This week’s (23) server rolls returned the packages that briefly ran last week, until Wednesday evening’s re-roll that wiped them out. Yesterday (this week’s Wednesday) those were re-deployed with the only change being the security fix was added.

The Trace 2014

Le Tigre now has the Group Ban project package. With a Group Ban Project Viewer you can try out the feature. It is not 100% and won’t be until the update is rolled to the entire grid. This means for now you can group ban people. But, there are ways around the ban and those only close once the roll is grid wide. 

LSL Materials

At the Thursday UG meeting Maestro Linden had link sets built to test the load a griefer might be able to throw on users’ viewers. These were four 256 prim link-sets scripted to change textures  on all faces and another set of 4 scripted to change materials on all faces.

Not surprisingly the better the video card the less it was affected by the objects. My GTX560 took about a 60% hit in frame rate. In general all the cards were taking  50-70% hits in frame rate. The updates being pushed through the UDP channel pretty much quadrupled for everyone. The UDP load was pretty consistent among all of us there.

One must have ALM (Advanced Lighting Model) enabled to see the materials changes. However, whether you have ALM enabled or  not, your viewer is going to be sent the update information via UDP.  Nor did having it disabled save those users from the impact of changing textures.

Changing materials placed less load on the viewer (less FPS damage ~5% less). But increased the UDP information being sent by 15±%. Oddly while the UDP volume was similar for all of us, some saw different volumes, which I think was just from what was in each person’s field of view.

Through all te tests the server performance remained steady. With and without the test objects the servers kept ~15ms of free time. So, it would appear the major share of the impact is on the viewer.

I think the verdict is the planned LSL functions will have throttles to limit how often a script can change materials.

As to how griefers may try to use the new functions, Maestro considers that a low risk possibility. After all one can turn on Show Update to Objects (Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U) to see what object is causing problems. Then it can be removed or blocked/muted.

There is, or will be, a feature request to allow us to decouple texture and materials animation. As it is now if we animate a texture it also animates the material. Having a switch to decouple that would allow for more creative uses.

Viewers

As of 6PM SLT/PDT today the main viewer has not changed. May be tomorrow.

The RC Viewers remain the same.

We do have a new Project Viewer: Snowstorm Viewer version 3.7.9.290788. The release notes show these open source items being added:

• OPEN-199 Viewer building: replace confusing STANDALONE option with USESYSTEMLIBS
• OPEN-203 Viewer building: cleanup dead hg branches
• OPEN-209 Viewer building: escape unintentional trigraph sequences
• STORM-1831 Obtain LSL syntax table from simulator so that it is always up to date
• STORM-1915 Vector math updates
• STORM-1920 Highlight values correctly when scaling prims
• STORM-1966 Block installation on old and unpatched versions of Windows
• STORM-1972 Restore particle debug display
• STORM-2007 Fix truncated names/permissions in Buy floater
• STORM-2008 “Remove from outfit” deactivates gestures in a folder when taking off items
• STORM-2009 Show all residents in allowed and banned lists after clearing the cache.
• STORM-2010 Fix AutoAcceptNewInventory for note cards, landmarks and textures
• STORM-2011 Improve loading of Group member list
• STORM-2013 Uniform scaling snap distance highlighting is incorrect
• STORM-2015 Region restart sound alerts play only locally.
• STORM-2017 Make hover text translatable for moving and scaling
• STORM-2018 Allow leaving a group while an invite is pending in order to make room
• STORM-2020 Restore RenderSpecularExponent
• STORM-2023 Restore use of UseDefaultColorPicker on Mac OSX
• STORM-68 Allow setting of default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, note cards, etc.

The LSL syntax update has been in place server side for some time. I thought it was already in a viewer. But, I guess not.

With the LSL syntax update in place your script editor will always be up to date. It will also allow us to have an updated editor when in an RC channel with new scripting functions. We will no longer have to wait for viewer updates to catch up. The viewer will update itself from the region server.

When these updates roll out to the main viewer version, the SL Viewer will no longer install on Windows XP machines that do NOT have SP3. I think the FS viewer has the same code in place now, but maybe not. They may duck the heat until AFTER the Lab releases the code in the main SL Viewer, which is sort of understandable.