April – 45 Articles

The first thing we saw in April was the Firestorm team quitting viewer development on April 1. See: Firestorm Dev’s Quit.

In Direct Delivery people were trying to decide if using folders or boxes for delivery worked better. I’m not at all sure that has been decided even now. This was the month Sassy Romano started a Direct Delivery JIRA log in the SL Forum: Existing Marketplace JIRA’s Issue Log.

It was this month that people began to realize mixing prims and mesh could reduce prim count.

The main SL Viewer gained the ability to import animations via ANIM files. See: Avastar Rigging and Animation. Kelly Linden announced he was working on a way to eliminate the need for Animation Overriders. I have no idea what became of this project. Later more discussion comes up about the Lab making an AO replacement. See: #SL The Great AO Debate.

The ban elevation limit was raised to 5,000m in preparation for removing flight limits.

The multi-threaded region crossing code continued to be tested in RC channels. But, this was the month we saw it pulled from the RC channels. It went into rewrite and eventually a new pass through QA that took weeks.

Changes coming to SL were announced; object return was to change so unlinking objects that would drive prim count over the limit and start a flood of returns would be prevented or return just the unlinked prims, selecting objects inside a parcel by a banned avatar would be prevented, an addition to the scripting language that would allow scripted return of objects was opened to discussion, Geenz Spad was working on a new Shine shader that was soon to release, graded shadows were planned to be added, spell checking was to come to the SL Viewer, local textures were to come to the SL Viewer, and libraries used to compile viewers were to be updated.

Andrew Linden first explained how Havok would be used to render the Navmesh for pathfinding. See: PathFinding Update Week 14. A planned pathfinding user group was announced this month. The first meeting was actually the 19^th. See #SL Pathfinding News Wk16 for information on the first meeting.

The Adult Content User Group pretty much dies out this month.

It was this month it was discovered mesh objects start to have a problem maintaining their physics shape. The Lindens started looking for a fix.

A Project Runway viewer was released to help figure out why avatar bake fail happens.

ATI rendering problems with texture compression on were encountered. Eventually a new texture compression feature is added to the viewer.

Work starts on improving the viewer’s memory management. This grows into a nightmare project that plugs the viewer development pipeline late in the year. Microsoft’s Windows code for Skydrive adds to the problem.

The script function llGetAgentList() was rolled out to the RC channels. As does HTTP_BODY_MAXLENGTH.

A bug that causes the first click on a prim to fail to trigger a touch event appears.

Strawberry Singh’s art was first used on the Second Life sign up pages as was art by other resident artists like; Harlow Heslop, Miaa Rebane, Ivoni Miles, and siXX Yangtz.. It was a big improvement. See: Second Life Interesting. The use of resident made art continues through the year.

The Lindens plan to change Flight Height. They begin testing to see what, if anything breaks. It takes a few weeks for this to finally roll to the main channel. Nothing breaks.

The region configuration process changed this month. It was no longer necessary to restart a region to make many configuration changes.

The first region rebalancing was completed and Caoyot Linden reports that region crashes decreased by 50%.

Inventory problems continue on the ADITI grid.

In mid April the Lab announces SL9B… This was the first year in a long time in which the Lab would not be participating and planned to leave the celebration up to residents. There was lots of drama, but the residents put on an awesome party.

The scripting flywheel effect was countered by the Lab to remove an ability to hog scripting time.

Havok licensing issues start to come up this month.

This month it was announced Direct Delivery’s ANS (Automatic Notification System) will be put online. Eventually it mostly works.

This month Oz Linden confirmed the Lab was looking at the SL avatar and figuring out how to improve it. While lots of looking and thinking will go on, the work on it remains rather nebulous through the rest of the year. It will be December 2012 before Oz Linden would say a new Linden will be using new ‘perspectives’ to look at improving the avatar in the first part of 2013.

We get more news on the Mesh Deformer this month as Karl starts to participate in the Metareality podcasts. See my summary here: #SL Mesh Deformer Project Update Wk16. Another iteration of the Deformer was released in late April. This month we heard about the possibility of a variable base shape for the Deformer for the first time.

Around the end of the month Second Life was scheduled to be off line for a several hours.

Land Impact costs changed to benefit users as Streaming Costs were capped.