Second Life News Week 17 TPD

The Third Party Developers met last Friday. This is the first of those meetings to run a full hour in some weeks. So, we have new information on several subjects. Some of that information I published on Saturday and Sunday as smaller posts rather than one gigantic post. This article will be the smaller bits of news from the meeting. But, it still went over a thousand words.

Balloons

Balloons by Vitos Davi, on Flickr

Oz Linden announced the next TPD Meeting is next Friday May 1. This is one week away, out of the normal pattern. He will be gone the following weekend and is pushing that weekend’s meeting up one week.

CEF Update

Oz updated us on the status of the project to change from Webkit to Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF). They have brought in help specializing in CEF. On the Windows side they are making good progress. While not as fast, they are advancing on the Mac side.

They have done a little on Linux. Which brought Oz to… Second Life Losing the Linux Viewer? It looks like little if anything will be done with the Linux version of the viewer. I am guessing the Linden Linux viwer will soon be completely obsolete.

BUG-8944

BUG-8944[Project BigBird] Unworn attachments sometimes show in COF and display as “Error: object is in current outfit but not attached”.

There is a new bug: Invalid COF links… There is no good user side fix or work-around that I know of. For now leave the bad link in place. The servers are being changed so the system can clean it up the bad links on your next log in.

I’m not clear on whether this feature is in place now or soon will be. Either way, the solution is to leave things alone and wait for the system to correct the problem. I haven’t seen the problem, I’m not using Big Bird, so I don’t know how hard or annoying it will be to wait.

Another Bug

When adding lots of outfit changes there is a server side issue. I’m not sure exactly what the problem is. Listen to it being discussed was confusing. But, it does not seem to be a simple outfit change that causes the problem. I think this is quickly adding and removing things to you appearance pre-outfit creation.

I think this is restricted to those using the Big Bird RC Viewer.

Whatever it is, the Lab is tracking that problem down.

Another Bug

Izzy Linden tells us ban lists and access lists are causing TP problems too. The Lab is not yet looking at the problem but it is on their list. I assume this only affects the owners of groups with large ban lists…

Currently Ban List size is limited to 500. That limit is on the Linden list to look at.

Those using the ban lists are finding that one person can force them add a lot of avatars to the list, alternates. At the least, the list does force them to use different alternates. It doesn’t stop them but it does make it a bit harder.

The real problem is one or two bad guys quickly fill up the ban list. So, good list management tools will be needed. May be building in a date for dropping the banned avatar out of the list.

While I would love to see avatars that consistently get added to ban lists banned from SL automatically, any automatic process can be abused to grief legitimate users. 

4 thoughts on “Second Life News Week 17 TPD

  1. Looks like I am finally forced out of SL after 8 years of being a resident. I won’t switch from my secure and easy to use Linux to an insecure and buggy Windows that is in bed with the NSA. Oz says there is an extremly low number of Linux users in SL. Strange I know so many, about 20% of my friends in here use it and they are all very heavy users and content creators. I am glad High Fidelity provides a Linux flavour.

    • Linux user do tend to cluster to together. So, I’m not surprised you know several Linux users. But, is that 20% of the people you know put the count into 3 digits? That is a small number.

      You don’t have to give up using Linux based viewers. You likely just won’t want to use a Linden built one.

  2. I have been in SL from 2006 just recently lost interest because not much changed. The population is decreasing and all places look basically the same like they did few years ago. Mesh was the last greater improvement but also brought problems concerning lag and viewers and has to my experience messed up clothing. Stuff like alpha layers to fix poke-through make it complicated, it doesn’t always go well with sculpt- or prim-attachments and so on.

    However being that long active in SL makes me looking forward for a complete next generation platform and I think that is the right thing to do for Lindens. I also hope that they solve a lot of problems that are buried deep in SL code and learn from their (plenty) mistakes in the past.

    I just miss news about the development. It’s hard to find anything and you find nothing when you are not explicitly looking for it. Lindens should use the opportunity and make people hot for improvements in NGP to gather new interest in SL as a whole. Lindens could tease people so much with this but the tech news are clueless about SL and most younger people probably have never heard about it at all.

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