Firestorm Considerations

The FS Team is working on Materials, Sunshine, and adopting the CHUI to Firestorm. I am sure they would love to see all of those in 4.4.2. But, they aren’t saying what they will be able to do because they haven’t even been able to get all the Lab’s code for these features. The Lab is just not done with it. Things are changing as it is developed. You don’t try to hang pictures in a house before the walls are built.

Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1
Firestorm Viewer 4.4.1

The FS Team asked the Lindens if their release of a new viewer requiring a cache clear is loading up the asset server. Monty Linden says the asset system has lots of head room and is not the likely bottle neck. But, the inventory system that tracks what you have in your inventory is near capacity. Consider the inventory an index that deals with permissions and lots of interactions between you and backend systems of SL.

Jessica has explained that people are convinced clearing cache solves every problem and speeds up their viewer. The opposite is true. But, sometimes without a stop watch people cannot get past their subjective impression.

Whatever the case, it looks like the Lab is going to start making plans to look at cache operation. Monty Linden is going to take a look to see how a Firestorm-clear-your-cache release may be affecting the SL servers.

Most of the current inventory problems are with inventory cache, which is not the same as the basic cache. It is possible to clear inventory cache and not clear the basic cache of textures, mesh, and objects. But, it is a clear that has to be done manually.

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Bits and Pieces 2013-25

RL is keeping me busy this week. I am mostly skimming head lines to see what is going on in Second Life™.  That results in short notes on things.

Win Alienware

The Lab is doing a thing with Dell Computers. You have a chance to win a free laptop. If you don’t know Alienware is a company owned by Dell that makes gaming machines. I think they are expensive for what you get, but they are good machines. So… check out the announcement and see if you can win a free one. 

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Second Life News 2013-25 #2

I am distracted by RL work events and running a bit behind. I’ve barely been in-world since last Thursday. We did get a rollout Tuesday to the main channel. The main channel got the Interest List update. This should be noticed as a little bit faster rezzing of regions you are visiting for the first time.

Image from Sorcerer and White Snake
Image from Sorcerer and White Snake

Rollouts started for today, Wednesday, on the release channels. All three are getting the same package. It includes the new LSL functions I’ve been writing about. If you have missed those articles take a look at the release notes. These include additions to Pathfinding and object returns. 

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SL10B Hunt

About mid-afternoon (SLT) the Lab posted about a Premium member hunt. There are also more free things in the Market Place. Look for the Party Pack.

The hunt has gifts for Premium members. But, the hunt seems to be staged as part of a story. The post says: “Magellan Linden has uncovered an evil scheme by mad Doctor Talpa, to build some form of mind-control machines and take over the world. Magellan is busy building a machine to counter this scheme, but in the meantime YOU are needed to gather materials and components — and to destroy any of Talpa’s machines you can find.

See the post here: SL10B News and Premium Gift Hunt.

Second Life Griefing 2013-24

Every release of the viewer and server software has more fixes to stop griefing. But it is an escalating problem. Sort of an arms race.

A recent casualty appears to be the Pornstars group. It seems that group is going to close because of griefer infiltration. It will be replaced with a new group:  The Sexiest® : Pornstars click the name to find the group.

You may be unexpectedly ejected from the group. That will be the group closing. There is some hope this may be avoided. But, that depends on whether the Lab helps out.

Many are hoping the coming Group Ban Lists will help with this problem.