Second Life News 2013-8 #3

The rollouts to the Main and RC’s should happen today and tomorrow as I reported yesterday. Simon Linden expects the maintenance package on Magnum to be promoted next week. But, that is a ways off. However, rollouts will return to the normal schedule next week.

Grey Goo - Tasty Planet Game

Grey Goo – Tasty Planet Game – Read On

Maestro Linden changed the forum Deploys post to say a bug was found in the prim rez code running on Le Tigre. Also the Blue Steel performance improvements package ran into problems. Both will drop out of the RC channels and move back into QA. The crash mode code that ran on Le Tigre last week will roll to all the RC’s this week (8). 

Other Problems

There is a bug where the region you are leaving appears in front of you in the region you are entering. Some feel that problem has gotten worse. It is reported as happening in both RC and Main channels.

VWR-6713

VWR-6713Allow Alpha Channel of Textures to be used as a 1-bit Mask (Alpha Masking). This report is a feature request. Uchi Desmoulins describes it as: Ever notice that the Linden trees have no trouble with alpha sorting? It’s because the alpha channel in those textures are being treated in a 1-bit format. The z-buffer is able to utilize them. So parts of the texture are either 100% opaque, or 100% clear. (Semi-transparency is not an option.) The Second Life client has the ability to do this already built into it. There’s so much potential there, but we have no way of tapping into it!

Link Sets

An annoying Interest List bug is root prims don’t show their child prims until you come close to the root prim. When they do appear the disappear and must re-rez when you look away.

Simon tells there is a fix in a ‘second round’ of Interest List changes and tweaks to fix this problem.

Region Crossings

Something has degraded region crossings. More people are reporting not being able to cross regions without being disconnected. Some have the problem whether walking across or teleporting.

I have a low script weight and have been crossing numerous regions without a problem. I don’t know that low or high script weight is a key factor, but…

Adjacent Regions Not Rezzing

It’s been reported and I have noticed that regions diagonal from the region I am in are not rezzing. I noticed this in a number of Le Tigre regions yesterday. When I would enter the region North, South, East, or West of the region I was in the diagonal region would not rez until I turned to face it.

Simon says there is a fix in the pipeline for this problem.

SVC-7684

SVC-7684Sim crossing messes up camera every time when crossing over into certain homesteads on a vehicle. There is a OGG type video of the problem here.

This problem has been fixed on individual regions. It is unclear what is causing the problem or how to fix it. For now, if you see this problem, file a JIRA and trouble ticket that refer to SVC-7684. Also, mention that it has been reported that the problem will migrate to a new region when the problem region is fixed. That leaves the region seemingly immune to the problem.

The Lindens have seen this problem but they are having a hard time reproducing it. That means it is nearly impossible to fix.

SCR-154

SCR-154 – llRezObjectFast() and llRezAtRootFast(), rezzing functions with zero delay. Is another feature request that came up in the Server and Scripting meeting. The request is made because the delays in these functions are said to degrade region performance. The other side of it is the griefer problem known as gray goo.

Simon explained the term ‘grey goo’ as coming from the sci-fi/nanotechnology world. See: Grey Goo in the Wikipedia for more information on the origin of the term. Or… just think Stargate’s Replicators.

Also see Tasty Planet (US$20 – 60 minute free demo) at Dingo Games. Eat the world.

First Level of Tasty Planet

First Level of Tasty Planet

Kelly Linden explained that the anti-griefing limits built into Second Life™ are generally referred to as the Grey Goo Fence, which is a lot of interdependent heuristics. There is no easy way to change them… or it may be more accurate to say balancing the heuristics is complex and time consuming.

The idea in blocking grey goo is to stop scripted objects from rezzing objects that rez more objects that rez more… and so on. When such objects change to physical it is not hard to overload a region’s server with physics calculations.

Materials Project

While the server side code has rolled out, there is still no public project viewer.

Mesh Deformer

For now this project appears to be on hold waiting for Lindens to move on it.

Avatar Baking

This project remains in QA on the Beta grid.

2 thoughts on “Second Life News 2013-8 #3

  1. Howdy Nalates,
    I have been looking closely at your articles for a time. Besides i find your blog very interesting and updated, lately i have been following with special interest with the hope of find information about a extremely annoying bug i have been experiencing for some weeks.

    I experience a sudden and extreme FPS drop in certain circumstances, and i suspect it’s related somehow with mesh items, and mesh clothes in rare occasions. Although it may be related with my hardware, i am pretty sure is not because its obsolete. My machine is 1 year old, and i invested a considerable amount of money on it having games on my mind, and SL in particular. One of the reason i am commenting this to you, is because i think we have the same GPU… and because this problem may be related with Nvidia GPUs.

    I think this way because after a bit of investigation i have found that some friends using more or less new Nvidia cards are having this same problems with the same mesh objects i do. Others friend using ATI GPUs are not. This is not a thorough test involving tens of people.. not near at all. It’s just something i have noticed, it may be related or not.

    But the fact is that i lag as hell when i have certain mesh items on my screen, normally i can run SL on 30-80 FPS on ultra on beta viewer, when experience the problem, it drops to 2-7 FPS. Sometimes i find the exact source of the lag, sometimes not. Unluckily one of the clear source is a mesh car i purchased not too long ago.. one of the highest investment i have make so far. Also i have troubles with a mesh house i am building. Well, i think the house is not the problem, i works good when i rezz standalone on a empty sandbox, but it dont work good on my parcel and surrounded with mesh furniture, i have yet to find witch one is… but it can be not that easy.. because i am not sure what’s the exact reason of the problem or combinations of problems.

    I know it sounds like the problem is caused by an high complexity of the objects, meaning they have high rendering cost. It can be, but i have found i do not lag with other items with higher LI. I suspect it have more to do with hardware because of the reason i pointed above.

    I would appreciate if you could provide me some experiences/information about this bug in case you heard about it, or you suffering by yourself. In case you have not, would be great if you could take a look to the car, and my house, and see if you experience the same problems i do. That would be a great help, because i a planning to make a video showing the problem and file a JIRA. I need to record as much information i can, and i have absolutely no idea where to start :C.

    Also if anybody reading this knows what i am talking about is welcome to IM me or comment, any help is very appreciated.. because you all know when lag kicks this bad SL is completely unusable and frustrating.

    Have a good day Nal.

    • Thanks for the kind words.

      IM me the location of the car in-world. A note card may be better. I tend to cap out on IM’s.

      You can try visiting Mayfair, an all mesh region with the Mon Tissu store, which sells nice mesh clothes.

      I’ve heard many people saying mesh was slowing them down. Unless it was a mesh object with a ridiculous number of polygons, I have not seen that. I am much more likely to see BUG-355 like problems. In most cases I see low FPS and rubberbanding only when the region Time Dilation, Physics FPS, and Network Time going nuts.

      Also, LI is not a good measure of object complexity. Several things in how objects are built can through that off. The Render COmplexity feature has been broken for a time. But, one can attempt to edit an object and look at the Details to see the render complexity.

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