General News

#SL Viewer Policy Follow Up

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A part of the Server/Sim/Scripting User Group meeting was taken up with discussion of the viewer policy changes. It seems some of the changes have been in the works for some time. Now that they are on the verge of being implemented the Lab made the public announcement.

Viewer Identification Tags

Tankmaster Finesmith said, “So, as one of the [Firestorm] TPV devs, we’ve know for a few months now that LL has wanted to brake the viewer tags. Today [Friday] we got word that LL will be braking them next week.”

So, Jessica is right, the viewer type ID tags will be turned off next Tuesday and Wednesday. Presumably the code to do that has already made it through QA process.

Simon Linden was the meeting chairperson or facilitor and I’ll quote him several times so I think this statement is important as a framework. He said, “…I’d like to preemptively explain that I’m a coder working on the server, so I’ve mostly been out of this loop. I’m not a lawyer, from marketing or product, etc. etc.” I suppose that means we need to keep what he says in some sort of perspective.

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#SL #SecondLife Outages

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[POSTED 1:41PM PST, 16 February 2012] We are experiencing an outage which may have caused some Residents to be logged out of Second Life.  Some regions will also be unavailable. Secondlife.com, the Marketplace and our support services for tickets and live chat are also unavailable.  We are working on the outage and will update this blog as more information is available. (Reference)

This is the second significant outage in two days. Valentine’s Day saw a hardware failure that took down the Market Place and some of the web services.

Today I watched my little Concurrent User Meter drop by 17,000+ users in one tick. In about 15 minutes the logins were hitting 1,000+ per minute. I suppose everyone was trying to get back in.

#SL Linden Realm Tools

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This morning Tiggs Linden visited Kelly Linden’s Scripting User Group to talk about Linden Realm Tools and made some announcements. Charlar Linden pointed out that none of the information is cast in stone, so things may change.

Tiggs Linden and a smokey pipe

Tiggs made it clear we are only getting part of the story for now by saying there are two things Tiggs would be discussing, a third Tiggs would be hinted at, and a fourth component of which no mention would be made.

Two Tools

The first two things are new scripting functions; llTeleportAgent() and llAttachToAvatarTemp().

Tiggs is opening up llTeleportAgent() to allow the same access as llTeleportAgentHome(). This means the object running a script with this command must be owned by the parcel/land owner.

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OpenSim vs Second Life vs Minecraft

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Hamlet in an article on New World Notes titled OpenSim Gaining Regions… But Not Gaining Many Users makes a point about user numbers for OpenSim. They are apparently decreasing while the region count is increasing.

OpenSim vs Second Life vs Minecraft

It is hard to know what is happening with user numbers in Second Life. From my empirical experience I would say they are growing because I meet so many new people now, but it is hard to find real numbers to back up that opinion. What I do think is coming clear is the nature of OpenSim and the reasons for the popularity of Second Life.

OpenSim

I have nine regions in OSGrid, an OpenSim world. I’ve had them for over year. In that time I’ve had probably 50 visitors, more or less. I have a count if I would bother to look it up.

As I write this there are 125 users in world now and about 3,300+ have logged in in the last 30 days.

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Qarl Alignment Tool Rejected

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Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.

Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.

These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:

  • The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.
  • It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
  • It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.
  • It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing.
  • There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with.

    • In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.

    I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…

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