Second Life News Week #40 & 41

Flickr

There are new changes over at Flickr.

Ebbe

Ebbe Altberg, the Linden Lab CEO, talks about what investors should consider and ignore when investing in virtual reality. See Three Things to Focus On, Three Things to Ignore (Podcast).

Third-Party Dev UG Meeting

There are 4 viewers out. Plus, the main viewer. The Ordered Shout Down RC is looking good. From that I would gather it is the current likely bet for the next promotion. The Maintenance RC is doing OK. The project viewer for EEP has a couple of bugs yet to fix. New employees specializing in graphics now available to work on those. So, hopefully… A Voice RC viewer should be out next week, maybe.

Voodoo Moon

Voodoo Moon

From the Firestorm peeps, the Firestorm release is going fine. No real problems found yet. Adoption is good.

There was a discussion about BoM adoption and use. The opinion seems to be things in the fashion community are still way disorganized.

Blogger Awards

If you are looking for people that blog, vlog, or photograph Second Life then you just hit found the pot at the end of the rainbow, Ballot for the 2019 Bloggie Awards. The ballot is 38 pages of categorized URLs.

Voting is open until Oct 19, 2019. But, you have to vote in every category… tedious… before you can submit any vote.

Also included is ‘best’ at photo-friendly. So, if you are looking for places that provide interesting backgrounds and gorgeous scenery this is a handy list.

Servers

This past Saturday the roll to the main channel (Tuesday week #40) was rolled back. This version had the improvements targeted at improving script performance. Unfortunately, the improvements changed the probabilities that some failures would be more likely, which killed a bunch of kittens. 🙁

This was enough of a disaster the Lindens posted about it. See Parent/Child object Script Communications.

If all the programmers/scripters in SL were real-time task aware programmers this wouldn’t have been a problem. Whenever one has to deal with asynchronous tasks there are certain communication protocols one uses. Hobbyist scripters are unfamiliar with these types of scripting tasks. Example. People are asynchronous. So, we say things like ‘call me’ when you are done or get there. We do that because there is no for sure way to estimate or know when a person will complete a task or trip. So, we create a signaling system.

Sort of let me know when your windows are up and I’ll turn on the car wash…

With the scripts in-world many people used a timer, which isn’t all that bad an idea. But, it is not foolproof.

So, scripters were rezzing things via script and trying to give them orders via script before they were fully awake. With the recent improvements, the rezzer/order-giver was more likely to be giving orders before the rezzed slave was ready. So… problems. (This is an oversimplification but it is sort of the idea.)

This is one of those rare cases where the Lindens tried to make everything work and couldn’t. So, they decided they could break a few things for the sake of an overall improvement. So, somethings will remain broken until the original scripter updates their scripts.

If I understood at the Server-Scripting UG the revised version will roll out to an RC this week (#41).

2019-10-03T01:12:11.531528 Oct 8 – RC for (which channel?) rolling out 10/09. We don’t know the channel.

  • Fixes: BUG-227645 EEP issue; Windlight no longer rendering properly
  • Internal logging changes
  • Improvements to simulator state saves, which should make rolls smoother
  • SL-11752[EEP] Smoothen transition time of llReplaceAgentEnvironment
  • BUG-227628llCollisionSound does not seem to behave as a ‘Prim Property’

2019-10-03T01:23:43.531529 Oct 8 – RC for ? rolling out 10/09. We don’t know the channel. This version is very similar to the previous one above.

  • Internal Script Improvements
  • Fixes: BUG-227645 EEP issue; Windlight no longer rendering properly
  • Internal logging changes
  • Improvements to simulator state saves, which should make rolls smoother
  • SL-12034Scripts not started before object_rez event is triggered
  • SL-11752[EEP] Smoothen transition time of llReplaceAgentEnvironment
  • BUG-227628llCollisionSound does not seem to behave as a ‘Prim Property’

Viewers

  • 3.1.530559– Thursday, September 5, 2019 – Default – Main viewer released week #37. The new BoM viewer.
  • 4.0.530150– EEP – Monday, August 19, 2019, week #34.
  • 3.2.531296– Love Me Render – Monday, September 30, 2019 – NEW
    • SL-12025Animated mesh objects are disappeared when avatar rendering parameter is off
    • SL-11656Alpha textures with Alpha mask cutoff of 255 look glitchy while ALM is off.
    • SL-11614Rotating objects flicker if Render type Avatar is disabled
    • BUG-2635Objects rotating with llTargetOmega now “vibrate” on spin axis when the camera is focused on them
    • BUG-225300Disabling avatar rendering removes static objects
  • 3.2.530962– Maintenance – Tuesday, September 17, 2019 – Released week #39.
  • 3.2.530972– Ordered Shutdown – Tuesday, September 24, 2019 – Released week #39.
  • 3.2.531587– Voice – Tuesday, October 8, 2019 – NEW – This viewer improves voice detection when you’re speaking ( VOICE-56 ). If you’ve been having trouble with your voice is breaking up, then this may be the solution.

Other Viewers

Firestorm NEW Version out. 6.3.2.58052. Download here. This version supports BoM.

More details here, Firestorm 6.3.2 Released – BoM is here!

…and there is a bug in this latest release. FIRE-24367 – Icons in profile are just showing text instead of icon.

Black Dragon 3.6.3 – BD updated to BoM and fixed some bugs. See the announcement for details.

2 thoughts on “Second Life News Week #40 & 41

  1. Some of us have been enjoying digging out our old pre-mesh outfits and wearing them via BoM. Only a few are worth the trouble; most outfits from that era don’t measure up to modern standards. But those few feel like long lost friends. For those of you who want to give it a try, the best candidates are outfits that were mostly prim parts but needed a system bit or two to tie them together.

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