Bits and Pieces of Second Life

Crash Report? - Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr

Crash Report? – Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr

Bliss Couture is having a closing sale. Most things are 90% off. That was a costly shopping trip.

The Second Life™ Wiki’s information on building vehicles has been updated a bit. See Linden Vehicle Tutorial and VEHICLE_BANKING_EFFICIENCY.

It is the first of the month so FaMESHed is having their monthly event. Teleport to FaMESHed.

View Candidates

The Google Breakpad RC Viewer is back. The Lab has found that most of the problems they had with Breakpad were caused by Windows XP. The Lab will take a new tactic with XP. But Breakpad is going to be in use for Win7, 8, and Mac… I think Linux too, but I am not clear on that. 

Immediately the question comes up, will the Lab ban XP? Oz Linden says no. If he were running things he would be strongly telling people it is time to get off XP. With only weeks left in the life of XP, it is certainly time. I’m moving clients and friends off it now.

Many machines running XP can run Windows 7 64-bit. With some patience you can get fully legal, new Win7 Pro packages for US$70 or $90 on eBay. The time to buy is now before we see a major rush and escalation in prices.

If you are hearing rumors of Microsoft giving away their operating system for free, that is not happening. But, I have seen some well reasoned speculation on why that is likely to happen in not too distant the future. But, it certainly won’t be soon enough to save XP users.

Oz Linden is working on a stats report to show which operating systems have what crash rates. All the developers know XP is a problem. But, we need good objective numbers if we want to show how bad it is in comparisons.

Also, while adding Breakpad code to third party viewers is not likely to be mandatory, it is going to be STRONGLY encouraged. Once TPV’s adopt the code, we will likely see a big jump in crash rates for all viewers.

It is not clear to me how crash rates between the SL viewer and third party viewers will be compared once the Lab takes the Breakpad code to the main viewer. We would then be comparing a small window for crash reports (TPV’s) to a large window for crash reports (LL).

The small/large window thing is like saying we only will measure max concurrent logins from 9AM to 10AM (small window) rather than all day (large window). It makes a big difference in the numbers seen.

Sunshine, Merchant Outbox, and Zipper RC Viewers are getting updates. We’ll have new RC versions of those ‘any minute.’ That ‘any minute’ was as of Friday.

An Oculus Rift viewer is making its way through QA.

AISv3 is enabled on Magnum regions.

A new version of Vivox SDK 4.6.9.? was received by the Lab. Oz has made that available in a Linden code repository for third party developers. Supposedly no viewer changes are needed to implement the new Vivox code.

This update should help people using voice on networks where they are losing packets. Ed Merryman says it fixed his Max Headroom like problems.

The FS Team is saying the Vivox update will be an optional install for the coming Firestorm Viewer release. Apparently it will be a manual download and install for Firestorm in the next release. I expect a good FS Wiki page will pop up explaining how to make the install. Then FS Support people will be sending people with voice problems to it.

We should see this Vivox code make it into the SL Viewer pretty quickly, meaning I would guess 3 to 4 weeks.

3 thoughts on “Bits and Pieces of Second Life

  1. Could you clarify something for me, please?

    Am I right in thinking that the reason you predict we’ll see a large increase in the number of crashes if and when TPVs adopt the Google Breakpad code is that their users who are still on Windows XP will experience more crashes?

    Or is it that Windows 7 and Windows 8 users are likely to find the viewers more likely to crash, too?

    • I could have worded that better.

      As a user we won’t see more crashes. The new reporting will catch crashes that are not being reported by the current system. So, we will see a jump in ‘reported’ crash rates.

  2. Thanks for the clarification — I was rather nervous for a while about what LL has in store for us, and wondering what possible justification there was for introducing so apparently unstable a viewer!

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