Closing comments

Some will see this as a cowardly attempt to shut off the negative feedback about the Banishment Program but this is not the actual reason. The real reason is that I am FED UP of being accused for such and such bug that is not my doing. SL has been (and still is) running sluggishly, everything is very slow and I have spent countless hours trying to make the Banesuit more robust. Now I have achieved a fair amount of robustness but still a few people are experiencing weird bugs such as :

- Custodian crashing without a reason. When it happens, the Bane is unable to move, is not restricted and does not get any violation. No wonder since the script that handles it all has died. Usually it happens after a SL crash (viewer and/or sim), and the script cannot handle it. It is NOT due to it being too big or something, although it does stack-heap like it was filling its memory up. I've seen random scripts doing this, including very small ones. A hard reset usually does the trick but it does break the experience for the Bane.

- HUD detaching itself after a teleport. SL likes to screw attachments up after a teleport, especially HUDs. I can't count the number of times my AO crashed, or my weapons, or my own RR HUD (be it cuffs or blindfolds). The symptom is that the Custodian complains that the HUD is not giving news, it retries, and decides there is no HUD and rezzes a new one. Actually the old one was still there, but dead. And no stack-heap message anywhere, it just dies without saying so. If it was a normal attachment instead of a HUD, other people would not even see it (it happens with unscripted hair sometimes). That's why the Custodian rezzes a new HUD after a while and everything is back to normal.

- HUD not giving news even when not teleporting. That one happens when the sim is very laggy but it seems it can happen just anywhere now. I suspect chatlag or even the sim being unable to transfer object private chat (the Custodian_Base talks to the Custodian_HUD periodically to check it is still there, since sometimes sending a "I'm detached" message when detaching the HUD is not enough). I'm still investigating.

- Banesuit self-destructing because it thinks the Bane is using the normal viewer. This one does not happen anymore since I have removed the code to destroy the suit when a regular viewer is detected, but this false positive still happens from time to time. Usually due to a slow connection, but it can also be due to chatlag. The procedure is simple : the suit sends a message to the viewer that must respond to it before a timeout of 1 minute. When logging on, the suit waits 30 seconds, then sends its check. And even with that long delay sometimes the viewer is unable to respond quickly enough. If needed I may lengthen the delay again but it's only avoiding the problem. The suit cannot be more reliable than SL.

That's the only bugs I have heard about so far, I'm sure there will be others, but I'm on the lookout. What I can't tolerate is to hear things like "this thing is not tested" (got that twice already) or "this is so bugged it's no fun" (well yeah SL is bugged, surprised ?) but constructive feedback is very rare.

That's why I want to prevent this blog from becoming a public garbage dump. From now on it is going to stay only informative.

Marine