This week a new package rolled out to the main grid. This is the package with the Inventory API changes. These are intended to make inventory transfers more stable and reliable. Features also will allow the Inventory loads to scale better. This is the package that was running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre release channels.

The main grid also got the change in flight height. The limit has been moved from 150-200m to 5,000m. Flight feathers should no longer be needed. However, some feathers will make you fly faster and that may be a worthwhile reason to use one.

If you have a flight feather or whatever device that sends you into orbit, contact Simon Linden

Release Channels

The package running in Magnum failed this past week. Group notices being sent from regions running Magnum failed. This package will continue to run in Magnum with a number of additional fixes.

This is the package with:

• PRIM_SLICE
• HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH
• llGetRegionAgents()

With any luck this will be the package that makes it to the main grid next week.

Which package is rolling to Blue Steel and Le Tigre this week is still unclear. That suggests they are still working on something.

Next week we can expect the Region Crossing Infrastructure Phase I package to return. The lead developer for the project was on vacation, which is why it dropped out of the release channels.

Pathfinding

Pathfinding is of course in development and seeing lots of changes. One of the oddities of Pathfinding is when prims with holes are used, the physics engine may fill in the holes when server load gets heavy. The change only affects Pathfinding behavior in AI Characters. Andrew Linden says this affect starts to kick-in when the server goes below 15 FPS.

Crossings and Vehicles

There was considerable discussion about vehicle crossings. The take-away from the discussion is that passengers’ avatar scripts create complications. A number of people wearing scripts and riding as passengers will likely cause the vehicle to fail when crossing a region boundary.

Script Removal

I suspect we all have items that are no-mod with a load of scripts that cannot be removed. If the maker did not include a built-in script to remove scripts, we are stuck with a problem. There was considerable discussion about creating a viewer tool to remove those scripts. But… it is not that easy. There is a load of security and permission issues with doing that. Participants in the discussion were coming up with various gotcha’s for such a feature. So, I doubt they are going to make one.

One bit of news came up in this conversation about removing scripts. Bullets are scripted and one of the tasks in the script is to cause the bullet to die and delete itself. A problem in busy regions (think lots of machine-guns firing) is the region failing to execute the scripts, leaving a load of bullets frozen in the air. It seems that problem has been fixed.

There is a script in the LSL Library for removing scripts. But, it only works with mode-OK items.

Summary

We’ll have more news from the Lab on Thursday and Friday. By then we should know what rolled out to the release channels.