ADITI

There is a bug some encounter when logging into ADITI, the preview grid.

BUG-7707 – “Login at last location” not working for any region on Aditi & other assorted weirdness with teleporting.

For now the Lindens think it has something to do with which inventory server your viewer has connected to. Simon Linden said, “…one of the back-end servers for this grid was having troubles and that’s behind some of the problems like logging into the last location.”

Until the Lindens fix it, there nothing we can do to get ‘last location’ working.

Maestro Linden advised us, “There was also an issue until yesterday [Wed 11/5] where Aditi mainland had “Allow Direct Teleport” disabled.  So you’d end up at a telehub in Ahern when trying to TP to Morris, etc.” He also advised us that the ‘troubled’ server had been fixed. I tried last location in ADITI this morning. It worked correctly. 

Group Chat

Simon Linden is working on more group chat changes. The last set to roll out to the main grid has made a significant change to how well group chat is working. Much better.

In the Beta Server UG we were load testing those new changes. At the end of the test Simon said, “I’ll dig into the logs and see what I find … this update isn’t expected to change chat performance much at all but will give us some information on places that might be improved.”

Lucia Nightfire pointed out that the opening post (OP) in group chat often fails to show. I know I have been noticing some odd chat comments. After being logged in for a time a group chat opens and the opening comment seems to be an answer to a question. The previous comment is from a secession from my last login. I had been assuming someone was just slow answering a question that popped before I logged in.

A number of people in the meeting reported encountering the bug.

There is also a problem where your chat stream may drop a comment or two when you cross or tp into a different region. Simon says it takes the system a bit to figure out you are not in a region where it has been connected to you and then find you.

Whirly Fizzle points out that if you receive an IM just as you are crossing to a different region, it often times will go to email instead of you receiving it. Simon pointed out that IM’s do not use the chat servers.

Maestro said,  “Right, the simulators update your avatar’s ‘presence’ to a central service, which is used to route IMs etc.”

When the location system starts to carry a heavy load, like during region restarts when people see the restart notice and run to a new region, things can and do go wrong.

Last Out

Another odd problem is being the last one out of a region as it restarts. Some months ago the region restart process was changed to make for faster update rollouts. The restart countdown is cut short and the region restarts when it sees the last avatar leave a region.

Since that change, the last avatar to leave a restarting region gets disconnected from Second Life™.

BUG-5034 – If an EM restarts a region and then teleports out immediately, the EM will disconnect just after teleport, seemingly only if no other avatars were on the region when it was restarted.

Script Windows

Seems there is a problem opening a script window for a second object, if you have previously opened a script window in another object. The problem was previously fixed but seems to have reappeared in the default viewer.

The Lindens think it is fixed and should disappear in the next release.

Servers

No news… we know there is no RC version running now. That means there will be nothing to rollout next Tuesday.

No word on what may get in the way of an RC next week.

Viewers

Main viewer is 3.7.19-295700 – no change since earlier in the week.

RC Viewers

Attachments Viewer version 3.7.20.296355 – This one is new and te release notes say:

This release adds some fixes to previously released changes in the way we handle joint offsets in rigged meshes. Originally, if you attached multiple meshes with joint offsets, the results were unpredictable, depending on the order in which the attachments were processed. This means that you could see yourself with different joint positions at different times, and the way you saw yourself might not match up to what others saw. With these changes, the behavior is deterministic, so wearing the same set of meshes should always produce the same joint positions, and the way you see yourself should consistently match the way others will see you. The process for removing attached meshes is also more robust, so you should be able to reliably get your old joint positions back after meshes are removed. People running un-updated viewers will continue to see the original behavior with the original bugs, but will not experience any new regressions due to these changes.

This release also fixes some issues found with adding and removing attachments after the recent AISv3 deploy, and improves the status information shown in inventory for attached objects.

Fixed items are:

• MAINT-4158 Avatar distorted when changing outfits
• MAINT-4196 “Wear” Behaves Erratically For Attachments on Same Point
• MAINT-4350 Attachments scripted to llDetachFromAvatar on region change show as “Worn on invalid attachment point” in inventory after region change on AIS3 enabled viewers only.
• MAINT-4572 Body crusher animations for quadruped avatars do not appear to load
• MAINT-4605 [LION] Avatar eyes sometimes disappear after adding or removing rigged mesh
• MAINT-4606 [LION] Avatar shape is deformed after removing some rigged meshes. Deformation is only seen by users on the Lion viewer, not default release.

Benchmark Viewer version 3.7.20.296094 – This is the viewer that ends use of a GPU Table. I expect it to be the next default viewer.

Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.20.296368 – Lots of fixes and improvements. Release notes.

Desura Sold

Linden Lab has announced the sale of Desura, their Steam like game development site. Ciaran has an article on it and the Linden announcement is here. You’ll find information about the change all over the blogosphere.

New World Notes writes: Why Linden Lab’s Selling of Desura Might Be The Smartest Thing It’s Ever Done — Wait, This Sounds Familiar.

Friday Hunt Report

Fabulously Free has their Friday Hunt Report up. See: Your Friday Hunt Report. The art work in the promotional poster is way cute.

They list a couple of dozen hunts.

Black Elk

Honour has a post up: Black Elk & The Photohunt @ LEA in Second Life.

VR & Altberg

See: Five Questions About VR Beyond Gaming with Three People Making It Happen. One of those people is Ebbe Altberg.

Snow

I was talking to a person about the snow in South Carolina. Their comment was along the line of; no, it would have been in the news. I keep hoping people will begin to see how biased main stream media is. Much of the news is never broadcast, especially if it runs counter to liberal agenda. But, it can be found online.

Nov 3, 2014 via CNN: Snow slams Maine as South Carolina has earliest recorded snowfall. That is the earliest snow since we have kept good records, 1886.