Our cats are wonderful creature that seem to move about Second Life(SL) with out much direction. They can and will do many different things on their own.  It is hard to understand then why when you log in to your dash board at times you find that your cats are market as inactive.  Yet, you see them moving about SL just fine.

How did this happen? What cause this? and Why can’t it be stopped?  

Well these are all very good questions. When our engines from the server go through and make the calculation of who is eating what, who is aging, who is ready to deliver and so on updating on the data base side it runs along smoothly. There is no hesitation in the communication of the process.  It is when the process has to reach out to SL (now we ALL love SL and understand it has its little quirks and we accept them for being SL)  sometimes the URL that SL has given your animal is no longer available.  All SL tells us is 404 Error.  That is a broad error and simply stated it just means the url or address your looking for is not there.  We know that the animal is there we can see it moving about, so how can SL say its not there.

Since the 404 is a flag saying there is a problem that we can’t find the animal where it was last left we mark the animal is inactive. It could be that the animal is in your inventory or it could be that SL is playing up. It could be the sim is offline at the moment we try to communicate. There can be lag on the sim and with any communication. We have all see chat lag that the attempt to communicate and get a message back from the animal saying “yes, I am here“ doesn’t happen in the allotted period of time.

Our Engines are spaced out through out the day and at different times so that we can try to communicate with them at various points of the day. If they do get marked inactive it just means the url we were given for the animal is no longer there. Since, the animal did not get the update we were trying to send it is why when you re rezz it you will see changes in the stats.

The Reconnect Button only sends us a current URL does not update stats.  They will get updated the next time a animal gets the communication from the server. We do have a feature request to change this to a Synch Button so that it will not only reconnect the url but it will get back updated stats.