Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
There was no roll to the Second Life™ servers’ main channel. The update running on Blue Steel last week had to be rolled back. So, it was not available for promotion.
This week the RC channels are all three getting the same new package. This one has some Simulator Fixes and a fix for BUG-9504 “Clicking on any object that affects the navmesh while in mouselook dirties the navmesh”. Remember, the Navmesh is a thing in Pathfinding.
At the Second Life™ Developers’ meeting a question came up about whether it would be possible to sell experiences, the kind made with the new Advanced Experience Tools. There was discussion about the idea at the TPD meeting.
The answer is: it has been discussed within the Lab, they would like for that to be possible, it is a complex add, and currently no one is working on it. So, a ‘NO’, but with hope. I would say, very very little hope. It is high hanging fruit.
What about grid wide experiences? The Lab is waiting to see how the land-based experiences go. There are several hundred experiences in the system. Not all of them are in use or that have scripts associated with them. So, it is a bit early to decide how well Experiences is going to be adopted by users.
As the Lab learns more about the feature’s popularity and how people use it, at some point they’ll decide if adding grid-wide experiences is worth the effort.
It isn’t contagious. This problem passed quickly, I think. I didn’t run into it, so it is hard for me to know. But, it revealed another part of how the Second Life™ system works.
Backend Serve updates – there are a number of backend services needed to support Second Life. When the Lab is changing/updating them they generally provide no public notice, unless users need to change behavior, like refrain from transactions or rezzing no-copy items (which hopefully is changing).
We don’t hear much about this Second Life™ change. But, Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF) is coming and will affect our use of Second Life in many ways.
The viewer currently uses Webkit, an old unsupported tech, to display a number of viewer panels (like Search). It is also the tech used in Media On A Prim (MOAP). It is a part of SL Televisions.
You may remember that weeks ago a point came up about how the little profile icons used in chat are never flushed from viewer memory. The more people that enter chat the more memory is used and never released until the user logs off or memory is consumed and you crash.
As tiny as they are they have a larger impact than one would suspect. The profile image has to be download and is the source from which the tiny icon is made. It is, as I recall, it is the memory for both images that is not released.
Last Friday word in the Third Party Developers meeting is Cinder Roxley started writing a fix. I would guess that we’ll see one this year, but I have no idea what Cinder’s schedule is like – which you should read as I have no real basis I can point to for that guess. I expect the fix would be tested in the Alchemy viewer before appearing in any other viewer.
For most, all this means is another memory leak is getting fixed and we will crash less often.
From the Third Party Developers’ meeting last Friday we got some new information about inventory and the viewer caching system.
The Linden engineers are still looking at inventory loss issues. A few weeks ago they asked for feedback from those losing inventory. How did you do that, type stuff. Ever since they have been working on fixing those things that lead to inventory loss.
One cause is apparently something to do with how inventory is organized. You may remember that one can be blocked from logging in by having too many items in a single folder. Somewhere above 5,000 items in a folder can be a problem depending on your connection and computer speed.