Tuesday things were borked. I got into Second Life™ and then could not teleport to Denby for the User Group meeting. My LM did not work. I tried to open the world map to teleport to a neighboring region. The map would not show Denby, the region with the Server-Scripting meeting. I tried the Destination Guide on the web site to get neighboring region names. It too could not find Denby.

Content-Mesh Meeting 2013-3

I tried relogging. But then, I could not log back in. Grid Status finally popped up that there was a problem.  Really!?! And I gave up trying to login. Later in the day SL was working and I could login.

When this sort of thing happens I always see lots of people in the forum asking what is wrong with their computer and telling how they have re-installed their viewer, cleared cache, updated drivers, and are wondering what’s wrong with their system that they can’t login. I generally suggest they read Troubleshoot Your #SL Connection to figure out whether it is the Lab, their ISP, or their system before doing anything to their viewer install.

Whatever the case, the Lab is still having network issues today, Wednesday. Maestro Linden posted this morning that the RC rollouts would be postponed until Thursday.

No Roll

There was no rollout to the main channel this week. One was not even planned. There were problems with the packages running on the RC channels last week. So, no package ready to roll forward.

RC’s

Blue Steel and Le Tigre are getting a release that has the Interest List improvements that Andrew Linden has been working on. They were held back last week because of bugs found in beta testing on ADITI.

The release notes make the update sound really great. I am looking forward to trying it out. It should reduce lag in regions with lots of avatars. There are various reasons for the improvement. Mostly less data should be sent to users.

Another change is how wind is handled. Wind should be more stable and change less often. Andrew was not sure but doubted this would improve ‘wind’ for sailing purposes.

This update also removes the last of the legacy data used by the old particle clouds. So, those clouds are supposedly gone from old viewers now. Newer viewers don’t use particle clouds.

Object rezing should work better. So, when you are inside a building you should see it and the things inside rez ahead of distant objects. In fact distant objects should not download and rez until you go outside. This should make for much faster rezzing.

Also, stores designed to improve rez times by using short lines of sight should perform better.

The camera behavior is going to change. When Alt-Clicking to navigate the camera, you should have a better experience. It is however going to be a bit different. Where all rez draw distance was measured from the avatar, now it will be measured from the camera but with a cap measured from the avatar… I think I have that right.

Large distant objects should have better rez behavior.

When we remove/de-rez objects during building there can be problems where the object ‘apparently’ remains. This update should reduce those problems by sending better ‘kill packets’ to remove the object from the viewer’s render pipeline.

PATHBUG-183 – Physical swimming dolphin ghosts flying off out of the sim since Pathfinding deployed. This problem should be reduced, but probably not completely fixed.

Magnum is getting a package with fixes. One of which is support for the Neck and Center attachment points. While those have worked there have been problems. The server side support fell through the cracks. That is being corrected with this update. The problem was mostly a scripting issue. When one tried to attach via script to either neck or center and error would pop.

Abandoned Land will now behave as described in the Knowledge Base. It seems the land was bypassing some of the procedure and becoming immediately available for sale.

We also get more effective estate/parcel bans.

Summary

We will hear more Thursday at the Server Beta meeting.

There is a thread about the network problems, titled: What’s going on with the servers today? Don’t expect to find any solid information there. Also, note the number of posts a name has. It seems the more angry and least informed comments are the avatars 1st or 2nd post. But, the thread has a good profile of the problems encountered.