Havok

Mæstro Linden says the next Havok version upgrade is almost ready. He suspects it will deploy on ADITI in the Pathfinding test regions. There is no exact when. I expect he’ll say something when it is ready for user testing on ADITI.

Apparently Falcon Linden is key in deciding how Havok will roll to the RC channels. Havok rolls create region crossing problems for vehicles and avatars with prim/sculpty/mesh attachments. This particularly annoys the sailing and flying communities.

Until they make the roll, we probably won’t know what they are planning. I suspect they will try to test the Havok upgrade on ADITI extensively. If things go well, they may just decide we and they can live with the pain for a week while it makes it through the RC channel, or not. They may come up with a better solution.

Viewer

Thursday the SL Release Viewer updated to 3.4.0. I understand this is the 3.3.4 viewer code with the Pathfinding Tools added. The 3.4 code is proving to have a difficult to find memory leak and high crash rate.

Mæstro says this ‘3.4.0’ release is not crashing any more than the current release viewer (3.3.4). That is a good thing and it gets the PF Tools out.

PATHBUG-183

PATHBUG-183 – Physical swimming dolphin ghosts flying off out of the sim since Pathfinding deployed. They are talking about this problem.

Physical swimming dolphins that use physics to move while swimming and jumping using physics and have worked fine for years are now constantly having ghost dolphins flying off into space with Velocity Interpolate on. Turning Velocity Interpolate off breaks other things. The sim is apparently not feeding the viewer adequate position updates to move the dolphins correctly in the viewer although they eventually return to their correct positions, presumably when physics updates are finally received by the viewer. The dolphins are actually still in their correct locations. The sim has lots of free frame time. The problem also seems related to what the viewer is looking at. If the dolphins are on screen they seem to move correctly most of the time, but if you turn the cam away so they are not on screen, they go flying off every few seconds.

This may be related to my PATHBUG-190 – Beta & Dev Viewers cannot render PF Characters. Andrew is looking to see if the interest is involved. Whatever, it is not uncommon to see things go flying off into the distance. This usually happened with an object near the edge of the viewer or said another way: the edge of your field of view.

Pathfinding User Group

Lorca Linden says this group will officially end with the end of September. The Pathfinding subject will roll into Andrew’s and Simon’s Sever-Scripting group.

AI Character Bug

There is a bug in the Land Impact cost calculation for Pathfinding Characters. If you can figure out how the bug is triggered, the character costs 1 LI instead of the minimum 15. It does matter how many prims are used. But, the 15 prim minimum does not always kick in. It is reproduce able, so the Lindens will fix it. No free lunch here, folks.

Special PF Scripting Event

There are several possible returns from the path_update event. There’s a special path_update event that triggers when the character enters a Pathfinding disabled region: PU_FAILURE_DYNAMIC_PATHFINDING_DISABLED. When this fires you have to use a movement means other than PF movement to get out of the area.

PATHBUG JIRA

You may notice the PATHBUG project in the JIRA works as the JIRA did pre-JIRA Change. That is because Lorca did not change it over. The project is schedules to close soon. So, it will likely remain open and take new items until it is closed. I would guess until the end of September.

Interest List

There are still some bugs in this upgrade. Andrew thinks he has most of them figured out. If the code makes it through internal testing we will see it in an RC channel next week. He has test regions up and one is Ahern, ADITI.

HTTP Library

You may know that Linden Lab is building a better HTTP Protocol handler for SL. Right now they are having some merge problems with the library. Once it is released we should see a reduction in router problems and faster downloads. The TCP/HTTP protocol has a built in data compression feature. When used it can reduce the amount of bandwidth used. As more of SL’s communication changes to HTTP less and less bandwidth will be used.

Virtual Land Marks

You may remember these. They are landmarks that can take to specific shop even after it moves to a new region. They are a feature request that made it onto the Linden’s To-Do list. Toysoldier Thor asked if the feature had been assigned a production slot. As far as Andrew knows, it hasn’t.

Direct Delivery

There was an update on the status of Direct Delivery and Magic Box cutoff date. Commerce Linden posted:

The transition from Magic Boxes to Direct Delivery has been extended indefinitely. We will be providing a 30-day warning before any shutdown actions are taken and will avoid doing this before peak holidays for the Marketplace (Halloween, Christmas/New Year’s, Valentine’s Day).

We are aware that some Merchants are still having problems with the Merchant Outbox. We are are working with TPVs and our internal development teams to address this issue.

Summary

There are lots of things happening. The development process is held up in a number places by hard to find problems that clog the pipeline. But, things are being worked on and will eventually resolve.