Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life News 2013-32

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Maestro Linden is on vacation this and, I think, next week. Caleb Linden is posting the Deploys for the week of… forum post.

There will be no new software rolling out to the main grid. It is unclear whether there will be region restarts are not. We will likely know when regions start going down.

Blue Steel

This release candidate channel is going to get a new maintenance package. VWR-13228 is about: an object obtaining and retaining permissions indefinitely without avatar’s knowledge. BUG-3291 is the llListen in linked objects listening at root instead of the linked object’s local position “after re-rezzing the linkset.”

A change added in the package is regions should now block rezzing and entering during the final countdown time before a region shuts down. This should make for a better shut down.

And of course a few crash modes… exploits, have been fixed. That were… Oh Wait! They never tell us.

Magnum and LeTigre

These two channels will continue to run the SSA upgrade. Caleb tells there are no changes to the code. Leaves us wondering what’s up with that? I suppose we may hear tomorrow.

Pathfinding Rumors Persist

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When Pathfinding was in development I had some concerns about how it would affect Second Life™ performance and especially about how hard it would be for region and land owners to implement. I wasn’t the only one. Rumors got started and region owners freaked out. The result is many turned off Pathfinding for their regions.

Surprisingly today, many region owners apparently still turn off Pathfinding thinking it is going to improve region performance. After all, if it isn’t running it can’t use up CPU cycles. Right? Wrong.

Whether Pathfinding is on or off the core functionality uses the same amount of cycles. Enabling or disabling Pathfinding is like enabling or disabling building in a region. The only affect is has on performance comes from whether people add prims or not. It isn’t the enable-disable that affects performance, it is the number of prims added. Otherwise, nothing in the server’s operation changes. This is just another setting that controls what people can do, not what the simulator does.

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State of Game Engines

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I think any one that has been around Second Life™ for any time and taken a look at the engine driving SL realizes the current batch of game engines in the gaming world far exceed the capabilities of Second Life. To get an idea of where the art of games engine design is take a look at Game Thirst’s Count Down of the top 5 game engines.

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If you are not that into the tech of game engines you may be wondering if Second Life will ever catch up. Well, probably not, which begets the question: why not? 

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Second Life News 2013-31 #2

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I’m lagging on the news. But, there isn’t much happening… well that affects us. The Lindens are busy. It is just stuff is in testing and incomplete.

Rollouts

The main channel and Blue Steel and Magnum got the roll outs we were anticipating. But, the Blue Steel roll out did not happen. The package planned for it failed internal QA testing and was held back. So, Blue Steal is running the same version as the main channel.

We found out Thursday that the main channel updates for faster texture retrievals cannot be used by the current viewers. However, the code to take advantage of that change is in the pipeline, somewhere. 

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Mesh Deformer and the State of Mesh

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The Deformer project remains pretty much on hold. The JIRA thread STORM-1716 has turned  in to a massive discussion where the uninformed and technically illiterate rant about what should be done. It is now a useless JIRA report too long to read with good technical information buried in thousands of words of useless rhetoric. The purpose that report best serves is to demonstrate why the JIRA was closed.

Mesh Shape Changing
Mesh Shape Changing

So… until Oz Linden can convince Linden management to assign people to the Deformer/Avatar project I see it remaining on hold and the JIRA item having devolved into a waste of time.

With In-Worldz deciding to adopt the Deformer, we are likely to see it added to viewers that support non-Second Life grids. But, for those viewers to be used in SL, they have to be classed as experimental viewers. That likely means little use by residents and lagging support. But, it might increase the Lab’s priority for the Deformer… might…

But, there is a need now and an annoying problem with Mesh Clothes.

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