#SL News Week 23

Griefer Monday cut into Kelly’s and Nyx Linden’s meetings. So, not much news from those meetings. I think pretty much everyone knows about the Advanced Creator or Experience Tools getting lose from the Release Channels.

Earthquake Map

One of the Scripting/Server meetings was hijacked by Slee Mayo’s fun new educational toy. It uses the LSL functions for HTTP data queries to make a live near real time map of earthquakes. See the opening image. Plus I was distracted and late getting there and they stopped posting transcripts in early May, so not much news from that meeting.

SVC-7902

SVC-7902Problem of not being able to rez on my land continues. This fix went to release channel Magnum Wednesday.

Restore To Last Position

This is about the one time feature that things would rez to the last place they occupied before being taken back into inventory. I don’t remember that. But…

The Lindens have been discussing it. Simon Linden said, “Apparently when it was on it caused a lot of problems, because people would restore onto a new region and put stuff underground, or off in a far corner and not realize it.

This would happen if an object were picked up in one region and later rezzed in a different region. Often the person would not realize the thing had rezzed in a different place than they intended. Also, if for some reason it could not rez at it previous coordinates in the new region it would rez at 0,0,ground or higher. Lots of things were getting lost.

No one that knows has said, but I suspect this feature is not coming back.

Deformer Test Set

Some time ago Oz Linden asked for mesh clothes to be used as test cases for the Mesh Deformer Project. There is a small set of mesh clothes available for testing in Hippo Hollow. You’ll need to use the SLURL to find them.

The test set still lacks male test clothes. So, if you know a designer making male mesh clothes, please contact them and ask they send a test item to Oz Linden. I have been trying to take time to experiment with the clothes and things I am making. I’ll eventually get the results into a post.

In Thursday’s meeting the problems of things wrinkling around the shoulders and shoulder blades of smaller avatars came up. I haven’t experimented with smaller shoulders. If anyone has, please add a comment.

Multiple Base Shapes

I had added an agenda item to Oz Lindens meeting agenda: “How can we get good data on whether a Multiple Base Avatar Deformer is wanted and actually needed?”

Oz responded and the conversation went as:

Oz, “It’s a good question, but I’m far more interested in whether it’s Needed than whether or not it’s Wanted. Not because I don’t want to make people happy, but because I think it’s easier to measure objectively.”

Nal, “I agree and we know that user are… fickel…”

Oz, “Well, I think the big problem is that even more than many other things, this one suffers from people wanting what they _think_ it will do without actually realizing that they don’t agree on what that is.”

Koli, “Personally, I’m happy with my normal textured & sculpty clothes. I know you can’t get perfection.”

Nal, “Most don’t understand the problem. I’m not sure I do. I’m still experimenting.”

Oz, “Me too… which makes evaluating it more than a little tricky 🙁 ”

Nal, “We won’t get perfection. But, we should be able to do at well as most other games when a good 3D modeler builds something. And designers and pro modelers are not the same [people] complicating [things] even more.”

Theresa, “Are there environments out there that actually use wearable mesh clothes? I know the Sims series just deforms the avatar mesh.”

Koli, “Eh, well, most games don’t use a deformer. (I actually don’t think /any/ do.)” Koli hasn’t been to Blue Mars? But, on some levels BM is not a game like SL isn’t a game.

Oz, “Most don’t support arbitrary user-created clothing at all. That is, of course, the central difficulty of Second Life.” In this case ‘arbitrary’ means user created anything over game designers creating or controlling the clothing in game. Most games the game designers give you what you can wear. Oz said, “They don’t let players build things in other software and import it.”

Dil, ‘Nods to OZs word: “and that content is optimized well.”’

Oz,  “Exactly.  Anyway… I think that the answer to your question is that we need to actually have people do careful looking at what the project deformer viewer does, using carefully made test clothes, and see if a consensus emerges. Granted, that might be a first…”

Nal, “I agree… we could have Fit Days where people rally to Hippo and try the test set.”

Summary

The challenge for all of us is figuring out what is needed and separating it from what people want. I made a question in the POLL as to whether those taking the poll are a designers or not. As of now 2/3’s of those taking the poll are not designers. Only a 1/6th are making mesh clothes. Another 1/6th are learning to make mesh clothes… well that question wasn’t as specific as it could have been. But, it is too late to change it now.

A more revealing figure is the data on Fit. 68%, as of this writing, are saying mesh clothes pretty much fit. However, that leaves about 1 out of 3 avatars that are having ‘fit-problems.’ And 10% are finding mesh clothes are not even close to what they need.

I think those in the ‘Close’ group will be happy with the single base shape and that it will work well for them. I think I’m in that group. I think this suggests that 68% will be happy with a single shape Deformer. Mix that information with the knowledge that people are pressing the Lab and Qarl to hurry up and complete the project and it looks like we may have to settle for the single base shape. If that is not something you feel is the best solution, you need to help get people involved. Start talking to your friends and especially clothing designers. We either shift those numbers and change the Lindens minds or they will chose the simpler solution, which is perfectly reasonable on their part.

SL Viewer

Martin & Jonathan have some fixes and things that have made it through QA and are moving into the Development Viewer. The Dev Viewer is updating pretty quickly right now. The latest version is: Second_Life_3-3-4-259223_Development.

I’ve had problems with trying to upload mesh with Dev versions recently. But, I have yet to try this one with mesh. I just got it installed today.

Blue Steel

This release channel is running the code from week 22. This is the code for the server changes to process prebaked avatar textures for library outfits. I suppose this is a step toward fixing the avatar rez fails, bake fail as many call it.

Le Tigre

This release channel is running the infrastructure changes from last week. This is Phase I of the region crossing shift to multithreaded processing. This code has worked well and would have been promoted to the main channel had Monday’s emergency  roll not been necessary. So, we should see it roll out this coming Tuesday.

Magnum

This RC had the Experience Tools package. That has been removed. It was replaced with a fix for SVC-7902Problem of not being able to rez on my land continues. This package will most likely see a main channel deploy the week after next, if all goes well.

This is a problem in how the viewer selects the rez point and how the server does a sort of CastRay to figure out if there are enough prims available in the region limit to allow a rez without causing an explosive return of existing things.

TIP: You can often get around the problem by moving your camera so it is looking straight down at the intended rez point.

Kelly said, “To address a grief mode of rezing on parcels that didn’t allow rez causing enough sim lag to disconnect users or crash the region the check for ‘can I rez here’ was moved much further up the process, which makes sense. However there was a mistake in that logic which instead of correctly calculating where the rez would happen it used the ray end point sent by the viewer. This means if that end point is somewhere you could rez, even though the rez would have happened where it was allowed, it would get erroneously blocked.

ADITI SVC-7727

SVC-7727Aditi grid problem. After changing my password to cause my inventory on Aditi to update, my inventory no longer saves changes made to it from session to session. Mæstro Linden said, “I’ve heard that there’s a fix. I’m not sure that anybody’s tested it though. It’s in the QA backlog at this point.”

So, if you are trying to test things in ADITI, mesh, clothes, builds, scripts, and etc. please add your WATCH to the JIRA item.

SVC-4444

SVC-4444Objects become fully permissive when rezzed under certain conditions. Baker Linden has a fix in QA for this problem. It will go in a maintenance package and work through the QA pipeline in the next few weeks.

Since this is a permissions related thing changes are a bit risky. Baker has designed the code to be one of the configurable changes. So, they can enable and disable it without a rolling restart. Eventually it will just be part of the server code and not an option to enable or disable.

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