Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Server Release Candidates
Things are happening. I’ve covered most of them in other posts. This one is a general update.
Once again there is no server update to roll to the grid. The Release Candidates in testing in Blue Steel and Le Tigre did not survive 6 days of testing. The fixes in the RC have been ‘fixed’ and new fixes added and rolled out to Blue Steel regions. The TMalloc build is being fixed and returned to Le Tigre for more testing.
With the new transparency at Linden Lab we have lots of information about what is being done with the second Life viewer and servers. This article is about the things I’ve come across that are in progress at the development level.
Merov has added code to measure the performance of llkdu.dll and its alternative OpenJPEG. For now it appears KDU is 4 times faster than OpenJPEG at decoding compressed images. The performance measuring code is being improved for use with OpenJPEG and JASPER. This will help TPV and LL developers make viewers faster.
Updated 2010-09-14 – scoll to end of article
Oskar Linden updated part of the Beta Server Wiki to announce the Blue Steel Release Channel changes are coming to 10% of the grid 9/14. If those changes hold up, they will spread to the rest of the grid on 9/21.
What’s changing? This is an example of one of the first rollouts using the new three channel process. So, the number of changes is small compared to previous updates as current changes are split up for testing. If these changes hold for 6 days, they will go to the rest of the main grid and into the other two release channels with the items being tested in them.
These changes are mostly exploits and SIM crasher fixes. Since these are ‘holes’ still active on the rest of the grid, Oskar is not publishing steps to reproduce the problems (a normal part of the testing process) for obvious reasons.
There are lots of things changing in SL. To those not following the Wiki, blogrum and various Lindens’ office-hours meetings; changes may appear to be moving slowly. However, I see a pattern of changes reflecting Phillip’s direction to improve communications between residents and the Lab and improve how they develop software for SL. I find the pace of these changes rather impressive.
One change is Torley’s recent update of the Wiki post on the Second Life Quality Assurance Portal and the changes in the QA process and how to participate. Torley is actually really busy updating the Wiki with all the new changes related to Bug Tracking.
Phillip, at SLCC 2010, talked about how the way Linden Lab develops code would change. Effort was to be made to get changes, fixes, and new features out faster. In that line the server code team is changing how they rollout server upgrades.
There is a Beta Server Team that does Quality Assurance (QA) on the Beta grids. The group is moderated by Oskar Linden. Beta Server Office Hours are on Thursdays at 3 PM PDT in Morris on the preview grid, ADITI.
Oskar and Lil Linden explained the changes in Beta Server Office Hours (09/02). The code is still tested on the Beta Grids, ADITI being the grid most of us know and some of us use. But once it reaches Release Candidate status it gets tested on the main grid, AGNI. Previously they were rolling all the changes into a single RC and rolling it out to the pilot area on AGNI. The Quality Assurance team would try to catch the problems and get back to the development teams.
Update 2010-09-06: The Display Names Wiki page has been updated and provides load of new information and answers.
Earlier I blogged about Display Names and referred to Gwyneth Llewelyn’s article Identity Crisis! The expected roll out for Display Names is late September 2010. However, Linden Lab just announced a Project Viewer for those wanting to test Display Names.
For me this appears to be a first case test of whether we are dealing with the same ol’ Linden Lab or the new more communicative and sensitive LL. Consider this part of their statement;
After the flood of comments that greeted our announcement of the upcoming Display Names feature, we’re happy to announce that we are now releasing a Project Viewer to help us further test performance and let Residents get a sense for how Display Names would work should they go into production.