#SL News 1 Week 41

There was a roll to the main channel this week. It seems to have gone well. At least all the regions get a restart after 3 weeks or so. The package was the one running on the Blue Steel RC Channel. It is a minor update and should have no visible effect on the simulator behavior. This is a release needed to enable a coming release.

Server & Scripting UG Oct 2012

Magnum

Will get a new package. It will be the main channel code plus the changes to allow better use of the new hardware. Not knowing exactly what hardware the Lab is upgrading to… its hard to speculate on what the change may be. Presumably, if they are running Intel, they may be adding more threading features for the iCore series chips. If they run AMD, I have no clue.

BlueSteel and LeTigre

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get the same code. This code has a small change that improves database queries. It is an optimized set of queries that cleans up how some things are done. Since Baker moved the group query into its own little world, they Lindens have improved the remaining queries, presumably using the same style of improvement.

Large Groups

Nope… it did not make it back to an RC channel. The package it is in had the handy Return Your Prims feature that was such fun last week. That is called a Prim Accounting Problem. It is still being worked on. Simon Linen is hoping and expects the package to make it back to RC next week (42).

Packages

You probably realize that a number of bug fixes, features add-ons, and changes get rolled into a package and run through QA. Simon explained a little about that process when answering a question.

Phoenix you asked earlier about the [Large] Group code being bundled with other work … that’s really a factor of how we divide up the releases. For regular bug fixing, we’ll work on stuff, put a bunch of fixes together for QA and then release [them as a package]. There’s a judgment call on how much gets bundled together, and a bunch of things go into the decision, like how overloaded the QA guys are, how many other things are trying to get to RC, risks of one part blocking [it another] (like now), stuff like that.

[Large Group Editing is] at the top of our list as well – we’d like to see it get out.

I’ve had a lot of discussions [like that about preventing the type problem we saw last week] in the past few days. We really want to catch problems of that size on the Aditi beta grid, so that’s means augmenting the testing there. [It The Le Tigre package] was tested on the Aditi grid … the tough thing with SL testing is running it on all those combinations – it’s just never possible to have complete test coverage. This one shouldn’t have slipped through, that’s for certain.

We discussed adding some alarms to the [roll out] system … like if you start up, and are suddenly returning a lot of things, as happened Wednesday. It’s a tough call, since there are so many possible things that can go wrong.

The RC channels are actually designed to be representative of the whole grid, so we try to keep a mix of the different types of regions like full, mainland, Linden Homes, etc. On one hand, the system worked … we found a problem before it got to the whole grid, which might have been how this would have happened before we started the Release [Candidate] Channels. But, it really was so bad we definitely want to catch something like that even earlier.

So, like I said, we’ve had a bunch of meetings discussing what and why it happened, and have some better tests added to the regular test pass so this specific problem won’t happen again.

SL is an amazingly difficult system to test because it’s so large and diverse, and we don’t really know what a lot of the content does since Linden [Lab] doesn’t make it.

54m Linking

This problem was covered in an earlier article. There is a bug that allows one to create linked objects that are more than 54 meters apart. It is a bug. It will be fixed. Andrew Linden has been working on it. They expect the fix to be a release candidate next week (42). Most likely the one with the Large Group fix.

Bake Fail Fix

No word this week. There was no Content & Mesh UG as it was Columbus Day. Simon has heard some of the team working on it talking about alpha layer problems. That suggests they are moving ahead.

Viewer 3.4.x

No word on where we are in solving problems in this version. A new Beta viewer version came out Saturday the 6th: 3.4.1-265642. The Development Viewer has not updated and remains at 3.4.2- 265141, as I write this.

Summary

It still feels like we are blocked by some tough problems. I am hoping the viewer problems get solved. I am certain that is holding some things back, Large Group Editing for one.

I’ve been playing with Patterns. I’m into the forge now and have actually made a shape. I figured out how to swing the build table around so I can see what I’m building: right-click and drag. I have yet to figure out why there are so many things I can’t build.

3 thoughts on “#SL News 1 Week 41

  1. “Magnum
    Will get a new package.”

    According to the Deploys Thread there is no new package.
    “This will have the same code as last week. There will be no rolling restart.”

    “A new Beta viewer version came out Saturday the 6th”
    Latest version is from Monday the 8th:
    v3.4.1 (265642)

  2. re. Patterns. My guess is that there are only so many shapes loaded into the game at this time. You can add them to your inventory either by finding them in starine or making them on the forge, but you can not forge what is not yet loaded.

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