Second Life News 2015-09

Not much development news this week. I’ve tried to fluff it up with interesting news.

Two days of decorating - II

Caitlin ‘Caity’ Tobias’ Two days of decorating – II

Servers

No update to the main server channel. 

RC

The RC channel did get an update. It is a maintenance up date that most notably fixes BUG-8297Unable to teleport anywhere using SLGO. Apparently SL Go had a work-around that came out a while back.

Whirly Fizzle says there is something about the work-around updates in SL Go that changes something with a single quote mark that was missing in a channel name? You can read the minutes if you’re having a problem with SL Go.

Yuzuru Jewell says that there is still some problem for users of SL Go in Japan with the single quote. It is not yet clear to me whether BUG-8297 fixes that.

Viewers

The word is that it will still be a time before work starts (or refocuses) on replacing Web Kit, the viewers internal web browser. From what Lindens have said I am expecting work on adding CEF to replace Web Kit to start after the Experience Tools project is complete.

CEF = Chrome Embedded Framework – See: OPEN-218.

BUG-5530

BUG-5530Objects become infected if saved after sim crossing, and can no longer cross sim line.

This often affects vehicles. But, it is a rare problem and is dependent on a variety of things to manifest. When it does, the problem usually causes items to be returned to Inventory Lost & Found when crossing a region boundary. Items going back into inventory after a region crossing catch the problem ‘infection’. Once the item is ‘infected’ with the problem it remains infected.

The cure for a corrupted item is to rez it, use Shift-Move, save the copy and delete the original. See the JIRA item for more details and discussion of the problem.

Mesh Crashers

A new griefer corrupted mesh attachment is making the rounds. They cause a fast viewer crash. You have no time to do anything before you crash. This means that once you realize what is crashing you, log into a different region.

Here is a page explaining how to auto-mute such crashers: Debug settings to make graphics crashers obsolete.

The explained fix is a change to some Debug Settings. They are good settings to use to allow you to get near a griefer and mute them. But, you probably won’t want to use these settings full time.

The settings cause lots of legitimate items to not render. Firestorm support has tracked user complains about things not rendering back to their having adopted the settings for everyday use. So, understand these settings can’t tell the difference between a legitimately complex object and a deliberately malicious complex object.

STORM-2082

STORM-2082Allow saving and loading of graphic settings and ability to control view of “blinged” avatars.

Some are hoping this will solve the griefer mesh crashers. Speculation is that it won’t. The reason for that is the viewer downloads everything and semi-processes it to get the Avatar Render Cost/Weight/Complexity value it needs to decide whether to render the object or not.

It may be that in the future this information will be returned to the server for distribution to other viewers. If that happens, this may become a solution to mesh griefers.

Simon Linden says the server already does the complexity calc, but the viewer is buggy using the result. Also, the server does not consider all that the viewer does.

Having the server calc complexity just moves the griefing vector from the viewer to the server. So, a better solution is in the works.

Main Viewer

The current main viewer as I write this is 3.7.25-299021. This version contains a set of maintenance fixes. The release notes are here.

RC & Project Viewers

Noting surprising here. An update or two. We may see one of the RC’s make it to main viewer status next week.

  • RC Experience Viewer version 3.8.0.298001
  • RC Login Viewer version 3.7.25.298971
  • Project Hover Height Viewer version 3.7.25.298129
  • Project Importer Viewer version 3.7.25.298441
  • Project Managed Marketplace Viewer version 3.7.25.298865
  • Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296

 Summary

The pace of releases seems slower. But, without doing some investigation and running some numbers it is hard to say. We know that there has been some ‘apparent’ slow down due to people working on the Build Tools. As that work winds down other development work will pick up.

It may just be the Lindens are talking less about what is coming. I cannot tell if this is an Oz Linden tactic or an Ebbe Linden directive. Whichever it is, we seem to have less development news leaking out.

On the other hand, in many ways the Lab is being much more open than in the past. The Lindens meet with users every week. They make more SL Blog announcements.

Yet, I feel there is less Second Life and Linden news. There just doesn’t seem to be much technical meat right now. When did anyone last see Kelly Linden? I suspect he, like many other Lindens, is doing exciting things for SL2. Of course, that is happening away from users in a NDA closed environment.

The Third Party Developers’ (TPD) meetings are one of the better sources of news. The meetings are definitely a status update. In them we also learn how TPD’s are coordinating with the Lab. That means we get idea of when things in progress will release.

The TPD meetings are not really for general low tech, low information (code wise) users. That it is for the high tech high info (code wise) developers makes for a more efficient technical meeting. That is a good thing.

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