#SecondLife News Update Week 29

Andrew Linden is working on a program/script to cleanup corrupt inventory problems. Presumably the script will go to support so they can fix inventory problems.

Server/Scripting UG

Corruption in this case is duplicate system folders or folders outside the main My Inventory foder. Also, parts of inventory not loading.

We can hope he gets this script working this week.

Main Channel Roll

That went well. It is still slow but faster than last week. Simon Linden is not sure how long a region will be down during the update rolls. If you know the time your region was down, keyword being KNOW, post it in the Deploys thread. (Ignore the wackadoodles posting in the thread.)

The Lindens in the User Groups are not the hardware jockeys. So, they don’t have details on the software/scripts that run the roll outs. Nor do they have details on the time needed. So, if the time is lengthening or just not changing, speak up.

RC Rolls

The Release Channel rolls will happen Wednesday.

Today the expected region crossing problems in Le Tigre & Magnum, when going from Pathfinding to non-Pathfinding regions, are still there. There are unexpected crossing problems between Pathfinding regions. Tomorrow we’ll see if that changes.

Bets are next week the Blue Steel package, maintenance pack, will roll to the main channel. That will keep Pathfinding in RC for another two weeks, even if things go well.

Pathfinding Viewer

The Pathfinding Tools are still in the Project’s viewer. Those have to be integrated into the main viewer. So, we may see Pathfinding rolling to the main channel before we get a viewer with the Pathfinding Tools.

Pathfinding Bugs

A few problems have been encountered on Pathfinding Beta regions. One is water. It is not Phantom in PF regions, meaning you can walk on the water. Typically this is a only a problem for bodies of water surrounded by land within a single region.

Prim Gravity and Friction settings keep reverting back to a previous value in some situations in PF regions.

High lag… some are noticing high lag in PF Beta regions. This may be a special condition in specific regions. The Lindens are looking at the regions to see what may be causing the lag.

Broken vehicles… the Lindens have been looking at broken vehicles to determine if it is the PF region or the vehicle design that is the problem. So, far problem vehicles have been uniquely designed.

Andrew Linden says, “The main thing that changed for vehicles in the pathfinding code is that the terrain no longer collides like a “heightfield” (a 2D function of heights). But now collides like a “mesh” (a list of triangles).

The main difference between those two is that the height-field only collides on one side, and it is relatively simple to do penetration resolution when objects embed [in] the height-field. But mesh triangles collide on both sides; top and bottom. So if you have a vehicle that has lots of triangles on it (meshy vehicle, or concave prims) instead of simpler shapes such as boxes, perfect spheres. Then when the vehicle penetrates the mesh, the resolution code that tries to separate them can get confused and as a result the vehicle can “snag” on the terrain.

So the vehicles we noticed that had problems were very strange… their collision shapes were very thin boxes, very low to the ground and one of the vehicles had heavy force pushing it down and the colliding box was concave. Hence it was a collection of triangles.

There is a fundamental problem with ground vehicles in Second Life…

They actually don’t have wheels per-se but are colliding objects that kinda scrape along the surface of the ground or road. So they rely very much on collisions to move correctly.

However… whenever the physics engine is updated the _details_ of how collisions are computed, or the results thereof can change subtly and as a result, ground vehicles in SL are very sensitive to changes in the physics engine details.

I should mention that I wrote the vehicle code for SL, way back in 2003. At that time I didn’t know or suspect this sensitive dependency on the physics engine. But if I were to do vehicles again, I’d try to separate ground from air vehicles, feature-wise anyway.”

Scripting

Simon Linden found time for a personal mini-project. He created code to pass the function signature into the script editor. What this means is you can start typing a function or event name like LISTEN then wait for the tool tip. Once the tip appears press TAB to get the first line of the tool tip injected into the editor. This will give you the full function and its parameters.

I’m not sure when we will see this appear in the main release or even the Developer version of the viewer. It will be weeks getting through QA.

Summary

Pathfinding is at least a couple of weeks away. It is going to be hard on poorly built ground vehicles. I expect it to be a bumpy integration. The PF Team has done amazing things in the last few weeks. But, it seems there is pressure to get PF released.

Advanced Creator Tools are out there somewhere. There is no word on when they will be activated. That team is rather sky. I expect to hear something soon. Whether they will just turn them on or whether there is a signup process to be able use them… I don’t know. If there is some signup process that could explain the delay, but it could also be an additional testing thing.

Whatever the case, it seems two projects are close to completing.

2 thoughts on “#SecondLife News Update Week 29

  1. They change the rolls for Wednesday. No Pathfinding on LeTigre, instead they will have the Creator Tools with LSL calls enabled. But until now, no statement from Oskar or someone else.

    • Now that is sneaky… I’ll bet the roll to the main channel is to get the Tool’s permissions code to all regions. That allows live testing on the RC. It cuts off building the script in a live area and then taking it to a region without permission controls.

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