Today we are getting new roll outs to the main grid and tomorrow release channels. There have been problems with recent releases for 3 or 4 weeks. Projects were rolled back, revised and retested on the release channels. Code for the introduction of mesh has and is being merged into the main code base during this time. It seems this has revealed a rash of problems that are being fixed. The result is the news about server upgrades is rather boring and vague.

Main Grid – AGNI

The changes rolling to the main grid are mostly what I’ll call backend changes, those we don’t really see. They affect our experience in terms of performance. But, there is nothing new like shadows or Display Names to see.

This release has the ever ubiquitous bug fixes.

The API (Application Programming Interface) for working with friends changes.  This is something those building applications for Second Life and viewers can make use of. For the rest of us, it has little relevance until others implement the use of it.

There are infrastructure changes… which doesn’t tell us much. These are the things typically about how the SL servers work together and how the viewer interacts with the servers. Some are improvements to existing services which we may see in better performance.  Others will likely have no effect until viewers change to take advantage of them.

Another set of changes will improve how new server versions roll out.

We seem to be having problems with this roll out as some people are already posting of new problems this morning. It will likely be hours before we know if the issues can be resolved in place or the update has to roll back.

Group tags with extended characters seem to be preventing login. It is unclear whether this is a real bug affecting everyone or just individual rare cases.

Release Channels

Blue Steel is getting an unspecified new test project.

Le Tigre is continuing to run the Kelly Mono2 upgrade with new fixes.

Magnum is continuing to run the Mesh upgrade with new fixes.

So… only one of the testing projects made it to the main grid this week. Mono2 and Mesh have been in a testing loop for a couple of weeks now. Hopefully these will make it to main grid next week.

Summary

As I wrote above, none of this is overly exciting or glamorous. Work continues and we are promised many new things this summer.