Monday was Martin Luther King Jr. day in America. It is a holiday for government and numerous businesses. The Lab considers it a holiday, so the Lab was running on holiday staffing levels. This usually means Tuesday and Wednesday server rolls are skipped or pushed back a day.

This week will be different. Maestro Linden told us last week that a rollout is planned for Tuesday and an RC rollout for Wednesday. We did not have one last week, so may there is a push or they are trying something differently. Whatever, we get rolls Tuesday and Wednesday.

Rolling to the main channel:

• Scheduled 2014-01-21 for Second Life Server
• Bug Fixes
  • Fixed some crash modes
  • New Features
    • The forced delay in llLoadURL has been reduced to 0.1 seconds
    • New LSL functions for uniformly scaling linksets
      • integer llScaleByFactor(float scaling_factor)
        • Uniformly resizes the linkset by the given multiplicative scale factor (e.g. 2.0 to double the scale in all dimensions)
        • Returns TRUE if rescaling was successful or FALSE otherwise
        • This function only succeeds in non-physical objects
        • Rescaling is subject to Linkability_Rules and prim scale limits
    • float llGetMinScaleFactor()
      • Returns the minimum multiplicative scale factor which can be used by llScaleByFactor(); i.e. such that every prim in the linkset is >=1cm in scale
    • float llGetMaxScaleFactor()
      • Returns the maximum multiplicative scale factor which can be used by llScaleByFactor(); i.e. such that every prim in the linkset is <=64m and the resulting linkset meets the linkability requirements
• Preliminary support for custom default permissions on newly-created objects
  • This feature requires support from an unreleased viewer
• Preliminary support for the viewer fetching the LSL syntax rules from the simulator, for up-to-date syntax highlighting in the script editor
  • This feature requires support from an unreleased viewer

There are updates that require an updated viewer. The new LSL functions can be used whether your viewer shows syntax highlighting for these new functions or not. That they are implemented on the server is enough for them to work. I suspect we will see highlighting for these new functions only in viewers that support the last change in this list; the syntax rules download from server. I don’t expect the LSL to be manually updated in the viewer with this new process so close.

The viewer being able to download syntax rules is going to speed up the delivery of new functions.

RC Rollout

The RC channels will all get the same update. We have very little information on this update other than it has a fix for a crash mode. I generally take that to mean some griefer exploit has been fixed.

Second Life Viewers

This week the main viewer remains: 3.6 .13 – 284995.

RC Viewers

Interesting Viewer version 3.6.14.285213 – I covered this viewer last week in: Second Life Interesting Viewer 3.6.14-285213. It has changed since then. But, it could change at any time.

HTTP Viewer version 3.6.14 – 285253 – This viewer changed since I wrote about it last week. Also, last week we got a tech update on the features going into this viewer. See: Second Life’s HTTP Tech Note Explained.

Fitted Mesh Viewer version 3.7.0 – 285178 – This viewer has also changed since last week. As of last week Fitted Mesh had no outstanding issues. So, if this RC Viewer has no problems it could be promoted to be the main viewer. If that happens, Fitted Mesh will see an official rollout. It will be live and that is very good thing.

If you’re using Avastar, know the current test version is: avastar-1-1-951 avastar-1-1-951_blender-2-65.

New Search Engine

Peep up dis freshly smoked up search engine: Gizoogle. Do a search n’ read closely. Da thangs up in dis biatch is from Gizoogle yo, but they done been translated ta gangsta. Peep up mah Snoop Bloggy-Blogg up in gongsta: Da Shiznit.