The Most Annoying Continual Little-Known Bug
Update!I’ve added this bug to the Jira, you can see it here: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-1493
Also there is now a video on YouTube:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=sTdXjplMGWg
I call it “The Jiggle Bug”.
What is it? The jiggle bug is a bug that causes your avatar to “jiggle” or “jitter” or “flinch” slightly (estimated 0.01 distance) up and down. Like your avatar has had too much coffee.
What causes it? I’ve found that it is caused by scripted attachments and only by certain script calls/events. It occurs when a link-message is received?/sent?, a touch event is triggered, and on the dataserver event (thusfar these are the three I’ve found, I think). It is most apparent when standing on an object, it does happen when your avatar is on the ground but for some reason its not as powerful? or something.
Who is effected? Most residents who wear a scripted attachment. After I noticed it on myself, I noticed it everywhere else. I’d say about 80% of the SL population unknowingly jiggles.
How did you (Oz Spade) notice it? Waaaayyy back around I’d say maybe 1.3 or 1.5 I noticed the world would every now and then jiggle, slightly. I think I found it while attempting to write a buddy-list type script with a constant dataserver call. I thought it was my video card or something, because the whole view would jiggle. No one else noticed it or saw it. After a while though, alt-zooming around, I noticed it wasn’t my camera, or the world, but my avatar. The world was jiggling because my camera (when not focused on anything else) was focused defaulty on my avatar, or rather “pinned” to my avatar, which was jiggling, hence the camera jiggled with it. Few others could see what I was talking about, because it’s such a very small “jitter” or “jiggle” or “flinch” that it could easily go unseen. I found that detaching everything fixed it, then tracking it down even more I found common causes.
How do people not notice it? I’m not sure, I suppose they could have such bad framerate that they don’t notice it. Or maybe some people just think its common, or they don’t notice it all together.
Is it reproducable? Yes. Easily. It takes a fine eye to see it, but its there, and I have five (or four) objects that reproduce it without fail. Others have reproduced it, with different video cards, different hardware, etc. so its not exclusive to any hard-ware set up, it is a SL specific problem.
Have you bug reported it? Yes. I think three times ever since I found it.
Why is it the most annoying bug? It’s been around for a long time now, about as long as Ghosting was before it got fixed and its just little enough to drive a guy nuts. It’s also caused by very common script events, which makes it annoying depending on what you want an attachment to do and if you also don’t want your avatar to jiggle, thus a problem results. It is also very easy to reproduce. And unbeknownst to most of the community a lot of people have it going on. In a crowd of people there are usualy 5 or 6 out of 10 people who have it. I believe a lot of Animation Overriders cause the bug.
How to recreate it:
- Create two cubes. Cube 1 should have a script in it with a timer that continously sends a link message every second. Cube 2 should have a script that has a link_message thingy in it. Link them together and wear.
- Create a cube with a touch event in it. Attach. Click the cube repeaditly.
- Create a cube that has a timer and every one second requests information using the dataserver call and event set. Attach.
I can drop a folder of the scripted objects that reproduce this bug on anyone that wants to see it in action.
Script Examples:
