February

(40 Articles) – In February Multi-Threaded Region Crossing rolls to the main channel. There is discussion about whether things are better or worse. Avatar crossing seems better. Vehicle crossing seems worse.

Excessive bandwidth use remains a problem. It causes many bots to fail.

Chat Hub User Interface (CHUI) was still in internal development for most of the month. But, we did see the new interface make it into the beta version of the SL Viewer by the end of the month.

The Materials System remained in pre-Beta stage. This month we learn the ability to script Materials changes would not being included in the initial feature rollout. Another update made it to an RC channel. By the end of the month the RC version had rolled to the main channel. But, there was still no project viewer available.

Flufee Missions end. The Arrival Mission is, I think, the last in the ‘pre-problem’ series.

And the farewell video…

We still see Flufee now and then. But the Flufee Missions have been replaced by the World Builders episodes.

Server Side Appearance (Baking) gets project viewer code released. Third party developers began integrating SSA. The Lab was doing load testing mid February. By the end of February there was a public pile-on test in the preview grid.

It was this month that we also learned SSA would break third party viewer’s avatar height adjustment. Later next Linden will provide a somewhat fix for the problem. But the loss will remain a missed feature.

Ima Mechanique is working on the scripting highlighting. The project allows the viewer to update its syntax files from the server. This project does not arrive on server and viewer sides until late December.

The visibility of diagonal regions continues to be an on and off again problem. Late in the month the problem seemed to get worse.

I think this is the first month I wrote about: STORM-68 – As a Builder, I want that ability to set default permissions on creation of objects, clothing, scripts, notecards, etc. We will see this feature making it into an RC Viewer in December,

World Maps has problems on and off for months. This month regions running in the Magnum RC channel stopped appearing in World Maps. It got fixed.

Problems with Havok’s update release start to show up. Terrain behaves differently. Vehicles hang-up easily. Other objects penetrate the ground.

Designing Worlds does a show on SL Griefing. In December 2012 I had written: From #SL Griefing to Extortion. I provided some tips for those being griefed in: Designing Worlds on Griefing.

Network Packet Size begin being looked at in February with the intention of being updated.

Mid February the SL Market Place got some updates. These were mostly to do with email. See: Second Life Commerce Update 2013.

Interest List problems started to show up with doors. Doors closing on a timer would update the physics but not the visual state. It would look like a door was open, but a person could not walk through it.

Also, link sets were only showing their root prim until you got very close.

Interest List changes apparently broke Area Search in some third party viewers. Also, some people were blaming the Interest List changes for AO’s failing. Items that used scripts to change their particle emission seemed to be failing. And some small objects emitting light stopped emitting light. Also, the viewer would think scripts were too far away to be edited in the middle of your editing them.

In February there was still some hope that 2012’s JIRA Change might be reconsidered. This was the change where the majority of JIRA users lost access to all but the JIRA items they authored. See: JIRA Change Follow Up.

Sudden Massive Lag continues to be a problem. See: Second Life BUG-355 – Sudden Lag. This was a big problem for those having large events.

A problem turned up were the region you are leaving appeared in front of you in the region you are entering. That problem seemed to be getting worse this month.

There is also a problem where people were disconnected when crossing from region to region. The problem may have been related to the number of scripts you were wearing.

In February I wrote an article about using layered materials on mesh. See: Second Life Mesh – Double Materials.

This is also the month when we started seeing changes to the warning notice of a region restart. These changes were being made because it was too easy to miss the notice. That seems to still be a problem.

We also heard that we can change the sound of these alerts: UISndAlert. See: Debug Settings.

In the Content and Mesh Upload User Group Nyx Linden explained how Flexie Prims work and whether something similar would be possible for mesh objects. See: Second Life News 2013-9.

The Preview Grid (ADITI) had been having problems for weeks. In the last week of February we got word that repairs a been made. See: New ADITI Fix Out. This apparently was not an absolute fix. Some people still have problems with inventory in the Preview Grid.

Kelly Linden described the Runtime Collision Control System (RCCS). See: Second Life News 2013-9 #2.

In February we were still trying to get some information about the number of people using Advanced Lighting Model, also known as deferred rendering.