#SL News Week 50

Once again, there is no roll out to the main channel. Bugs in the release candidate channels prevented a promotion.

Blue Steel & Le Tigre

These channels will get the same package as last week, but with fixes for the found bugs.

Magnum

This channel get a slightly different package. It is the same package as is running on Blue Steel with the addition of additional bug fixes, an improved fix for the memory leak fix, and a new feature: longer animations.

Server-Scripting Dec 2012

Server-Scripting Dec 2012

In a short article I mentioned the animation change. Animation files were previously limited to 60kb. That limit has been changed server side to 120kb. The change will allow for 60 second animations that are more complicated.

A viewer change is required before we can take advantage of this server side change. No one is sure when the viewer change will hit Dev or Beta viewers. 

Sudden Massive Lag

I’ve been writing about this problem that event managers have been complaining about. Toysoldier started a thread in the SL Forum. I covered it in: Sudden Massive Lag Update.

The problem seems well and is proliferating. At Monday’s meeting of the Content & Mesh group we saw Borrowdale hitting Time Dilations of 0.03 and ping hitting 6,000 to 8,000ms. I got disconnected twice. The group finally abandoned the region and moved north into Grasmere.

Grasmere then went into the same process of slowing and grinding down to 0.03 Time Dilation with high network times, just as Toysoldier describes in the thread.

Tuesday the same thing happened in Denby with 47 avatars present. I never got kicked out and ping never got as bad as it had in Borrowdale. But, again there was bad TD and Ping and high Network Time.

So, the problem continues. If you are an event manager and you are seeing this problem, file a JIRA and attend the Thursday Beta Server user group in ADITI. It seems this problem is prevalent, but I don’t get that it is on the Linden radar.

Interest List

Andrew Linden says his work on the Interest List will be moving into QA. He has it running on Ahern in ADITI and thinks it is also on Morris. So, you can check it out there. This week we may see the QA team roll it to a number of their regions in ADITI.

Provided it makes it through QA it will move into the Release Candidate queue and probably appear in RC channels sometime in early January. The ‘no-change’ windows push it into 2013.

No-Change Windows

Ahead of major holidays when a large portion of the Lab’s staff are off they avoid any changes to the system that might precipitate and emergency. The last 2 weeks of the year are no-change windows. The weeks of Dec. 24 and 31 are the no-change weeks.

CHUI

CHUI = Communications Hub User Interface… or in simple terms a new chat interface. Back in October I first covered CHUI, #SL CHUI Quick Review. Since then the Lindens have been working on the interface.

There is a CHUI Project viewer where you can try out the new interface. The current official version of the viewer is: 3.4.1-266356 Project Viewer CHUI (11/27 build). You can get it at Second Life Alternate Viewers. This is a static link. The dynamic latest links don’t work with this branch. Presumably it is a special build or I don’t know the correct branch name. So, you have to visit the page and click the link to see if the viewer version has changed.

I thought this version was really fast, 45 FPS in my home, but I found Lighting & Shadows was disabled.  With it enabled I’m down to 22 FPS.

The CHUI panel has changed a little in how it works, but it looks the same to me.

You can get a copy and offer the Lab feedback in the JIRA. Ciaran Laval blogged about the CHUI section of the JIRA being open to all. This allows you to provide feedback via the JIRA, which will presumably go directly to those working on it. See: CHUI – Making Good Use Of The Jira.

I suspect the Lindens are experimenting with the JIRA and different ways of using it. I am sure like many of us the Lindens don’t know all there is to know about the JIRA software. Or… it may just be different Lindens use the JIRA different ways.

There is a forum thread on CHUI here: CHUI Project Viewer. A Linden named ‘Viewer’ posted in response to Hitomi Tiponi’s question about the survey the Lindens were going to run. Viewer Linden says the JIRA seems to be working well so they are not going to do a formal survey. So, if you want to provide feedback, find the CHUI project in the JIRA: CHUIBUG. Cute name, huh?

Scam Alert

http:// marketplacesecndlife (dot) altervista (dot) org/p/Full-Perm-Rigged-Mesh-Complete-Santa-Avatar-Fashion-Kit/4258347/index.htm

This URL is making it around SL. It is a scam to capture passwords. The site is named to look like: https://marketplace.secondlife.com/.  The trick to knowing if a URL is real is finding the last (dot) before you see a ‘/’. If it does not spell secondlife.com then it is a fake of an SL site.

If you went there, change your password now. I mean right now. Don’t walk, run.

2 thoughts on “#SL News Week 50

  1. “The change will allow for 60 second animations that are more complicated.”

    By “more complicated”, do you mean by virtue of there being 30 extra seconds to be creative with or are animation uploads changing to allow more options? Like for example, some of the things we can achieve bulk uploading .anim files in TPVs instead of .bvh? Like per bone priorities and not having to keyframe them all etc.

    • If you have looked inside an animation file, you have found an outline of the armature/skeleton and then a section of frames listing the bone movements. Outside of Sl there is no limit to the size if the last section. One can add as amny frames as one wants.

      The bones and the animation information that can be included is a fixed format. For Sl there are limits on bone names and the number of frames. Unless they change the SL internal format, which I doubt will happen, the increased file size would only allow us to add more frames.

      So… my assumption is we will be able to add more frames of animation. Changing the play length I think is a single value in the file, a per frame time specification. I’m fuzzy on how the total frames and play time are controlled within SL. But, there is an option in several viewers to put animations into slow-motion for testing in-world. I think that setting just multiplies the animation file’s setting.

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