#SL Scripting News Week 51

Kelly Linden learned that when iTunes locks up the SL Viewer can’t open… Computers are full of complications. The viewer will never get past Initializing VFS, if iTunes freezes. This is Windows. No telling what will happen on a Mac.

Server Roll Out

Kelly says the server maintenance release from Le Tigre seems to be running well. This is the release that got rolled back from the main channel once. It is good it is running well. Because this is the release we will run until next year.

The roll out means both LSL functions llTransferLindenDollars() and llGetParcelMusicURL() are on the main grid.

Region Crossings

The rumor about more region crossing failures came up. Apparently there is no statistical data to tell the Lindens that is the case. So, unless people are filing JIRA’s it would be an invisible problem from the Linden side of the equation.

Kelly says the Lab is currently working on projects to improve region crossings. The Lab is also working on projects to reduce what Kelly called ‘up time bloat’. I suppose that is things like memory leaks and other things that tend to degrade region performance over time.

The last roll out had fixes for some up time bloat problems. The next server maintenance package will have more.

LLNet

LLNet is on older project that was asked about. LLNet is a private network between the co-location sites. It has been complete for some time. Presumably this is a fiber optic network that replaced VPN tunnels through the public Internet.

SVC-7466

SVC-7466A notecard holds more data than a script can read. This JIRA fix is in the next server maintenance pack. It should make it to an RC in January.

llGetEnv()

This function will get the parameter frame_number in the same server maintenance pack. This is the function that will give frame numbers since region restart. At 45 FPS it takes well over a year to overflow the integer format the function returns.

llSetRegionPos()

Kelly believes the plan is to have llSetRegionPos() in the next server maintenance package too. But, that is a bit dicey and there are probably lots of ‘depends’.

Some want a parameter that will allow one to include rotation. There is some discussion whether move and rotate needs to happen in the same frame or two frames.

On_Texture_Change

A question was asked about being able to detect when a texture on a prim changes. Kelly says they tried that once upon a time and broke loads of stuff.

% of Scripts Run

Kelly has added a new statistic for regions. This one returns the percent of scripts run in frame. Presumably this will appear in the Viewer Stats panel (Ctrl-Shift-1). Don’t expect to see it in the next Beta Viewer. But, it is coming. We will probably see an LSL function like llGetScriptPercent()... eventually.

Kelly said, “If your region is lightly loaded it will report 100%, if you have so many scripts it takes 2 frames to run them all it will report something around 50%. In any case, this stat is not designed to tell “is the sim loaded”, the spare time works fairly well for that. The idea is more to show how heavily loaded it is once you reach the point that spare time is used up.”

It seems Homestead regions have a baked in spare time factor to allow more Homesteads to run in the simulator. So, this function would be a better measure of how heavily they are loaded than the spare time stat.

SCR-133 & VWR-23393

SCR-133Script Info reporting on discontiguous [sic] parcels is not working as expected. VWR-23393Viewer reports script info for the wrong parcel, in some cases. Kelly says the server is providing the correct information and the problem is on the viewer side. Eventually they will get fixed. AS a triage step things were getting put into the right groups.

SVC-7552

SVC-7552World map tile generator renders mesh objects as marshmallows. Kelly says the map servers have not yet been taught how to render mesh. Eventually…

Reporting Bugs

Scripting bug reports without a script to reproduce the problem are mostly useless. Keep that in mind when reporting LSL/Mono bugs.

Finding things that can be done in LSL, that cannot be done in Mono are of special interest to the Lindens.

Next Meeting

Watch the wiki for a meeting date. Several User Groups will not be meeting for the next couple of weeks. Kelly did not say the Scripting Group would or would not meet next week.

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