October
A problem with a rollout causes over a 1,000 regions to have to be recovered from backups. The RC channel Le Tigre was expected to get the package for Large Group Editing was where the problem strikes. The following week we got more information. Something in the package was miscalculating Prim Count and forcing the return of prims. Basically that was decimating regions. The mistake inspired the Lindens to create a process for doing massive restorations automatically.
The Large Group Edit was supposed to make it into an RC channel. Because of a prim counting problem that is mixed in with that update the package was pushed back to QA. Simon Linden explained how packaging works.
On the 8th Treet.TV broadcast their interview with Lorca, Maestro, and Falcon Linden about pathfinding. My summary of the interview is: Treet TV’s Pathfinding Episode.
On the 10th the Lab released their new game Patterns.
The Lab asked for more users to test the Beta viewer. They thought they had the memory leak fixed.
Simon Linden took the Sudden Massive Lag problem seriously.
The 54m object linking bug fix is announced, buy some saw it as a feature.
On the 11th Rod Humble posts in the forum thread: To RODVIK – Request meeting with Merchants on Commerce Team concerns. I cover the thread in: Second Life Market Place. As of December I have yet to see any improvement in the Commerce Team’s communications as Rod suggested was possible.
By the 12th we have another Beta Viewer with the long hoped for memory leak fixed. This memory leak is a problem down in the Microsoft compiler’s use of a memory allocation function. The use of Skydrive aggravates it to point of making the viewer unusable.
SL residents Magus Freston and Darien Caldwell cooperated and made a viewer to fix a mesh import problem.
Lots of PING – Image by: mknowles Flickr
We got an explanation of how PING is measured in Viewer Statistics.
By the rolls around the 14th the Large Group Editing package had not made it out of QA.
Andrew Linden explained how the camera behavior would change with the arrival of the new Interest List code.
Honor McMillian found a glitch in how the viewer renders mesh objects.
On Inara Pey’s blog Rod Humble confirmed Linden Lab is looking at being involved in more virtual worlds, with the plural being deliberate.
The 16th saw RC channels get 3 new packages. None contained the Large Group Editing fixes. A new Havok version 2012.1 rolled out to RC. The Lindens had rearranged regions to minimize region-crossing problems from the version difference. No fixes for the Sudden Massive Lag problems event managers were seeing.
The wiki was updated to point out that failing to click Analyze during mesh upload would result in double sided objects.
On the 18th I covered a problem discovered when using arbitrary shapes. See: Mesh Deformer Update Week 42.
The Commerce Team posted an update on the Market Place. Merchant Update October 2012. There was no update in November or December… In December there was a request for feedback on Market Place categories: Proposed New Marketplace Categories.
On the 22nd we heard about another reorganization of regions. The consolidation of data centers contributed to the need to make another organizing pass.
We also got word that Runitai Linden is working to have the viewer do a better job of recognizing video card features.
On the 23rd we got a warning from Kelly Linden about a change in HTTPRequest.
Also, we saw a CHUI Project viewer arrive. CHUI=Chat Hub User Interface.
On the 25th the Large Groups Edit package had to be rolled back again. A special roll was made the sort of backup channel Snacks. Baker told us things worked pretty well in Snacks, but a couple of problems were revealed. Kelly and Simon’’s HTTP stack changes seemed to make things better.
Open Source UG meeting times change.
Mesh Deformer limits were pointed out by Darien Caldwell.
Andrew Linden’s Interest List changes arrive on the ADITI grid.
The Sudden Massive Lag at events is still with us. RC rollouts the last week of October are supposed to help with or resolve the problem.
Expiring group notices remain a problem.
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