Hopping Toad

The problems plaguing the managers of Grendel's Children aren't anywhere near resolved - in fact, they might be getting a whole lot worse. Toady Nakamura has posted a video of the kind of quality she's getting from the latest version of Viewer 2 (v.3) viewer and it isn't good.



She had to film this using her Nikon Coolpix because the 'hopping' of frames on her monitor meant that she couldn't use her screen capture program. So why not switch back to a viewer that will be more comfortable to use? Because Toady was told to upgrade to the latest release, as until she did so the Lab couldn't look into the problems she's been having with Grendel's Avaria and Avaria Tor sims, that both her and Flea have continued to request help with.

The problem that Toady has though is that the change in framerate for Viewer 2 makes it almost impossible for her to spend much more than a couple of minutes in Second Life now; the flickering leads to her getting headaches and nausea. Not exactly an ideal Second Life experience. This, coupled with the lack of support that she and Flea got from the problems with their sims, is starting to take its toll.

Toady's resorted to having to create a Jira to try and sum up all of the issues she's having, with links to her Flickr stream containing snapshots of what she has to contend with. I really don't see where the connection between what client a user would be using and the performance of a sim? Surely client performance is almost unique to every user, whereas a sim's performance will ultimately effect everyone on it, regardless of how they got there?

Looking After The Children

A few blog posts have popped up over the past couple of days about the recent plight of Grendel’s Children.

Treet TV’s Saffia Widdershins has a comprehensive write up of the issues that Flea Bussy and Toady Nakamura have been facing for the past few weeks, which basically amounts to the fact that two of their cluster of sims have been performing so poorly that even after repeated requests to the Lab about trying to rectify the problems, they’ve decided that the best course of action is to dump them entirely.

I know for a fact that this isn’t a decision they’ve taken lightly - I’m very proud of the fact that I can count Toady as a good friend - and I know when she told me about the closures over the weekend that she and Flea were both saddened and angry that it had come to this. It seems the Lab had put in a fix to try and better performance on the sims, but the solution hadn’t lasted beyond a few days and wasn’t followed up on again; it was only when they announced their decision to off-load the sims that someone decided to take notice, immediately flying in to investigate and proudly informing them that performance had massively improved. “Of course it had,” Toady told me, “because there were only 6 prims left on the sim by then.”

It won’t be a massive hit for Grendel’s as a business but it’s a shame for them both as creators; not only do Toady and Flea want to give users a product range but an experience to go along with it, an environment as well-crafted and atmospheric as their avatars are. The sims at ground level are amazing feats of architecture that Toady, Flea and others work so hard at that it’s almost the the suppression of creativity that I feel most saddened about. I've filmed

Hopefully someone at the Lab - or Rodvik himself - will be alerted to the problems that are still haunting the business and, although too late for Grendel’s, does something to ensure that other clusters and communities (and ultimately, revenue for the Lab) don’t slip away unnecessarily or unnoticed. In the meantime, if you’re looking for somewhere to explore, teleport over to the GC store and then find a way outside and hurl yourself down to ground level!