The previous Monday meeting fell on a holiday, so no meeting. This week some interesting items but not much news.

Last Names

I think we all know Rod Humble, LL CEO, had to walk back his idea to bring last names back. The interesting part is Kelly Linden had not heard the story by the time of Monday’s meeting. My point being: the Lindens are not a homogeneous well informed body. They often have their heads into their projects and are oblivious to much of the goings on in Second Life.

llGiveInventory()

This week’s roll to the main grid has the relaxed llGiveInventory() throttle. This doubles the rate subscribers and other messaging and delivery systems can send. The new rate is 2,500 sends per 15 minutes.

This is different than changing the throttle from 2,500 per 30 minutes to 5,000 per 30 minute. With the later one has to wait longer to recover from a throttle block. The average for 30 minutes verses the average for 15 minutes.

llDeleteSubString and llGetSubString

The next server maintenance package will revert these two function back to previous versions. Recently we got the new List Functions that are much faster. These two functions were part of the upgrade. In use it was discovered the functions were having problems with some Unicode characters.

Kelly explains, “C#/mono has a slightly flawed (in my opinion) Unicode string implementation. It uses UTF-16, which has 16bit characters. Most code points only need 1 such character, however UTF-16 does allow for 2-char code points. All the functions to work on strings though will operate only on the 16bit chars and will happily break those chars. If you then try to convert that to any other encoding (like UTF8 or UTF32) it will crash the script. UTF-16 is a bad half way solution because even that ‘constant size of the char’ isn’t always true, because of the 2-char code points. But, there are no decent facilities for manipulating strings on whole code points only.

Simulator Discussions

The Lindens are pushing the Simulator Discussions private section on the SL Forum. The Lindens want a reasonably rational group involved so they are limiting invitations. I’m not sure what criteria they are using for deciding who is or isn’t rational.

If you are at the UG meetings you’ll probably be able to get an invitation.

DATA_ONLINE

This is the change regarding detecting ones Online Status. Kelly says, “The DATA_ONLINE change is completely on hold until other improvements have been made to mitigate it’s loss of functionality. We don’t have any news on that, we are still gathering feedback and working on design etc etc.”

“There are two ways to respect privacy settings – one is the friend setting (can your friend see that you are online) and the other is the profile flag for whether anyone looking at your profile can tell you are online. The former (friend setting) is a complex query all by itself that would be a significant source of DB load if scripts were allowed to make it in any capacity The latter is *very* tied to profile code. That setting [the global privacy setting] is part of profiles. It isn’t impossible to move, and it isn’t ‘difficult’ in the sense that I know pretty much all that is required to make it work with scripts – but it is a significant amount of work. ”

“Right now we are committed to fixing the things that require DATA_ONLINE but shouldn’t and ensuring there are alternatives for the rest.”

SCR-79

SCR-79 – llMatchGroup() – Checks if an object or agent is active in a specified group.  Kelly says no news on this JIRA item.

Scripting Group Ending?

Kelly asked, “I did have another question: How many people only go to this user group and not the other Simulator user groups (run by Andrew and Simon)? And for those that go to both, how important is this one?”

My take is Kelly attends several UG meetings each week and is looking to free up some time. I can’t say there was a consensus of opinion. However, some of the discussions and the inside information Kelly provides on scripting in the meeting go deeper than I see in the other meetings.

tehKellz also says, “Please feel free to bring up scripting topics in [the] simulator forum, I will watch it.”

I think he means this one: Simulator Discussions.

Four Region Meetings

Kelly explains, “There is a lot of cross communication going on in those cases, and each region does maintain a connection to every agent AND child agent – so that is a lot of connections in a full 4-corner scenario. You get bogged down in interest list type things then.”

The idea of putting up walls to limit visibility was suggested. Kelly doubts it will have any affect. The occlusion is handled on the viewer so, it does not reduce the info that has to be sent to the users from the servers.

Kelly says the problem is a combination of the number of connections and the changes they see. Those changes have to be sent to all the users. Thus: the admonishments at events to SIT and be still. Since the servers do little occlusion processing what avatars are ACTUALLY seeing has little to do with what information has to be sent.

Vivienne Daguerre came up with the idea of a Super Server that could be rented for events. It might contain four regions and be optimized for large audience performance. It is an interesting idea.

SCR-4

SCR-4 – Unbundle PRIM_* rules for llSetPrimitiveParams and similar functions to allow for individual parameter settings for all possible parameters.”

This is still low on the Linden priority list. The interest remains high among residents because prim slice is not programmable by any LSL function. Being able to program slice would allow new types of prim animation.

Summary

The scripting UG is usually interesting and we gain insights to inner workings of the Second Life system. I hope Kelly sticks with the UG.

However, there does seem to be more movement to move people into using the SL Forum rather than having UG meetings. We have so many rude, abusive, haters in SL it is hard to keep the forum civil. Unfortunately that problem is somewhat universal online.

The Adult Content group tried moving to the forum. That UG for all practical purposes is dead. We’ll see what Kelly does and how using the Simulator section works.