Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This morning the first question asked of Oz Linden on the Open Source User Group was; What’s with the restarts? See: Scheduled Maintenance. Oz was all ‘what restarts? Oh… those restarts…’ Saying:
They’re doing some checks on some of our server hardware that requires that they take them down briefly. I don’t believe that all regions will be affected, but I’m not sure.
So, we aren’t really sure what they are checking. It may just be they are giving the gerbils their flu shots.
Maddy Gynoid pointed me to a notice the Lab has posted in Grid Status saying starting the Week of Nov 17th (Monday) they will be doing grid maintenance with one or more restarts per region per day.
Grid Status – Scheduled Maintenance
[Posted 10:00 AM PST, 14 November 2014] Beginning Monday, November 17, we will be undertaking a full week of scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will take place at approximately 7:00 AM each day next week. Each region will be subject to one or more restarts, as its host takes its turn for inspection. A five-minute warning will be broadcast for each restarting region. Additional warnings will be broadcast to regions where multiple restarts are necessary. Please be cautious about going AFK for extended periods in the middle of build sessions or handling no-copy objects, as you may miss the shutdown warnings. Please keep an eye on this blog for further updates.
Capital Exchange has posted that Linden lab has contacted them. So, attorneys from both sides are now discussing whether or not Capital Exchange is a game of skill or chance. Expect these discussions to take weeks. During that time game will remain frozen.
See: Linden Lab Counsel Finally Contacts CapEx Counsel
I think most people have noticed it is better. So far, I have been able to comment in groups such as Firestorm Support without a problem, a group I seldom could connect to. I could listen, but not post comments, about half or more of the time.
Posting to any large group was a problem. That has now mostly been resolved.
We are losing the open post of any chat that starts after I login. In some cases it is not noticeable. In others it is apparent. The Lindens are aware of it.
Today grid status reported the internal utilities servers would be getting updates. In the Server Scripting meeting we learned that additional changes to group chat were being rolled out. So, this is likely that change going into place. The Lindens say not to expect visible improvements. That doesn’t mean there aren’t any, just that they are not likely to be as noticeable as previous changes.
Ciaran and Inara quote from a post on the Radegast Viewer Blog. Radegast is a light weight viewer handy for the visually impaired. The developer is Latif Khalifa. For health reasons he is no longer able to develop the viewer. It is open source, so someone may take it over.
Sad… I wish the best for Latif.
As noted in an earlier post Ebbe was on a panel in New York at Engadget’s get together discussing virtual worlds in apps beyond gaming. There is little in the discussions about SL2 other than closed beta will likely start mid 2015. Both Ciaran and Inara have more to say about what was discussed. I still see most of the VR talk as hype about what great things they are GOING to do. I am waiting for it to solidify into something we can touch and do. But, knowing how people see VR developing is good for perspective and has some predictive value.
For a summary see: Virtual reality has a future beyond video games, and it’s already started.
The Content Delivery Network is used by all viewers. No viewer update was needed for CDN to work. It is a pure server-side thing.
Ciaran wrote about the problem he and others run into in: CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide. Some regions just refuse to render. Lots of textures fail to load. The usual leave and return tricks are not working. When these textures fail to load they FAIL to load and there seems little we can do about it.
The Lindens are aware of the problem and have posted on the SL Blog about the problem, what they think is causing it, and the hope it will pass with changes being made by both the Lab and the CDN provider. See: An Update on the [Second Life] CDN Project.
If you run into this problem, please file a JIRA report. Add your RL location (City, State, Country) and ISP name.
And like Ciaran I encourage you to check out the mole abode: Meauxle Bureaux.