In the area of server updates, there has not been much exciting news. Or even mildly interesting. Changes have been about data collection, which will guide future changes, and infrastructure changes. But, this week there are some interesting changes people are noticing.

Who knew?

A few people were reporting long down times after this week’s update rollouts. Others noticed there were two rollouts Wednesday. Mazidox Linden took the blame for that. Maz rolled the wrong version to the RC channels. So, a second roll was required to get the correct version in place.

So, both Blue Steel and Le Tigre got two restarts. Lucy is certain that if Maz had had a bear it would have told him he was making a mistake… Forgoing the Bear solution the roll procedure is changing to hopefully reduce this mistakes reoccurrence possibility.

Teleport Hammers

When using a TP Hammer some people are getting the notice TBF TP Hammer v1.0 (Wear/Add): Too many llTeleportAgent requests.  Throttled until average falls. This seems to be in place on the main and Blue Steel channels.

Maz thinks the change should be in place everywhere.

So… if you have a TP Hammer of any brand that does not allow a frequency/speed change, it will likely be slower getting you into a busy region than no hammer.

If you ae wondering what a TP Hammer is… these are the HUD’s that you give a destination to and they repeatedly try to teleport there. The try at computer speeds. This puts a load on the destination region server. So, an already full region is being pestered by a flood of ‘let me in’ requests, degrading performance even more.

Example: LazyGuy – Get me in!

During the time of Fantasy Faire the Lindens noticed a couple of problems. One was full regions having more load than the avatar population would warrant and those regions losing connection to the backend caps. Both problems were looked at. Old, long time problems were discovered with the design. Those are being corrected. A quick fix was to throttle the number of TP requests a client can make per second. For manual TP’s you are probably never going to trigger the throttle. However, TP hammers get you zapped.

The effective replacement for TP hammers is Premium Membership in SL. Recently the population limits for regions was increased. But, only Premium members and region owners/managers can take advantage of the increase.

The amount of work a region has to do in deciding where to let an avatar in is unnecessarily high. That is being changed. So, between the nerfing of TP hammers and coming changes we should get an improvement in crowded region’s performance.

DRTSIM-350 is now on Aditi. This is mostly internal features, think management tools for Lindens, and logging changes, think data collection, there are interesting changes.

Empty Region: One is the rare problem of a region being totally empty after a re-start. Subsequent restarts didn’t help. The owner had to contact support. Maz points out, “Obviously that sucks! So, we’re trying something to fix that. I’ve been working on that most of the afternoon, actually. It turns out reproducing an ultra-rare bug is hard 🙂”

Bad Animation: Another fix is blocking the upload of broken animations. Maz thinks they weren’t crashing people, they just looked weird awful.

This isn’t a fix for animation-crashers. Those have pretty much been eliminated from the grid. These are invalid animations that look odd. In some cases, they attempt to animate non-existent bones.

Version Promotion: Maz is uncertain which RC version will promote to the main grid next. DRTSIM-350 is the likely candidate for an RC channel next week. DRTSIM-340 may promote to the main channel. DRTSIM-323 is killing Shoutcast Boards, those signs that tell you what music is playing. Until a new way to handle that task is devised, 323 won’t promote.

Water Detection: Seems some people are reporting HUD’s not being able to detect water. It is how AO’s know to play a swim animation. The Lindens haven’t heard anything. So, if you can reproduce the problem, file a JIRA bug report.

Animated Objects: Attendees were asking about regions for testing animated objects. As yet there is now server version to test. (Most info on this comes from the Content Creation UG.) There was some discussion of what to call the animated mesh objects… as the name ‘animated mesh objects’ is too long. Also, people will want to be able to search for them in the marketplace.

So, Animesh?