#SL Server News Week 31

The main channel got the Advanced Creator Tools (AKA: Experience Tools). Torley Linden has a new video out showing a bit of what they can do. Watch it on Hamlet’s NWN in: SL Creators: What Will You Do With Your New Teleport Agent & Temporary Attachment Tools?

Server Scripting July 2012.

You can read the official Linden announcement on the SL Blog: First Set of Advanced Creator Tools Launched Today. These are the tools that were used in Linden Realms.

This set of tools gives us new Scripting Functions. We will soon start to see new teleport units appearing. They will use the new functions: llTeleportAgent() and llTeleportAgentGlobalCoords(). These are for intra-region and inter-region teleports. A nice feature in them is you can control which way an avatar faces when they arrive.

One of the odd kinks in how the functions work is for the teleport to work differently than they do now, at least permissions-wise, is one must own the TP device. That is where llAttachToAvatarTemp() comes in.

To attach a device one must grant permission. Once attached the avatar shows as owner of the device or HUD, I think. But, as it is a temporary attachment the device will never appear in inventory. It also drops off on logout. The attachment is very much temporary.

This means TP’s like a Stargate would not necessarily have the teleport code. The TP code could be in any device a gate user would wear. The gate could send destination information on touch or collision and the attached device would then do the TP. There are lots of possibilities.

The release notes say, “The new LSL functions work with the current runtime permissions system and are precursor to future work with experience permissions.” I think it is clear that experience permissions are a future feature.

Le Tigre

This release channel got an infrastructure package. Some weeks ago we got Phase I of the infrastructure update. Now that we have the Shining Project it is hard to know if this is Phase II or some mix of projects. Whatever the case, a significant part of the infrastructure project was the change to multi-threaded region crossing.

Magnum

This channel continues to run the Pathfinding upgrade with some fixes.

A neighbor connection problem has been found, meaning adjacent regions. When an avatar flies up above their Draw Distance for more than 50 seconds the connection to neighboring regions is lost. The Lindens were testing a fix Tuesday. If things went well, it should have made it into the code rolling out Wednesday.

If you are up in a skybox you may not notice, unless you are looking at a sunset.

SCR-382

SCR-382llTeleportAgent() and llTeleportAgentGlobalCoords() can break any script in any attached object that contains a change event. This problem has started turning up. The Lindens are having some trouble reproducing the problem. If you have run into it, add your information to the JIRA.

Group Edit

Baker Linden is working on a fix for the problems we have editing large groups. This is proving much harder than Baker thought. A group like N-Core with 40k is almost impossible to edit. The trick is getting a query of 40k members to complete in less than the data query timeout and transfer 2mb of data via UDP without losing too much data.  All that has to happen in less than 5 minutes to avoid a timeout… much less user patience timeout.

The new HTTP processes should help the problem. The pipes can be faster and they have error correction so fewer lost packets. But, it may be some time before we see HTTP Fixes roll to the main grid. Plus on-the-fly data compression is possible with HTTP.

At least it is being worked on.

Last Position

Prims used to rez at the last position the occupied. (Really? I don’t remember that.) Create a prim, take it into inventory, and on the next rez it will rez in the previous location. The problem with that is lots of people did not understand what was happening. So, when they tried to rez something in a different region, things did not rez where dropped and they could be lost, well… the user would lose track of the items. A bug would some times rez them at 0 north, 0 east, and occasionally below the ground.

That created lots of problems for everyone. So, to reduce support issues the feature was removed from the viewer. Third Party Viewer Dev’s are still providing the feature and wanting assurance the feature will not be removed from the server side code… I wish them luck.

Link Sets

There is a problem with link sets. If part of the link set extends into a region where ones does not have build rights, it is impossible to unlink the prims. That is to prevent a type of sneaky griefing. There was considerable discussion on how this might be improved. Most fixes are computationally intense and result in behavior that would be hard to understand.

Personally I think adding an error message explaining why a set will not unlink would be best.

DD & Market Place

It seems some users are still suffering with the swapped images problem. This is where your product in the Market Place may show up using pictures from another merchant or your pictures may get used with another merchant’s products.

Andrew asked internally about the status of the problem in response to an attendee’s question. He says it sounds like those working on it will be posting new information on the Commerce Forum… any day now™.

Summary

It is nice to see the Advanced Creator Tools making it to the main channel. I do think it will change how some things are done.

Pathfinding is not far behind. If things go well, we may see Pathfinding come to the main channel next week. I wouldn’t suggest holding your breath, but it is looking good.

Rumors that a materials system is on the way persist. Maybe with these projects completing there will be people starting on such a project, which means it would far enough along for the Lab to start talking about it. Then on the other hand it could all be rumor and all we will see is a proposal from third party developers.

 

5 thoughts on “#SL Server News Week 31

  1. Hey Nalates, just a correction – as it currently stands, objects attached using llAttachToAvatarTemp() cannot use the llTeleportAgent() command.

    A potential workaround is having the temp attachment rez *another* prim that does the teleportation itself, as that prim would be owned by the avatar wearing the temp attachment. In theory anyway, I haven’t actually tried that out as I ran into some bugs with the llAttachToAvatarTemp() when experimenting with it.

  2. I’ve not tested it yet, but the wiki entries for the relevant functions all stress that items attached using llAttachToAvatarTemp can’t call either of the llTeleportAgent functions.

    So, while groups of RP sims will be able to use llTeleportAgent in the way you suggest — a stargate tells your hud the destination and your hud teleports you there — you’ll need, I think, to own the hud already. The startgate won’t be able simply to attach a hud to you and tp you somewhere.

  3. Thank you for the update on groups. Me and my friends are really suffering from this problem for years already. Just turns out that if it is fixed, another bug takes over and still prevents us from loading our groups. Currently I am still on viewer 3.3.2., because of VWR-29124.

  4. I’m curious as to just what is meant by “materials” when people are talking about this rumour. In other CGI contexts, it can mean the use of math functions to create a pattern to replace a bitmap. The results can depend a lot on the UV mapping. You can create stripes that way, very UV-map dependent, but I reckon it might be more useful for natural patterns such as rock surfaces.

    But that sort of computational texturing might need a good deal more CPU and GPU time than displaying a bitmap. It might be a lot more useful to increase the number of library textures, and see what the improved caching does, before opening that can of worms. Though I can see one function that might be useful. Allow the setting of two colours. with a blend from one to the other depending on the greyscale value of the texture. With that, a simple black-and-white texture, stripes or checkerboard or any decorative pattern, could be an explosion of colour.

    • In general, I think, the use of the term ‘materials’ in an SL context refers to bump/normal maps, reflection, and specular aspects. These are the features that professional modelers miss. Procedural textures may or may not be part of the system meant when LS users talk about materials.

      Most games use whatever material system works best with their render engine. I’ve just seen a significant change in the SL render engine. Where my graphics card was carrying 30% load it now hits 99% when running SL. I have not seen a jump in FPS, so I’m not sure what is up.

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