#SL Server News Week 21

I’m a bit behind on general news.

Servers

Andrew Linden has been gone on vacation this week. Simon Linden facilitated the User Group. He says they are expecting to roll the Threaded Region Crossing code to the main grid this coming Tuesday. This is code they have been bouncing in and out of the Release Channels (RC) since February. Getting it to the main grid is a significant step.

Once Threaded Region Crossing code is in place effort can concentrate on Phase II of Region Crossing. It is only in Phase II that users will start to see changes in crossing performance. You may not know that significant region lag is caused by avatars exiting regions. The rumor is most of that lag has been eliminated in Phase II code. That should make a significant difference in region performance for events and other crowded regions.

Release Channels

Provided the Region Crossing code rolls out, the Lindens plan to roll 3 new packages into the Release Channels on Wednesday.

Unfortunately the fix for SVC-7713sim crashes all avatars on sim (doesn’t restart but crash all viewers) multiple times a day, while showing as resolved is not in the roll out packages, but still in QA. If you’re wondering, yes it is griefer related. This fix will stop several DoS-like attacks on the SL servers. Plus there are some other ‘interesting’ anti-griefer fixes in the pipeline. But, we aren’t likely to hear much about them.

Simon Linden was recently at a music event when everyone suddenly crashed. He trarked that problem down and has a fix in the pipeline for the viewer. However, if you have seen crashes like this and have specific information on it, like precise time, location, and such then get it to Simon.

There is a trick griefers are using to crash viewers, call it a Medusa attachment. They are a complex mesh attachment designed to force the video card to detach from the viewer to process the shape. Anyone that has it in their field of view crashes.

The viewer has a RenderComplexityThreshold, any thing too complex the viewer is supposed to skip rendering. But, it is unclear whether that is working or currently disabled.

Baker Linden has been working on VWR-14674Object Return Function of Region/Estate Menu does not work. He hopes to have it fixed next week. Of course there is a JIRA item to remove the feature… Being able to return all of a set of things from an entire region has a large potential OOPS factor.

Internationalization LSL

There is some effort of working toward creating various languages for scripting… if I understood correctly.

4 thoughts on “#SL Server News Week 21

  1. The internationalization is just for the LSL aids in the script editor (the tooltips that describe methods and constants). By itself, this won’t be a big user visible difference, since the help text is localized in the viewer now.

    What is going on now is just moving that localized content from the viewer to the server, in support of an open source contribution by Ima Mechanique that will provide a direct benefit for scripters: STORM-1831 modifies the editor so that it loads all the help information from the server at run time, which will make it much more likely that the help will be current and match what the simulator implements. As things stand now, updates to LSL in the simulator are often not reflected in the viewer help promptly.

  2. Sorry to ask in a comment but I’ve been looking around your blog and on the wiki for more information about Threaded Region Crossing. I’m wondering if you can point me to an explanation of how this works, and how much of an improvement it will bring. If you know of one or could do a post about it, I and I’m sure many other people who use vehicles in second life would appreciate it.

    Thanks
    Brookston

    • There is not much information available. I have been writing about it since February this year. Try searching on ‘region crossing’ or ‘Phase I.’

      We are NOT going to see improvement at this point. This is an infrastructure change. It is the foundation that Phase II needs and it is in Phase II that we will see improvements in performance. The Lindens say in testing Phase II is making significant improvement. It removes most of the Avatar Departure Lag we see now.

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