Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life News 2014-45 #3

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This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. This is usually the best source for information about developments in the pipeline at the Lab. This week there is not a lot of news.

Viewers

Benchmark RC Viewer – I been talking about this one. It is the one that ends the use of a GPU table to figure out the default video settings for a new viewer install.

Maintenance RC Viewer – This one is a collection of fixes and feature improvements.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014 - Frost Mole
Meauxle Bureaux 2014 – Frost Mole

AISv3 Fixes aka Attachments RC Viewer – This is a viewer version created to fix problems with AISv3 that were holding up Firestorm Viewer development. The problems were Linden Lab problems and we could see them in the SL Viewers. But, the bugs were a reason the FS Team was not merging the code into their viewer. More on this later. The AIS fixes were moved into this RC Viewer and the code changed to solve issues and make for easier merging into third party viewers.

Oz says this set of code changes are relatively easy to merge and this is the RC Viewer now seen as most likely to promote soon.

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Firestorm Viewer – Soon?

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Firestorm Logo
Firestorm Logo

There is a new article up on the Firestorm Viewer site. See: Be Careful What You Wish For. I can read a lot into the article. That doesn’t mean I have it right. The things I am pretty sure of follow.

We have known for some time that the FS Team planned a viewer release for November. It seems the release date is sliding. I am guessing Jessica is feeling pressure or anticipating blowback from users when the release goes out and thus posted the article. We know from her own words blogging is not a thing she really enjoys. Thus we can assume something is motivating the post.

Jessica is explaining the difficulties of releasing a viewer and deciding what is and is not going to be in this release. Her estimated release date is ‘a few weeks’… the word ‘few’ is ambiguous. Dictionaries define ‘few’ as a small number of things. As examples they give 2 to 5. But, in my family 2 to 5 was a ‘couple of’ and ‘a few’ was closer to 10. We have no way to know what ‘few’ means to Jessica. But, I suspect this puts a viewer release nearer to the end of November and possibly into December. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #2

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ADITI

There is a bug some encounter when logging into ADITI, the preview grid.

BUG-7707 – “Login at last location” not working for any region on Aditi & other assorted weirdness with teleporting.

Don't Panic 2014 - End of Game
Don’t Panic 2014 – End of Game

For now the Lindens think it has something to do with which inventory server your viewer has connected to. Simon Linden said, “…one of the back-end servers for this grid was having troubles and that’s behind some of the problems like logging into the last location.”

Until the Lindens fix it, there nothing we can do to get ‘last location’ working.

Maestro Linden advised us, “There was also an issue until yesterday [Wed 11/5] where Aditi mainland had “Allow Direct Teleport” disabled.  So you’d end up at a telehub in Ahern when trying to TP to Morris, etc.” He also advised us that the ‘troubled’ server had been fixed. I tried last location in ADITI this morning. It worked correctly. 

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Second Life News 2014-45

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Servers

There is a roll going to the main channel this morning. The Deploy thread in the forum describes it as ‘minor improvements’. Not much to go on.

RC Channels

There is no package ready for the RC Channels. Caleb Linden says there will be no roll of the RC Channels.

Deyanira Yalin - Builder's Brewery Class Instructor
Deyanira Yalin – Builder’s Brewery Class Instructor

Problems

I am seeing more people complaining about texture loading and render stalling and things remaining gray or blurry. It is still a small number of people, which means the Lindens are not going to turn their attention to the problem. They are watching for problems from Pipeline and CDN changes. So, that may reveal the problem.

If you are consistently running into the problem, file a JIRA. To helpful the Lindens needs lots of detail and a way to reproduce the problem. If this is a timing issue, the Lindens may not be able to reproduce it from within the Lab, they are sitting on the servers and miss out on some of the problems we see.

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Second Life Bits 2014-45

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Flickr

I am finding lots of people that make amazing images using Second Life. Blanche Foxclaw is one of the people that is posting images I like.

Silver (Close-Up)

Nebraska Oddfish has posted an image of her ‘average experience… a small number of people are complaining about this problem.

My average SL experience these days...

Fab Free Help Wanted

Fabulously Free is looking to add bloggers to their family of writers to help with their blog. See: Want To Join Our Blogging Team? The requirements, guide lines, and applications questions are all on the page.

Jingweidu Technology Co., Ltd

Jingweidu Technology Co., Ltd is taking pre orders for their Oculus Rift knock-off. Hypergrid Business has an article on it. See: Chinese Oculus alternative hits the market. (US$327± depending on the day’s exchange rate.)