate of the buggies yet. I am not alone, many other designers have had their buggies put on hold for 2 months or more! Mine are just coming to a month, so I shouldn't complain that loudly huh?

Oh well... I hate not knowing. If only they'd just come right out and tell us whether they will fix the bug or not.

Geesh.. I still can't believe these buggies are still pending after so long!!

  1. FMV Foxwagen R2004
  2. Emerald's Purple Rage


I sure hope There comes back to us soon!!