#SL News 1 Week 49

This week is short on news. A couple of user group meetings were canceled. A couple of Lindens are on vacation too. So, there isn’t much coming out of Linden Lab™ this week. It is the holiday season.

Server Beta Meeting Dec 2012

Servers

Tuesday there was no package roll out. It seems a number of regions were restarted. I suspect because of the server side memory leak. It seems to be related to rebuilds of the Pathfinding Navmesh. So, any building that affects the Navmesh, like making an obstacle Static and clicking the Rebuild button, is going to push the server closer to a crash.

On Wednesday the Lindens did roll a maintenance package to all three Release Candidate channels. The same package rolled to all three channels. I has the bug fixes built after last week’s testing. Unfortunately there is a new one: Email messages sent by scripted objects are not triggering emails when the owner-recipient is offline. That is a pretty big problem. Maestro Linden has confirmed this is a problem.

There is some other factor that contributes to or mitigates the problem. So, apparently some emails are being sent from some regions. A number of people have noticed they are NOT receiving emails.

The Lindens are working on a fix and we will likely see it come out next Wednesday. If… big if, the Lindens are really confident of the fix, they may add it and roll the package to the main grid and put a new package on the RC channels.

Blue Steel

As I said all three channels are getting the same package. The release notes are here: 12.11.29.267443

The release gets the changed: llGetObjectDetails(). It has three new flags:  OBJECT_PHYSICS,  OBJECT_PHANTOMOBJECT_TEMP_ON_REZ. Each one returns a Boolean integer indicating that object’s settings corresponding to the new flag.

Numerous bug and crash fixes are included.

The bug that kept the package from moving forward this week is fixed: parcels cannot be deeded to the group (BUG-927 ). Also the problems: offline emails triggered by scripted object IMs are missing the message (BUG-916) and offline emails triggered by scripted object IMs have the wrong avatar name in the email “To:” field.

Coming Weeks

Server updates will happen in weeks Dec. 10 & 17. There will be no updates in weeks Dec. 24 & 31. The last two weeks of December are a ‘no change window.’

Because of the failure to send emails, the current RC package will get an update next Wednesday. There is unlikely to be any roll to the main channel the preceding Tuesday. If things go well the current RC package could make it to the main grid Dec. 18.

The Lindens are planning 2 new RCs: one with just the incremental IM bug fix and another with all that other stuff plus other fixes… yeah, that’s clear. Sorry. Whatever, they are only planning conservative updates pre-Christmas. They don’t want to take any chances and have problems during the holidays.

Region Presence

There is a problem where regions disappear from neighboring regions. Regions that come up after a restart are sometimes not visible to one or more of the adjacent regions for up to an hour. The Lindens thinks they have found the cause. A fix has not been completed yet.

Disconnect

Mæstro says, there’s a fix for the: ‘neighboring region briefly disconnects from viewer 50 seconds after a region crossing’ problem.

Navmesh Bake Leak

A fix for this problem is going into QA this week. A number of actions cause a Navmesh rebake that are just not intuitive. For instance changing some parcel flags in estate management, like enabling/disabling scripting. Each bake can consume 50mb of ram and the limit is about 250mb… or 5 bakes and the the region is screwed and must be restarted.

ADITI

Recently some people have noticed that the ‘free-L$-on-ADITI’ nightly script no longer works. When the balance gets low in ADITI it is supposed to automatically update the balance by L$5,000. Those with less than L$10k should get a 5k deposit. Coyot Linden thinks he has the script problem of failing to update L$ balances in ADITI fixed.

The login problems from the disks filling up in ADITI have been looked at. It is thought the plan is to get more disk space. Whether that is to be by adding more disks, it’s not like going to Fry’s, or culling data, we don’t know.

The inventory problem after password changes is still around. The fix is still to change it again and wait 24 to 48 hours before attempting to login on ADITI.

Multi-Threaded Region Crossing is being tested in regions running DRTSIM-184. GC Test 15 and GC Test 16 are both on that channel and side by side. So, one can check out region crossing with the new code. It seems like a number of regions in that area are on DRTSIM-184.

If you want a new experience in region crossing, try it out. I was surprised. Someone was there flying a plane across the region boundaries. That seemed to be working well. But, there were only the two of us.

UG Meetings

The Sever Beta UG will have its last meeting of 2012 on 2/20. The next meeting after that one will be January 3, 2013. You can probably safely guess that most UG meetings will be on a similar schedule.

Viewers

We have seen a number of new versions of the viewer rolling out from the Lab and Third Party Developers. The big problem memory leak has been fixed, or at least a work around found. I’m not sure whether that means the problem with Microsoft’s Skydrive has been resolved or not. The two seem tied together.

The Lab’s Development Viewer: 3.4.4-267614_Development. – I find this viewer has a faster initial texture render. But, textures slow to render seem to hang in the blurry stage way longer. Also, after the initial render of an area textures that come into sight later are slow to render. It may just be SL today… or it may be the interest list processing change. Things outside the field of view are less likely to render. But when they do come into view, it takes time for them to start rendering.

The Lab’s beta viewer: 3.4.3-267135_BetaViewer.

The Lab’s main viewer: 3.4.2-267137_Setup.

The Lab’s project viewers are here: Second Life Alternate Viewers.

Dolphin Viewer has been releasing a series of versions lately. Today: 3.4.5-26752.

Exodus Viewer: Beta 9 – with Tone Mapping.

Firestorm released a major version update: Firestorm Release 4.3.1.31155 Review – with Photo Tools. ATI users had problems with this release. Their screens were going pink. We have seen that problem in other viewer brands and releases in the past. The Firestorm team has a fix. See: The World is Pink

Kokua Viewer (Imprudence Replacement): 3.4.2-25211. If you jump over and read the blog, you’ll see some updates at the Lab are having affects on OpenSim grids. NickyP is posting about the issue and the fixes. I’ve been expecting problems like this and I expect more. Whatever, for now OpenSim grids are adapting.

Niran’s Viewer: 2.0.4 (2321) – has a settings reverting to problem values issue. There is a work-around fix explained on the site.

Other Third Party Viewers are here: Third Party Viewer Directory. Firestorm has moved to being the most stable viewer available. Congrats Firestorm Team. Both Imprudence and Phoenix are listed as lacking important features. For Imprudence that would be mesh?

Summary

SL is definitely moving into the holiday work mode.

8 thoughts on “#SL News 1 Week 49

  1. re: Region Presence; the diagonal regions not rezing bug is still with us. This would have been getting a lot of chatter under the old jira system. I am disinclined to submit a bug report saying “it is still here” every week, only to have it ignored because I am not using the LL viewer. Not sure if any of the Lindens are aware or care about this any more.

    • Alexa assures me that all JIRA’s are read. Plus there are not that many filed per day. In the last 30 days 316 have been filed and 260 resolved. That is about 10 JIRA items per day.

      When I want more attention for a problem that annoys me I splash it around and follow up on the JIRA with Alexa. Toysoldier did a forum thread and commented on all the articles I did to promote news of the problem.

      There is a lot of griefing and crashes they are working on… the disappearing diagonal regions are a small problem. Plus, I think Andrew has hopes for his Interest List revisions fixing it.

  2. Yesterday’s change to the Beta Viewer – 3.4.3.267755 – now includes an extra three stops in the graphics settings. Odd because this didn’t seem to come through the dev viewer, and also because some of them don’t seem to do anything much yet. But it is good to see LL planning to offer more graphics granularity for those who don’t want to mess with the detailed settings.

    • Put up a version number and the Lindens update :/

      I noticed my Dev Viewer didn’t have that. I think they are merging lots of branches into the main trunk now that the memory leak is fixed.

    • It is hard to know. There seems to be some dependence on the region’s content. I’ve been working on the Navmesh in my home region and have yet to crash the region. I know I’ve baked more than 5 times this morning…

      • Well i had a totaly Region Collosal crash today followed by a Sim Presence hiccup. First the region not there for at least 30 minutes, then it was there but invisible to the neighbouring sim. anyone who went on it dissapeared from view and mini map, but could see back at us int he neighbouring sim. When i went to enter i crashed lol. Thought maybe it crasehd due to the 5 bake rule

  3. Pingback: Dies und Das aus dem Web (KW 49 / 2012) - [O.L.D.] Old London Docks

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