#SL News Week 22

PATHBUG-136

PATHBUG-136llSetRot() completely broken in RC PF 12.05.10.256473. This is a problem only on the Pathfinding (PF) enabled servers/regions.

Andrew Linden thinks he has this one fixed and believes the fix for that was deployed yesterday, Thursday. I’m not sure if he meant to AGNI or ADITI and didn’t think to ask him at the time.

Andrew has moved on to fixing Keyframe bugs in the Pathfinding.

Server Scripting Meeting

Rebake the Navmesh

There was a problem where rebaking the Navmesh would go into a perpetual pending state. Falcon Linden thinks he has that fixed. The change rolled to the AGNI (I think) PF Test Regions Friday morning. Falcon wants you to report if that happens again. Include the time and region name in your report.

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#SL News Week 22

We have a bit more news on this week’s roll outs to the Release Channels. Actually some BIG news.

[youtube mGPiywc6Hh0]

More information below the fold.

Blue Steel

This channel will be updated Thursday instead of Wednesday. The package will contain an avatar render change. The avatars in the Library will now have pre-baked textures.

You probably know that the viewer downloads all the textures worn by an avatar and bakes them intop a composite texture. So, skin, tattoos, alpha layers, undershirt, and shirt layers are baked into a composite. That is uploaded to SL and is the image others download. Even you download a copy, which is why you see your avatar start blurry then render crisp, which is the end of the bake, then go blurry and then hopefully crisp again.

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#SL News Week 21

Region Idling

This is the server update that is advancing to the main grid today, Tuesday. I’ve been writing about Second Life® Region Idling for a few days now. So, if you don’t know about it see: #SL Region Idling and #SL News Update Week 20.

Open Source Meeting

Threaded Region Crossing

I’ve been writing about the Region Crossing Phase I code for some time, since about February. This is a major refactor of region crossing code. It touches many parts of the Second Life system. Because of its complexity it has been a difficult write. We have seen lots of problems from it. It has been rolled back from the Release Channels a number of times.

It looks like this code will stay on the Le Tigre and Magnum channels this week.

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#SL News Week 19

Kelly Linden provided some information on the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function llGetAgentList(). The server maintenance package with this new function rolled to the main grid Tuesday. It rolled in spite of a problem. See JIRA item:

SCR-311llGetAgentList() with scope AGENT_LIST_PARCEL or AGENT_LIST_PARCEL_OWNER returns empty list when attached to avatar.

Server Scripting User Group

Of course those most interested in getting this feature intended to use it in avatar attachments. Frustrating. Kelly believes they can fix the problem and we’ll either see the fix pushed to the main grid or pop up in a release channel, depending on how well the fix goes.

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#SL Pathfinding Wk17 & Wk18

A little catching up… RL work has interfered with my making a couple of User Group meetings. One of the Lindens was kind enough to send me transcripts for the meetings I missed.

Land Impact

The Lindens were testing the modified Land Impact system in week 17. They were using the algorithm that set a cap on Streaming/Download Weight of 1 on all non-mesh-prims.

Also, the Script Factor of increasing Server Weight by 0.5*prim_count for unscripted-prims and scripted was switched to 0.5*prim_count + (0.25*number_of_scripts) with a cap of 2. Rounding is done on linksets. The Lindens believe that change would only cause the Land Impact cost of existing objects to decrease.

While one could probably prove the deceasing cost belief mathematically, on a practical level bugs tend to add chaos to and invalidate clean logical proofs. So, they test.

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#SL Server-Script News Update Wk18

Pathfinding

Pathfinding is closer to release. I expect we will see it arrive on the Release Channels this month.

Andrew Linden says they feel that are now feature complete for the initial release. I suppose this means that all the features the Lab believes are important for successful use of Pathfinding have been added. They still have bogs and issues to sort out. But, the feature set is fixed until after initial release.

Server/Scripting Meeting - Lego Chairs

They have decided to change the Pathfinding Tools in the viewer. Seems it is a work flow change that drives the need for viewer changes.

If you have used the viewer to edit Navmesh, you realize there are some klunks. Unfreezing the mesh, editing, and Freezing the Navmesh have some delay issues that have to be handled. Once a Navmesh has been changed and locked it takes some time for the server to recalculate the Navmesh. As Andrew says, may be tens of seconds. With multiple people editing the same Navmesh in a region you might imagine what problems a 20 to 40 second delay might cause them.

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