August – 55 Articles

In August a failure in the wiki forced a restore from backups. Lots of article editing was lost.

In CCIIUG discussion on a better build panel starts. It would probably have been more interesting if people had known it was related to the coming Materials System, which was still a secret project. A case of really bad timing and trying to have the horse push a cart. But a couple of weeks later the Materials System is announced and the real revisions needed begin to be discussed. Later in the month we started to get more information on how the Materials System would work. I thank many realized what a huge push this new feature would be on old viewers.

More questions were answered about the Materials System in the Content-Mesh UG meeting.

Kelly Linden demonstrates HTML HUD’s.

Baker completed most of the server side fix for Large Group Editing in early August. He was looking forward to it passing QA in ADITI. He was still new. The rest of the month Baker would be debugging the code. By the third week he was redoing the process. By the end of the month he confirmed there would be no chance of backward compatibility and the UDP API for groups would be abandoned. See: #SL Group Edit Update Week 34.

The idea of editing groups to allow culling by Last Login Data was rejected as too risky.

The idea of Virtual Landmarks arrived this month.

In the first week of August I published an article on the frustrating state of Direct Delivery and the Market Place. We had been hearing about it since April 2011. People were and are still very frustrated with the Market Place and Direct Delivery.

In the second week of August Linden Lab changes the SL Viewer and effectively blocks it use on any grid other than the Lab’s Second Life. The restriction is due to the constraints of the license the Lab has with Havok.

From the Shining Project the HTTP Library is made open to Third Party Developers for testing.

The Linden people started looking at adapting the SL Viewer to Apple’s then new Mountain Lion system. By December they will be looking at adapting to Apple’s Cocoa system.

By the second week of August the Havok License was still incomplete and undecided.

The idea of using Click-to-Walk and Pathfinding was rejected. Pathfinding can appear unpredictable and that was considered unacceptable for new users.

In August we saw privately owned new orientation type regions for new users appearing.

We were getting a huge amount of misinformation on Pathfinding performance and its effect on regions in general. Some of the sources were unexpected. The ideas around ‘disabling’ Pathfinding were highly misleading. We also find out there is a minimum Land Impact cost for each Pathfinding character. The Pathfinding Tools got caught in viewer limbo due to unrelated memory leak problems in the viewer and were delayed.

A problem comes up with Traffic Counts – SVC-8099. Since it affects search results it was big drama. Andrew Linden talked about Traffic Counts in a week 32 meeting.

In the third week of August the Lab posts a page with 5 videos on What is Second Life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PLA4A56B2AB33F7723&feature=player_embedded&v=r74hkI-JcHY

Andrew explained how the camera and avatar position affect the Interest List, what you can see. I think this was before Andrew started redoing the Interest List code.

Tiberious Neruda posted a JIRA feature request regarding problems with rigged mesh and the SL Skeleton. I tried to explain it in: #SL Mesh Update Week 33 – New JIRA Feature Request.

Around mid August bandwidth use skyrocketed which created a big problem for those with capped Internet service. It took weeks to fix the problem. A fix was found about week 33 (8/20) but still had to make it through QA. By August 24^th the fix made it to the RC channels. However, a bug in permissions kept that package from rolling out as hoped.

Also around mid month the Pathfinding and Havok update has rolled to all channels. Thus the region crossing problems diminished.

LlHTTPRequest got a new option HTTP_CUSTOM_HEADER.

Baker announced that the Large Group Editing changes were not going to be backward compatible. This meant older viewers would be limited to working with groups of 10k or less.

In mid August Nala Spires published the results of testing to find what most affects viewer performance.

About August 17^th the Materials System was formally announced.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pr3AP_DADAY&feature=player_embedded

The Lab announced that SL would be available on Steam.

Osker Linden announced Phase II of the Multi-Threaded Region Crossing project had entered QA in ADITI.

Oz Linden confirmed that Second Life Viewer Plugins, for all practical purposes, are off the table.

In August some third party viewer developers start dropping support for OpenSim.

The Firestorm team opened their support island: Phoenix-Firestorm Support. This is very much a new user orientation and training island.

I wrote up my first look at the Pathfinding template scripts the Lab released. It has a great video explaining gimbal lock.

Photo Tools for Second Life started to appear in Third Party Viewers.

Andrew Linden gave us a detailed explanation of the mesh road bumps problem.

More problems with Mesh model uploading were fixed.

Another Havok update started its way through QA the end of August.

Frustration about the time it is taking to develop the Mesh Deformer surfaces.