#SL News 2 Week 44

Well the roll out went nowhere near as planned. There were problems starting out that pushed the rolls back one day, from Tuesday to Wednesday. And that pushed Wednesday’s roll back a day. But, then the actual roll to the main channel rolled out the wrong version…

Server/Scripting Meeting

The Main channel was to get the code running on Blue Steel. Instead, an older version of the server code from a couple of weeks ago was rolled out. So, the main channels has regressed. I don’t know which version. Lydia Craig reported end up on version 12.10.12.265813 when the release notes said it should be 12.10.19.266079, which would be a one week regression.

Only a few people have noticed the glitch and posted in the forum Deploy thread.

Blue Steel & Le Tigre

These two channels are running the same code. This is the code from last week that ran on Le Tigre. I suppose it has some fixes included. This is the package with Havok 2012.1. So, crossing from the main channel to the Blue Steel or Le Tigre with a vehicle is going to be a problem.

The Blake Sea regions were moved to Magnum a week or so ago. So, sailing from one region to another in the Blake Sea should still work.

This is the package I described in #SL News 1 Week 44 in regard to Le Tigre.

Magnum

In News 1 I didn’t have information on which package would be rolled here. Now we know that the package from the Snack Channel rolled to Magnum. This is the package with the LARGE GROUP EDIT CHANGES. You need a Project Viewer to take advantage of the change. There are some minor problems but those are getting fixed.

Qie Niangao has noticed that the code rolled to the Magnum channels has a problem. You can read his post in the forum. (M8106) He also filed a bug report:  BUG-630: MAGNUM 12.10.29.266360 – LSL (not Mono) fails to append key typecast singleton to list.

Some people are reporting problems with RLV in Magnum channel regions. In this case it was pose balls with RLV interaction that was not working in Magnum. That could be the ‘list processing’ function failure in BUG-630.

So, if your scripts and breedables are acting up in Magnum, this may be the problem.

Snack Channel

This is a special channel used only when needed. It folds back into some channel until needed again. It only consists of some sandboxes with limited access.

Disable Collisions

This is a region setting that is used by estate managers to handle some griefing issues. It has been broken for a time. That got fixed this week. The fix is in the package on Magnum. We should see it make it to the main channel in a couple of weeks.

FREE SIM Monitor

Resident Zeebster Colasanti of DSE is providing a very interesting simulator monitor. SL Enquirer Magazine ran an article on it. It sounds interesting. It certainly has some neat features. The extended tracking will be interesting to any region owner wanting to track down performance problems.

See the SL Enquirer for more info: Revolutionary #SL SIM Performance Monitor.

Or see: SimMonitor.com – On Facebook: SimMonitor – And in the Second Life Market Place: SL Region Performance Monitor.

Mesh Deformer

I’m not hearing much from anyone on the Deformer. No updates to the JIRA sense 10/28.

In a recent open source meeting Oz Linden when asked about testing the Deformer answered, “I have not done any lately myself … reports on the jira mostly seem pretty good, though the sample size is very very small.

If there are a lot of people trying it, they’re keeping that fact to themselves.

Before the Deformer makes it into the main viewer Oz wants to see good testing of whether or not it does a reasonable job on the major soft-tissue changes, including tracking with avatar physics. I’m not sure where that testing will come from for him…

AS to when we will see it… it seem memory issues and high crash rates on the Beta Viewer are still holding things up. I thought they had caught that problem, but apparently not. When they do solve it there are weeks of work waiting to be merged into the viewer. So… I doubt we will see the Deformer merged onto the SL viewer this year. May be… may be we will see it make it into the Dev Viewer or possibly the Beta. But, I would put much money on that.

Export

The subject of getting a Collada export from the viewer came up. The reason for this is obvious to me because I’ve run into the need. Here is the deal.

We can export an avatar shape as an XML file. The file contains the Appearance Slider settings. It does not include a mesh or vertices information. So, there is no way to import the shape into Blender or 3DS. So, you actually have no way to model for the exported shape, you can’t see it.

So… to see the shape you need to get one of two programs:

See my tutorial Page 4 for more details.

That tutorial explains what one has to go through to get a custom shape from SL to Blender. I used Phoenix 1.5.2 (1185) to export an OBJ file (Wavefront) to get a mesh deformed to my custom shape.

Those using the XML file are finding that the translation to a mesh one can use for modeling on, is not as precise as they would like. I personally have run into a number of problems in connection to the idea of multiple base shapes. I think a Collada Export would be a good idea.

If you have gone the ‘OBJ export’ path, you will know that the export does not include the armature or weight painting. That means you have lots of work ahead of you if you want to use that mesh for a base model. It’s not bad. But, it is several steps.

Collada would allow the export of the armature and weighting. I think both of those are a big deal.

If you are working on or planning to make mesh clothes you may want to jump over and Vote for the Firestorm JIRA entry: FIRE-290. AFAIK, there is no JIRA feature request for this in the SL JIRA.

Whether the Lab will seriously consider the issue is an unknown. But, I have hopes.

Threaded Region Crossing

This is Phase II of the region crossing code. It has been in the background for some time. Oskar Linden says it is coming to the Preview Grid some time soon. I think that means this year, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

They plan to set up regions in ADITI for a test program. I suspect at some point they will ask for resident help with testing.

Summary

Once again things are backing up. The viewer had been backed up for weeks. We thought that was solved but, crash rates say: NOT.

Some significant changes are being made server side and those are taking some time. Several of them are backed up too. But, things are moving forward.

One thought on “#SL News 2 Week 44

  1. Pingback: Dies und Das aus dem Web (KW 44 / 2012) - [O.L.D.] Old London Docks

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