Pathfinding

Pathfinding is closer to release. I expect we will see it arrive on the Release Channels this month.

Andrew Linden says they feel that are now feature complete for the initial release. I suppose this means that all the features the Lab believes are important for successful use of Pathfinding have been added. They still have bogs and issues to sort out. But, the feature set is fixed until after initial release.

Server/Scripting Meeting - Lego Chairs

They have decided to change the Pathfinding Tools in the viewer. Seems it is a work flow change that drives the need for viewer changes.

If you have used the viewer to edit Navmesh, you realize there are some klunks. Unfreezing the mesh, editing, and Freezing the Navmesh have some delay issues that have to be handled. Once a Navmesh has been changed and locked it takes some time for the server to recalculate the Navmesh. As Andrew says, may be tens of seconds. With multiple people editing the same Navmesh in a region you might imagine what problems a 20 to 40 second delay might cause them.

Andrew is expecting to make a Pathfinding Update some time after the initial release. I suppose the update will have the remaining features they aren’t adding now. We’ll learn more Thursday.

The Release Channels

Kelly Linden tells the bug in the release channels that prevented their advance to the main grid was a race condition in the read-write locks in the mesh cache. The most common problem from the race condition was a deadlock in the threads handling attachments. The apparent effect is they won’t rez or fail to work.  Another affect was an inability to rez mesh objects.

Random Fix

Last Thursday the world map began failing to show on/off line status. A fix for that problem was installed today. Since it did not require region restarts, I am guessing the update went into one of the support server systems.

SVC-3811

SVC-3811 – Sit disabled on prims that are: inside a prim’s bounding box (eg, phantom prim). This is the topic that inspired the article: No Room to Sit. It explained why we see the No Room to Sit, try elsewhere message.

There was considerable discussion about how to handle some of the sit problems. Sculpties and Mega-prims tend to have sit position problems as does mesh.

In general, we set a prims Sit Position with a script. Once set the script can be removed and the setting remains, as Sit Position is an attribute of the prim. This suggests that a panel could be added to the Build Panel to handle Sit Positions just like TPV’s have a panel for setting the particle properties of a prim.

To make a prim “No Sit” one would just need to set an impossible Sit Position. It would be much simpler than the work-around method I describe in No Room to Sit.

Who knows if we will ever see it? It was just a discussion about a possible new feature.