General News

#SL Avatar Render & Bake Fail

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It has been awhile since I updated the status of the bake fail problems. Bake fail is well and healthy… but, the Lindens are working on removing the fail part.

Back in March 2012 the Lindens were tracking down the problem. The failure to properly rez the avatar was not a simple failure. A number of things in the overall Second Life™ operation cause the failure. After tracking down as many of the failure triggers as they could they started planning the fix.

If you are interested in know how the system works now, read: #SL Clouds, Grey, and Blurry Avatars. Or the short version I supply in the forum Answers is here.

The solution the Lindens have come up with is a server side compositing engine. Rather then do the compositing in the viewer and upload it, a folder named Current Outfit will be used to contain a list of the items an avatar is wearing. The folder is updated automatically as you change appearance. When the folder changes I suspect a dirty flag is set probably posting a date and time of the change. Some message is likely sent to the server after some time period. At some point the Compositing Service on the Linden side pulls the list from your Current Outfit folder and bakes the composite texture made from your skin, tats, and clothes. That server will cache the texture. As others need your appearance texture they will get it from the Compositing Server’s cache.

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#SL News 2 Week 37

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Interest List

The interest list is all about how fast things rez and download due to the number of requests being made. A small number of requests complete quickly and the viewer can go about rendering the newly downloaded stuff.

Server-Scripting Meeting 9/2012

Figuring out what you are looking at so the viewer knows what to request from the server is a bit of a chore. Andrew Linden has been working on improving the interest list to improve performance.  This week (37) his code is moving into testing.

We should be seeing it on the ADITI grid. The changes are server side. No viewer changes are required, if I understand correctly. So, the effect will show up quickly not having to wait on viewer QA.

Andrew says there is an experimental change that could cause some viewers to use more memory. For now he has that disabled. Andrew says they will test that feature with a custom viewer and decide how much of an impact it has. Then they’ll see if they can better coordinate the viewer and server for better performance and less memory use. He did not get into the details… of those details…

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MetaReality Podcast Week 37

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Yay! We have a new MetaReality podcast out today: Aaaaaaand We’re Back!

My timeline of, summary of, and comments on the podcast follow. As usual this is not a transcript. I provide time marks for the things I see as subject change points or interesting entry points, so you can check out what interests you.

If you decide you should yell about something, be sure you check out the audio first. The subject content I hear and you read from my writing may have no relationship to what was actually said.

 

Metareality Podcasts

01:15 MetaReality podcasts are loved by a good number of SL users. As evidenced by Gianna getting all sorts of questions via various media about whether she was going to be doing more podcasts. Gianna is committed to continuing the podcasts. This recent break was due to RL busyness. So, we will see more podcasts coming. Yay!

2:00 Material System – Discussion about this new feature starts.

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Torley Celebration

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Daniel Voyager has a post up about a Torley Linden party to acknowledge Torley. See: Attend St. Torley’s Day 2012.

Torley Linden Rez-Day

We don’t see as much of Torley these days. When I started playing in Second Life™ in 2008 he was way more active making numerous video tutorials. I watched a load of them. His silly fun style is great. He is very much a part of SL’s history. His love of watermelon colors is well known.

I’m not sure Torley is a saint, but I think I understand why many would have that sentiment and it is all in fun.

Friendly greetings… and happy rez-day Torley! Thanks for your help and contributions.

Check out the announcement and story on Daniel’s blog.

Interesting #SL Things in the Background

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BUG-81

BUG-81 – add the number of groups you’re in to the bottom of the group list. I’m not sure that is the exact title, I can’t read the JIRA. Whatever, this is a feature in Marine Kelley’s RLViewer and is in a beta version of Dolphin 3. The code is being contributed to the SL Viewer project. So, we may see it in a future version of the SL Viewer.

It would be nice to have a count of the groups I’m in. Once upon a time we could click WATCH and follow progress on the JIRA item and hopefully give the Lab an idea of how many were interested in the feature.

BUG-59

BUG-59 – Add a GO TO LINE # to the script editor. (Not exact) This would add the ability to enter a line number and have the script editor scroll to that line. Could be handy. We’ll see it in Third Party Viewers and probably the SL Viewer.

RLV API

The Retrained Love Viewer has features not included in the SL Viewer. These are features that in a technical sense allow a viewer to be programmed to accept instructions from another viewer or scripted object. There are a number of possible uses beyond dominate/submissive play.

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Group Edit Update Week 37

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Update: The JIRA post was updated 07/Sep/12 5:07 PM. ADITI regions Aglia and Chooqu Clone have the new server code.

Group Edit changes are moving forward. The server program with the changes was being built (compiled) on September 7th. My previous article included links to the Project viewer and the JIRA. The test regions in ADITI will be posted in the JIRA.

JIRA – SVC-4968 – Group won’t load – too many members

For now, bugs found by Third Party Viewer Developers won’t be able to be added to this SL JIRA item, unless they are individually added to the correct JIRA groups. You can tell if you are in the group by looking at the bottom of the JIRA item’s page. If there is a Comment Button, you are in the right group, provided the item has not been closed.

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