Second Life News Week #26

More Groups? Current work is on improving reliability and performance. No plan to add more groups, for now.

Apple is changing its OpenGL stuff. So, Oz is trying to HIRE a senior graphics designer. Oz plans to improve the graphics rendering pipeline so they can do more fun stuff in the future. Oz needs a good senior graphics designer to do that. This position is the Lab’s top hiring priority.

Viewer Profiles – There is a Project Viewer out for Profiles. The Profile is returning to the older style Profile Panel. It is much faster than web profiles.

when the old forms have started to decay

when the old forms have started to decay

Long ago avatars could be rated. Patch Linden was firm in his statement that he thinks they WILL NOT bring ratings back.

Will the Lab make a web viewer? Oz says, Absolutely. They are not releasing because of cost. That should tell you they are thinking of a Bright Canopy type solution.

Restarting Regions – Some restart regions before events. Is that necessary? Theoretically, no. It shouldn’t be necessary. The Lindens would like it to be true, restarts not needed. But, regions do seem to run better after a restart.

The Lab is always working to make restarts unnecessary.

Oz points out that clearing the viewer cache is an old ‘fix it technique’ that generally is not needed and makes things slower. So, periodically one needs to update their habits.

Will the viewer ever use more video RAM? They have a project in the works that will allow the use of more video RAM and improve the viewer cache. Oz says they are committed to increasing the video Ram for end users.

Mobile Viewer Development – an Alpha version is coming pretty soon… not too terribly distant future, says Oz. The first one will be text only.

Will SL websites be made mobile friendly? Yes, being worked on. It is complex and going to take some time.

Is inventory being worked on? Anything new? Current work is stability and performance. Nothing else on the short term list.

Are there projects to make large events better? Yes, but not anything they will deliver any time soon.

Enhanced Environment Project (EEP) – Basically, upgraded Windlight. This is going slowly because of the Lab’s effort to maintain legacy compatibility. That has not gone as smoothly as they hopped. Oz explains the complication of the render process changes.

Oz is expecting EEP to complete pretty soon now.

Massively Overpowered has an article on Star Citizen 3.6.0 Alpha. They explain a bit of the development testing cycle used with SC. They call it the Public Test Universe (PTU). I suppose this is a bit like Second Life™’s Preview Grid. Whatever, they provide info on how to get into PTU and show some other fun stuff.

I find the game too expensive to play. I do watch for the free trials. Having played in one of those, I think the game fun. Yet, I feel restricted. Content only includes what the professionals make for it. Thus, the ‘expensive’ nature of the game.

New SL Premium Membership rates are now in effect. Monday was the last day to get in on the old rate deals. Premium now costs US$99 per year.  There was some confusion about quarterly rates and whether they would still be an option. They are, $32.97 billed quarterly ($131.88/yr). And monthly $11.99 ($143.88/yr).

With SL16B there is a “Meet the Lindens & Moles This Week in Second Life” event. Names, times, and places are listed in the SL Blog post. Ebbe will be on stage Wednesday.

360 Snapshot Viewer – You may not have noticed this Project viewer disappearing from the Alternate Viewer’s page. It has. It was a year and some weeks since its last update. It was far behind other viewers. They have updated it to be current with other RC viewers. It is currently in QA and will soon be back as a Project Viewer.

DCMA Complaint Form available. A link to the online form is embedded in the page. Read the legalese and understand before filing a form. This is initiating a RL legal proceeding. False reports have consequences… unless you are the FBI.

Servers

The main channel saw a roll to version #19.06.11.528038, and included a couple of EEP and Animesh fixes-changes.

  • BUG-226815 [EEP] Since the grid was rolled to 19.04.15.526263 yesterday, region Windlight is broken for all legacy viewers
  • BUG-226252 [EEP] Please create an internal error code for llReplaceAgentEnvironment() & llSetAgentEnvironment() that distinguishes whether an agent does not have the experience allowed and if the experience is not allowed at their location.
  • BUG-225815 [Animesh] – Much needed Animesh specific constants for llGetObjectDetails().
  • BUG-226917 EEP Environment, New Sky should default to midday and not 6pm
  • Internal Fixes

I suspect the Disconnect changes are in this release too.

One person experienced worse Script Run performance post-roll. A restart helped, but still not as good as pre-roll on Monday. I missed the Server-Scripting meeting today… pizza or meeting… aaaahh PIZZA. So, I may have missed some news.

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum all get the same version #19.06.14.528215 with Internal fixes. We can only guess what those might be.

My region restart tracker is showing a restart today, Tuesday.

More pages… links below.

2 thoughts on “Second Life News Week #26

  1. Why are you posting a link to a quack news site? It’s not hard to verify a news source these days.
    https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/climate-change-dispatch/

    • I thought it was easy to check website credibility. But you may have proven that not to be the case.

      First, your link sends me to a check for Climate Change Dispatch (CCD) on the website Media Bais/Fact Check. But apparently, you didn’t check the Media Bais site. Look here: https://www.justfactsdaily.com/media-bias-fact-check-incompetent-or-dishonest/

      Second, To verify whether I, CCD, and Just Facts are right, you might have done better to first check whether or not the writing of CCD was accurate. Google: https://www.google.com/search?q=Ireland+To+Ban+Private+Cars&rlz=1C1ASVA_enUS743US743&oq=Ireland+To+Ban+Private+Cars&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i60.1375j0j4&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

      Or you could have checked various news sources to see if Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar did actually make such a speech. He did.

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