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.
Rod Humble commented on the Last Names project. Seems they are doing more with last names than we may have expected. In any event the comment in his feed has drawn 76 comments as I write this. Check it out at Rod’s SL Feed.
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.
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…
More and more Third Party Viewers (TPV) have built in Animation Overriders (AO). A huge problem for those of us that use multiple viewers is the problem of each viewer having unique AO folders. There is no standard AO folder. Milkshake names their AO folder Milkshake, Phoenix’s is named Phoenix, Firestorm’s is Firestorm…
New AO's
If you have walk’s and stand’s that are no copy, you were screwed. You were forced to have different animation sets for each viewer, which sucks. This is the main reason I still use my ZHOA-II HUD. It is available in any viewer I choose to use. Plus I only need to set it up once.
AO Animation Configuration Tool
I also avoided using built-in AO’s because I have a couple of favorite animations that are no copy. Fortunately more and more animations are provided as copy-ok. The super cheap (L$10 mostly) animations in Kuso are copy \o/. Eventually I’ll find replacements for my no-copy fav’s. (I was new when I bought them.)
AO’s Change
I haven’t been keeping up on Viewer AO’s. When they first came out I played with them, ran into problems, and stopped using the built-ins. At some point things changed. While playing with the Milkshake Viewer I decided to try the built-in AO for one of my Alt’s.
New Milkshake Logo
Milkshake has a nice AO system. I like it and was surprised several times. I’m not sure who wrote the code or which viewer had the system first, that just doesn’t matter to me. Sorry programmers, no offense or diss intended.
Some improvements in Second Life have unintended consequences. The Destination Guide and What’s Hot are both nice additions to Second Life. But, there are some unintended consequences from them. One of the negative consequences is over loading regions.
Loki's Game in Destination Guide
I’ve seen lots of improvements in Second Life this year. Region crossings and region lag have been improved. But, those sailing and flying vehicles through crossings are still unhappy. Also, we all have probably had recent problems with region crossings. But, in general things have gotten better. But, the destination guide offers some new opportunities to concentrate more people in a region.
It seems there are some long term problems with large groups. Seems a large group is 12,500 members… yeah that’s a large group. Some people have pointed out in JIRA SVC-4968 that some much smaller groups run into similar problems.
One user, Point Luminos, suggests that computer resources are the problem, not the viewer. Point has a rather modest computer, Duo Core2 E7500 with 4gb ram. Point tells us that he/she is editing a 36,000+ member list each day without a problem.
However, users with more computer and smaller groups are running into the problem. That is more as in newer CPU and more ram. So, it probably is not just a computer resource problem.
The comments are arguing about whether it is a resource problem on the client or a bug in the SL system. Since some can edit large lists and some can’t edit some not so large lists it suggests another problem than just a size limit or computer hardware.
I saw Danial Voyager’s post about a comment in LL’s CEO’s Feed. Rod wrote that last names are coming back in 2012.
You may have been following the JIRA Feature Request to being last names back. See SVC-7125 – Bring Back Last Name Options!
This JIRA had 2,139 votes and 696 watches. That is probably some sort of record. It certainly shows that the most residents do not know the importance of clicking Watch.
There is a stream of new comments added to the JIRA item just about every day.
Racism?
The lack of last names seems to have created a form of racism. New SL users with the last name Resident are claiming discrimination. The only way to know is create a new Alt and walk a mile in their shoes.
