Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Nalates Urriah Caleb Linden is taking some heat for announcing an update rolling to the Blue Stool [sic] channel.
The main channel is not getting a new package. The planned roll was held back to add a fix for slow script performance.
All three RC channels, including Blue Stool, are getting a revised package with Minor Internal Changes and Fixes BUG-40565 “Significant script performance degradation observed in server version 16.09.14.319788”
People are reporting more occurrences of Beggar Bots hitting their groups. BUG-40546 – Group Chat Spam Bots. People are asking if they should be reported. The ToS is fuzzy on the topic. In general begging is not a violation of the ToS. Spamming is. So, we see varied opinions on whether to report or not.
The apparent consensus among those in the know keeping up with such things is: REPORT ‘EM. The Lindens are working at closing and banning accounts of the spammers.
Group managers have the Eject and Ban tool. Some do not realize it has been upgraded. Originally it did not terminate the current chat session. So, E & B didn’t immediately shut them up. Now it does. (SVC-32)
Oz Linden reviewed the status of viewer development. He pointed out that the Visual Outfit Browser (VOB) is now in the main release version of the Linden made SL Viewer.
They updated the VLC RC and Bento RC viewers with VOB.
Both RC viewers are doing well in the crash rate stats. Oz expects the VLC version to release to main viewer in week 39. That will leave the Bento RC as the only RC. Seems like the pipeline is emptying out…
Oz pointed out the Lab did block a few old viewer versions. Saying, ‘Only a few thousand users…’ would be affected. That number can sound bad. But, as a percent of SL users it is way small, likely way less than 1%.
October is almost here. Halloween is near. The Highlight’s page in Featured News is listing lots of Halloween oriented places. Soon there will be rotting virtual pumpkins all over Second Life™. Oh… wait… even more scary, those evil pumpkins never die.
Check the Featured News and the Destination Guide often as new places will be appearing almost daily. Those listed Friday are:
Halloween is becoming a huge economic thing in developed countries. Almost as big as Christmas. I dress nicely for Christmas parties but, I DRESS UP for Halloween.
Thursday about noon the Lab announced some of the things that will be changing in Second Life™ viewers. We know viewers will change. But, never exactly what change is coming. See: Important Viewer Evolution Update.
Most of the changes mentioned, we know about.
The viewer’s built in web browser is changing over to Chromium Embedded Frame work. So, it is basically a new browser, like Firefox or Chrome. This affects lots of things inside the viewer, search, profiles, etc. Most importantly it is part of the frame changing how streaming media is handled. There is an RC version of this change on the Alternate Viewers Page.
The avatars are changing and the RC version of the Project Bento Viewer is out, also on the Alt Viewer page.
We haven’t had much news coming out of these meetings. This week’s meeting was more informative. See the previous article on Forced Sit.
We also heard about BUG-37692 – llRezObject() and llRezAtRoot() peroidically stop responding unless you’re an estate manager. This bug breaks existing content. If you are having a problem with it, you have this weekend (#38 – Sept 24-25) to add your information in comments.
If you think of the shops that have a ‘rezzer’ in store for their products, you can have an idea of the scope of the problem.