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As most of you will know I'm far from an expert on the use of (IMO evil) voice.
However, I did read a report on using SL for counselling that said about 1 in 3 sessions had technical difficulties and these were almost all due to voice messing up. As the class gets bigger that will obviously be increasingly likely to affect some of your class.
I believe that the larger the group trying to use voice the more prone to problems it is too, although that's mostly anecdotal evidence.
If they're students using laptops are they also using shared wifi, or even shared bandwidth. SL chews a fair chunk of bandwidth before you add voice, that adds more. Too many people competing for it will give you worse problems.
The sudden inability to move is an old problem that I've always called micro-crashing. You can usually turn around and participate in chat, but can't move. Sometimes someone offering you a tp can fix it by the way, but not always. I'm not sure what the technical reasons for it are, and in some variations of the server code it goes away, but the most recent server version seems to make it happen more often (I've had it happen a couple of times in the last week or so, after months of no occurrences). My guess, and I do mean guess, is that the sim half forgets where you are. It then thinks (to continue the horribly anthropomorphic paragraph) that your avatar is at <0, 0, 0> in the sim, which being underground usually stops you moving. However, the chat parts still remember what's going on, and you get the chat normally. This can escalate to losing chat or IM or both, and redmapping before you get a real crash (with being automatically logged out).
There's not much you can do about the microcrashing but not using wifi, and not sharing hubs and bandwidth wherever possible might help with the former.
El.
On 27 Oct 2009, at 17:32, Robin Ashford wrote:
I'm wondering if anyone on this list can shed light on a couple of tech problems. This is my second semester teaching a course fully in Second Life. This semester my students are experiencing more tech related problems than last semester. Most of these problems are related to voice working momentarily (they can hear voice when they first login to meet for class but soon it's gone) or voice not working at all. They quit SL and come back in and sometimes that fixes the problem, but sometimes it does not.
The other problem is related to avatars not being able to move. They can still hear and see what is going on but they suddenly can't move their avatar and have to quit and come back in, which usually solves the problem. None of my students experienced that problem the semester prior. Some have PC and some Macs and majority are on laptops.
All but one of my students' computers meet the SL recommended system requirements, but a few are experiencing these problems (which I know can also be related to bandwidth but most have good broadband, which I understand can fluctuate but still...). One who had not had any problems up until this week suddenly could not hear for more than a few seconds last night, this student had upgraded to Snow Leopard that day. Any thoughts?
-Robin Ashford (SL Robin Mochi)
--
http://twitter.com/rashford
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