June – 54 Articles

A Pathfinding Release Candidate channel was created in the main grid and regions were moved to it. Falcon and Lorca Linden provided information on the transition to PF and calmed some of the concerns people had. The need to ‘unfreeze’ the Navmesh before being able to build was removed. llGetStaticPath() was mostly working but undocumented this month. By late June all sandboxes in the main channel were running the Pathfinding code.

We saw some of the first awesome Pathfinding characters this month. Plus the Lab promised to release Pathfinding script templates.

The Multi-Thread Region Crossing code for Phase I finally made it through RC testing and rolled to the main channel.

Huseby Linden talks about Experience Tools in the Magnum RC channel. See: #SL News Week 22.

Merov Linden found a problem with asymmetric textures, much wider than tall, which failed to completely rez until zoomed in on. Merov had a fix that would be rolling out in the next weeks.

June 4^th is Griefer Monday. It is caused by a fail in the Experience Tools permissions. This apparently was an unforeseen weakness in the basic design. The Tools were removed from the grid in an emergency roll back and the project put into a rewrite. As yet, Experience PERMISSIONS have not reappeared on the grid. That indicates a serious rethink and I suspect rewriting of many parts of the SL system. Also see: Griefer Monday Postmortem. Oskar talked about what happens within the Lab when a project fails.

Discussion about Mesh Clothes fitting or not and what needs to be done continued. See my Poll in: Do #SL Mesh Clothes Fit.

We saw Slee Mayo’s fun new educational toy. It uses the LSL functions for HTTP data queries to make a live near real time map of RL earthquakes in SL.

For those wondering why the Mesh Deformer testing is taking so long, a good article to read is: SL News Week 23. I discussed Deformer testing problems with Oz Linden. Karl S. talked about coming changes to the Deformer at SL9B. See: Mesh Deformer Update Week 25.

This month we hear about an alternative to the Mesh Deformer. It was and is not ideal, but it works now. See: #SL Mesh Deformer Alternative. We have recently seen this solution appear as Liquid Mesh.

ADITI grid problems continued. See: SVC-7727.

It is this month that the Lab changed emphasis. It shifted from new features to fixing and improving existing features.

I started seeing Mesh Warning/Fail icons in world for the first time this month. See: #SL Pyramid Warning Symbols.

Andrew Linden talked some more about a syntax service for the viewer’s scripting editor. This would allow the editor to pull it’s syntax files from the region server and thus always be up to date. I’m still not sure where this project is.

We also found out that the script size limit, the text size limit, was 65k. Kelly Linden explained the viewer side limit is the restriction, the limit is set in a viewer file: panel_script_ed.xml. See #SL Scripting Update Week 24 for more information.

SVC-4444 was filed in regard to objects becoming full permissions if rezzed in certain ways.

Discussion started on llMatchGroup() and SCR-79 – Checks If An Object Or Agent Is Active In A Specified Group. We still hear this function asked about. But, for privacy reasons it is not going to happen. See: Update on SCR-79.

The new virtual world Cloud Party entered the awareness of many SL users this month. See: Cloud Party vs Second Life.

The Lab was rolling out a fix for the problem of not being able to rez things on your own property this month. A quick fix was to have the camera look as straight down as possible when attempting a rez. The problem was a selection issue.

Auto-replace and Spell Check show up in the Beta Viewer.

Baker Linden, a 2012 hire, starts working on Large Groups Editing and Opening problems.

A new roll out process is adopted for server updates. Initially the process is slower but over time it improves. The process allows the OS and simulator software to be updated at the same time.

The end of June we got hit with a Havok update rolled into the RC channel that created region crossing problems. We learned that regions with mismatched versions of Havok were always going to have this problem. Eventually regions in RC’s were rearranged to minimize this problem.

The pre-baked textures for Library avatars made it to a main grid RC channel.

The Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group (CCIIUG) is formed the end of June. See: Group’s home page. The group proves to be a bit irregular about whether it meets.

The last day of June the Lab announced Project Shining. See: Second Life Changes Coming.