Changes

Second Lifes Linden Groups

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Second Life Communications
Listening - By: vagawi @ Flickr

Since long before I found Second Life residents, users, have complained about poor communications between Linden Lab and users. In 2010 Phillip Rosedale proclaimed that would change and the Lab would be more open. That has been happening and there have been problems. So, more changes are coming.

 

Contacting Linden Lab

Some time ago I wrote an article on how to effectively contact the Lab. Contacting & Influencing Second Life. Things are starting to change and eventually the information there will be way out of date.

This article is sort of the transition phase of how to connect with the Lab until we know more.

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Second Life Group Chat Upgrade Coming

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We are getting closer. In Oz’s office hours meeting Gez Linden, the project owner, explained the next steps for moving forward on Group Chat. Soon a Group Chat Project Viewer will be out. Code will be available. An in-world group will be started for the project. The first testing will be on the ADITI (Preview) Grid in a couple of weeks.

Some ADITI sim’s are already using XMPP group chat. Once the Project Viewer is out the next level of testing can begin. The first release will be trying to achieve parity with existing chat. Once the new chat is doing everything the current chat can, the code can be rolled to the grid. We should see a big reduction in chat lag. Plus, the new XMPP chat will be separate from the SL SIM servers. So, we should see less region lag too.

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New Things Coming to Second Life

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There are several projects now making their way into the Release Channels and soon to the main grid. None are as fun or exciting as mesh, but they are things that should make SL faster and nicer to play in.

Faster Non-Texture Assets

Monty Linden attended Oskar’s office hours meeting. There is a small project (small code-wise) coming to the grid soon that will speed up non-texture assets moving through the system. Now is that cryptic or what?

Seems Monty means sounds and wearables. The change won’t be as dramatic as ‘Compression’ is for region crossing, but it is expected to be significant and have noticeable effects. The change has to do with making the process smarter, whatever that can mean in this case. Monty describes it as removing artificial slowdowns… which may have mostly to do with making the path things take through the system more efficient.

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Second Life 40 Groups

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Updated 2010-01-13 – 6:15 PM – SLT

Several blogs are reporting that in some regions with some viewers one can now have 40 groups. There is no Linden Lab announcement out. So, this is testing and it may change at any time. Try it at your risk.

Update: So far there is still no official word. Speculation is that one going over 25 groups may lose those if Linden Lab turns the feature off. Whether the excess groups would be lots in alphabetical order or join order or something else is unknown. Actually whether they would be permanently lost or come back when the limits is raised is unknown.

Using Phoenix you will see the limit listed at the bottom of the Groups panel listed as 25. This does not mean that is the limit. That is just a cosmetic thing. One is supposed to be able to set the Debug Settings value in Phoenix40GroupsSupport to TRUE and see what limit the server is using (requires a viewer restart). Update: Phoenix is rumored to only support a max 40 groups. Whatever the case the next version (Firestorm) is planned to have better group support.

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Second Life Update

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I write about the changes in Second Life that interest me and/or that I think will be of general interest. Most of the recent changes have been boring bug fixes and tedious changes to the SLV2 user interface. Things like making this or that button transparent when the panel loses focus. Mostly stuff everyone wants done, but doesn’t really want to read about or at least, I don’t. But there are a bunch of those tedious changes, which I’m skipping, and few interesting ones I’ve touched on here.

Mesh

Throttling has been added to mesh to prevent using mesh animations. You may or may not know that sculpties are animated by changing the sculpty map a prim uses. It took no time at all for that idea to come those using meshes as a similar process  is used. However, there is a drastic difference in the load mesh animation throws on the viewer and server. Throttling mesh changes will prevent the use of mesh swapping for animation and lagging the region. 

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