May – 43 Articles

I finally figure out the ‘No Room to Sit’ riddle. See: No Room to Sit.

A hollow leaves the inner cube ‘outside.’

The first week of May Andrew Linden announced they felt the Pathfinding project was feature complete and nearing release.

A new Mesh Deformer Project viewer was released by the Lab in the first week and another later in the month. This month sees the first rumblings of the Mesh Deformer being delayed and dropped in priority because of a lack of test clothes. That shortage continues through the rest of 2012. See: #SL Mesh Defomer at Risk. However, some test clothes did appear and were placed in Hippo Hollow for all to use. As the Deformer advanced these test clothes would become obsolete. The failure to remove them once outdated caused some confusion. This is also the month that we heard about Alternate Avatar Base Shapes being added to the Mesh Deformer. See: Mesh Deformer Update from MetaReality. This news lead into a debate among SL users as to which is the best way to proceed. See: The Great #SL Deformer Debate.

Skydrive and similar software was found to be the cause of a number of viewer crashes. It triggers some type of memory clash.

A bug popped up where small objects go invisible.

Several SL offline periods were scheduled this month. The Lindens were updating the Operating Systems of all the servers. I suspect the backend server updates were the reason for closing SL.

We saw a bug that was causing adjacent regions to disappear, become invisible. This problem is still occurring in December 2012.

This month we heard about a cleanup of the SL asset database. After an 85% reduction the database was to only 192 terabytes.

We had a bug that shows up this month that caused the avatar to try and wear everything in inventory. The cause was figured out. I’m not sure it has been fixed yet. But, there is a fix one can do when it happens. See: Second Life Wearing All Inventory.

The new Local Textures feature came out in the Linden viewer, Beta version I think.

In Pathfinding the problem of static obstacles with doors was run into. This was also the month that #SL Pathfinding Update Week 20 came out with the Pathfinding lag drama. I’m not sure we have ever gotten over that.

Region Idling was announced and rolled out to RC channels this month. See: #SL Region Idling. The Lindens talked more about it throughout the month. A FAQ page on Idling was added to the SL Wiki. Various concerns discussed were covered in my article: #SL News Update Week 20.

At mid month more load balancing was done. The process that restarts regions and decides which server to load them into (Region Conductor) was changed to avoid placing busy regions in the same server. Oskar Linden said it was making a big difference in performance stats.

This month I got hooked on Penny Patton’s idea for a better-looking Second Life. See: #SL Crusade for Good Looks.

Penny Patton’s Proportioned Shapes

It was this month that VWR-28416 was determined to be the reason for bumpy mesh roads. See: Second Life’s Bumpy Roads.

This was the month that Laurence Simon begin posting the hilarious series of Angle of Death videos about SL9B. See: SL9B.

Multi-Threaded region Crossing Phase I made it back to the RC channels this month and was expected to roll to the main channel.

I finally found out why people disagree in the face of overwhelming evidence. See: The Reason Why.

An Avatar Baking Change appeared this month. I think we could have labeled it a proof of concept. The standard avatars in the library began using ‘pre-baked’ appearances in preparation for a Bake Fail fix. See: #SL News Week 22.

Experience Tools using Experience Permissions rolled out to the Magnum RC channel. This lead to Griefer Monday. Oops.

Now we know the tools that eventually rolled out as the Advanced Creator Tools. We consider permissions as either standard permissions or the coming Experience Permissions, which have been rewrite since Griefer Monday.