In Friday’s (6/19) Third Party Developers’ meeting at the 15:00 mark of the video discussion about changes to the SL Damage System starts. The changes were made by Grumpity Linden. She is off on maternity leave with her new baby. So current discussion is sort of one sides as Oz Linden is just in listen and learn mode until Grumpity returns.

The Imperial Retreat by Canary Beck, on Flickr

The complaints about the change are people mostly considering the result is a bug ridden. Ser  JIRA BUG-9422  – List of problems with the new parcel damage behavior for discussion at the next TPV meeting. 

Notice that the Lab is apparently asking that Firestorm Dev Team to duplicate the SL Viewers handling of Damage. They are objecting saying the SL Viewer is broken in how it handles Damage. So, what’s not working right? Why are BUG reports stating certain behaviors considered by users to be a problem/bug getting marked ‘intended behavior’? There is some confusion somewhere, which usually means someone is not completely informed or someone is running an agenda. Read the JIRA to find links to reports marked expected behavior.

The changes appear in Second Life Release 3.7.26.299845. The JIRA report I linked to used Second Life 3.7.29 (301305) for listing the problems. The changes are propagating to newer versions.

The problems:

1. Problem 1 – The LL viewer does not display the damage icon or remaining health when standing on a parcel that has “Safe” enabled on a region that has “Allow Damage” enabled even though you can receive damage, lose health and die on this parcel.
2. Problem 2 – The LL viewer does not display the damage icon or remaining health when standing on a parcel that has “Safe” disabled on a region that has “Allow Damage” disabled even though you can receive damage, lose health and die on this parcel.
3. Problem 3 – LL support reported to Oz that they tested and confirmed that disabling the Safe (no damage) parcel option on a region with Allow Damage disabled allows damage to be taken by Firestorm users onlyand that in the official viewer they do not take damage.
   This is incorrect – LL viewer users still take damage, they just cannot see it until they are dead and get teleported home.
4. Problem 4 – Parcel owners on Mainland can no longer enable Damage for combat games when using the current LL viewer.
   Mainland parcel owners who had previously set damage to be enabled on their parcel cannot disable damage when using the current LL viewer
5. Problem 5 – Parcel owners on shared private regions will need to ask the estate owner or an estate manager to enable then disable damage on the region each time they wish to toggle the safe setting for their parcel, or use a different viewer.

Oz Linden at this meeting did not know why changes had been made. Until Grumpity returns, we can’t know the why.

In an interesting twist it seems  some people use the Damage System as an anti-griefing tool.

From what I read, how Damage is working now is not logically correct. It doesn’t fit with what I, and apparently several others, I know of its purpose.

If you need to make changes to damage settings on your parcel or region, you’ll probably need to use the FS Viewer. I think, and consider the Norco on that point, your viewer controls for damage setting are not quite right. As the changes are viewer side, third party devs can make their viewers work as I think most would expect, tell you when taking damage.

Since the next regular meeting would fall in July 3, the 4^th is an American holiday and los of Americans take that Friday off, we won’t get anything resolved until a meeting on July 10.

Oz Linden is on vacation two weeks later, July 24, so that meeting pushed to July 31.