Second Life News 2013-12

This week a new package rolled to the main channel from the Magnum RC channel. As of noon today the crash or scream rate was low enough the Lindens were happy. That doesn’t mean everyone is happy. We still have major crossing problems with mesh vehicles.

This was too funny not to use.

This was too funny not to use.

While we just got a fix for the BUG-1814 – Fix for ‘No object updates from vehicles after some region crossings’ the problem of vehicles crossing is not resolved. This fix is for the case where a vehicle appears to get stuck at the crossing. The fix for vehicles failing to cross, or at least the camera failing, is supposed to be in the RC release to roll out to Magnum tomorrow, Wednesday.

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will continue to run the same package, but updated with Magnum’s code and some more fixes. The changes are: crash mode fixes, estate managers exempt from TP disable, and neighboring region visibility delay fix.

There are more Interest List changes and fixes being tested on ADITI, the preview grid. Andrew Linden was going to get some more regions setup in ADITI for testing the changes. But, that hasn’t happened yet. There are some regions running code from somewhere in the Interest List pipeline.

Pre-Loading Mesh

To help with the mesh-vehicle-crossing problem it has been suggested and the Lab has looked at pre-loading mesh objects that may cross into an adjacent region. Much of the crossing problem has to do with the time it takes to move data, especially mesh data, to another server. So, pre-caching could solve the timing problem.

However, there is a problem. The amount of work that would need to be done for items that MIGHT cross but never do would be so much more it would result in a net loss of performance.

Group Ban Lists

Baker Linden is working on Group Ban Lists. Currently this feature is in the planning stage. So, it could die. The Lindens normally never talk about things in the planning stage. But, Baker is new. I suspect the conversation sort of got away from Simon. So, we got to hear about it.

Whatever the case, the Lindens are thinking about it. I believe we will see some form of it.

Several people were interested in how big a list would be allowed. It may be the same size as the parcel ban list or may be 500.

Someone brought up the possibility of allowing their group ban list to be exported for others to import to their groups. That is unlikely to happen.

Rex Cronon voiced the idea of having each ban added to the avatar’s data. When the number of bans reaches some number the system will lock the avatar out of SL for a day per week. While I sort of like the idea it can be gamed too easily. Griefers would form groups just for banning people. So, I doubt we are going to see anything like this.

Baker is considering whether a ‘reason banned’ drop down would be feasible. That would help people manage the list. Managers could note if the banned person were just annoying, a pain, or a massive asshat. Then clean out the lesser problems to make room for bigger problem people.

There is also an idea that bans could be for some period of time after which they would drop out of the list. That seems to be overly complex for the initial pass at the feature. Baker was hesitant to say it could be done. I take that to mean there are some technical complications that make it awkward to do.

Then there is also the matter of getting SL banned for life avatars out of the list.

Exactly how this is going to look is not decided. But, Baker is going to include a date banned as part of the list entry. We’ll have to wait until some more thinking is complete before we know how the feature will actually look. But, the user case for having the feature is strong. And being able to sort by date is always handy.

Once it is in place scripting functions to manipulate the list will likely follow.

BUG-1940

BUG-1940 – Feature Request: It should be possible to prevent particles crossing parcel borders in the same way that one can disable Object Entry or Build. This came up. Several people at the meeting thought it a good idea and something that could reduce griefing.

It would have to be a viewer side task, as all particle stuff is done by the client. The server only sends out the object parameters, which the viewer uses to make the particles.

Simon says they have some particle griefing fixes in the pipeline. It will be interesting to see what they do with that. I know we have griefer stop now that cuts of particles when the frame rates drops below 4 FPS.

I have been annoyed by somebody’s poorly spec’d particles drifting through my house.

Zero Script AO

Last week I mentioned a comment made by Maestro Linden about Kelly Linden having a no-script AO. Today I got a bit of a confirmation from Simon Linden: “lol Nal, you have good sources … but I’ll save spilling the beans for later.” So, while I am not sure what is going on or anything about such an AO, it does seem there is something up.

I would guess that if things go well for Kelly, we will hear something this week.

3 thoughts on “Second Life News 2013-12

  1. Pingback: Cajsa Fast Five: March 20th | Its Only Fashion

  2. The upcoming zero-script AO is probably inspired from this message I posted a while ago in reply to a request from Oz: https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2012-April/008850.html

    Oz later wrote me LL “had some very interesting internal discussions based on that thread” and that he was “optimistic that we’ll have some good stuff to share about it soon”. Of course, LL’s “soon” meaning is not the one most would expect (this was back in April 2012, i.e. almost one year ago), but it’s good to see that the project is making some progress.

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