Second Life News 2014-27 #2

Servers

There were mostly no roll outs this week. None on the main channel or Blue Steal and Le Tigre RC channels. But, the Magnum RC channel did get a roll.

Summerfest '14

Summerfest ’14

Next week the Blue Steal and Le Tigre package will roll to the main channel as they have not reported any problems. The Lindens chose not to roll that package this week to give users more time to test the new LSL functions for Materials. So, once this rolls we will have the LSL for Materials on all channels. 

The Experience Tools features in Magnum will get the LSL update and continue to run. The JIRA bug BUG-6438  – Objects attached via llAttachToAvatarTemp to object owner detach when script is removed from prim inventory.”

There is a new maintenance release coming. Maestro says it is just bug fixes. One has something to do with the Interest List He got detailed by discussion of the Experience Tools.

Viewers

No news.

Materials LSL Functions

Maestro Linden tells us about some of the sever side of the new functions saying, “It’s [Mat-LSL Func] throttled via the normal script time throttles. There’s no special X/minute throttle.

Also there’s a throttle for accessing the materials list by viewers. So, even when your viewer knows that an object got material X via the update, it may have to access the RenderMaterials capability to look up the render parameters and that capability access is throttled (the viewer knows to request at a rate below the throttle so that it doesn’t’ hit failures).

You can see the delay if you login with 2 avatars, add a normal map to a prim, then have one avatar hold down the spinner to continuously rotate the normal map.  The other avatar will only see it update once a second or so.”

When asked if having ALM enabled or disabled makes a difference Maestro sais, “I believe a viewer with ALM disabled would still do the lookup to see if the non-ALM materials parameters have been updated, which would be things such as alpha mode.”

LOD Values

Merchants selling mesh are recommending setting RenderVolumeLOD to high values. But, this burns up memory and causes more ‘out of memory’ crashes. Firestorm people are seeing people with values set to 10 and 20. Once they come to FS Support and are told to turn the value down, the crashes stop.

Low values for RenderVolumeLOD (1) improve performance but with poorly made mesh and especially sculpties degrade the visual experience. A value of 2 is just over the default value. With good hardware a value of 3 or 4 can work. But the higher you go, the more likely you are to crash.

Experience Tools

There is a planned discussion of the tools at the Server-Scripting-Content UG meeting Tuesday July 8 at noon in Denby. See the office hours for a SLURL.

While the Lab has announced the tools the Wiki page has not popped up yet. So, we don’t have much in the way of details. It was discussed by Oz at the last third party viewers developers’ meeting. But, the Ebbe news on the new world over shadowed it.

The Lab did officially announce the Beta testing for Experience Tools/Keys. Torley made a video. To be part of the Beta send an email to slexp_beta@lindenlab.com. That address was bouncing. But, it was fixed Thursday afternoon.

Maestro Linden tells us, “Okay, it looks like there will be a real Q&A session for experience keys at Simon’s next office hour.” (Tuesday, 12:00 noon PDT  @ Denby, Agni) I think there will be some of the Experience Tools/Keys team there to talk to the users. I don’t see it on the UG’s agenda yet.

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