Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
The Beta Server meeting this Thursday was definitely attended by more Lindens than I’ve ever seen in any one place.
That is a pretty big list of Lindens.
Maestro covered the server rollouts for the week. No surprises there. But we did get a bit of information on a couple of the fixes in the Magnum RC channel.
We have had lots of discussion in the community about tier prices. The Lab is quietly contacting educational and non-profit groups that have abandoned Second Life™ Sim’s. Hamlet has an article about it here: Linden Lab Quietly Offering 50% Discounts to Select Non-Profit & Educational Groups Who’ve Given Up Their SL Sims.
New software rolled to the main and RC channels this week. There isn’t much to say about the rolls. We hit some problems with last week’s rolls. Fixes for those problems are in this week’s RC channels.
The main channel got the Large Object Rez upgrade that Baker Linden worked on. The idea was to place handling the rez tasks in separate threads. This allows the simulator to continue doing other tasks while a large link set is rezzed.
Blue Steel and Le Tigre are getting the same package. It fixes a crash mode. Presumably this is some exploit fix. I think that because almost nothing else is being said about it.
The Magnum channels got the package from last week with fixes for problem found last week. The known fixes are; region managers being exempted from Direct TP disable, neighboring region visibility issues, and bogus User Not Online error messages.
Maestro Linden posted in the Deploys thread about a bug they are having trouble reproducing. If you are seeing this behavior file a JIRA with your details and as precise a time for the experience as possible. The one bug that we’re having trouble reproducing is a bit different: User-A TPs into somewhat busy sim … Read more
SUN-38 is a bug report in the Second Life™ JIRA. The details of the JIRA item are visible to most SL users, I think. In case not, the title is: As users of kneel/lay/sit animations and tiny/giant avatars, we need a way to change the body size in SSB sims.
The description of the problem is:
In server-side baking regions, it becomes impossible to change your avatar’s apparent size (bounding box X and Y sizes and pelvis to feet length) since the LLAgent::sendAgentSetAppearance() function becomes a NOP.
All TPVs are providing a way to adjust your apparent avatar body size: this is of uttermost importance to adjust the height above the ground for sitting (on ground), kneeling, crouching and laying anims (since those specific anims are sensitive to the pelvis to feet length and changing your shape or shoes affects this length, that, when different from the length the animation was designed for, makes your avatar either float or sink into the ground).
RLV enabled TPVs even provide a way for scripts to adjust automatically this “Z offset” so that any avatar sees the animations played right (see the full story about this feature here: http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=447).
Such a “Z offset” also allows to adjust your avatar’s position for devices you “sit on” and that play a sit animation without letting you adjust its offset (which, again, depends on what shape and shoes your avatar is wearing).
With the appearance of rigged meshes and the tiny or giant avatars, it also became very important to adjust the bounding box (X and Y sizes) for the avatars: a tiny avatar should not bump into obstacles like if its shoulders would be 45cm wide when they are only 15cm, and giant avatars should also have a possibility for their actual shoulder width to be taken into account. Granted, the current (non-SSB) servers do clamp the values sent by the viewers, but at least, there is some possible leeway (and it would be a good occasion to remove that clamping, or at least to allow for a wider range of values).
Being unable to adjust our avatar body size in SSB regions is a MAJOR regression. Please, provide a way to do it !!!
If you only use the SL Viewer, you may not know about the Z-Offset. But, you have seen the reason for it with shoes. When one puts on various shoes they may appear to float above or sink into the floor/ground. This floating/sinking is caused by a combination of how the shoes fit and the size of your avatar.
In late February problems in ADITI were slowing down Third Part Party work on SSAB (Server Side Avatar Baking). Nyx Linden explained that some of the problems in the SSAB pile-on test were caused by inventory failures. The problem then becomes sorting out what is an ADITI Inventory issue and what is a SSAB issue.
In any event, some significant changes have been made to ADITI Inventory. Unfortunately the changes may not save you from problems if you change your password to trigger an inventory refresh. My experience has been to keep changing your password until it corrects. But, with these changes the Lindens are saying if a password change breaks your inventory, contact them and they will fix it.
Two new pile-on tests are planned for this week. There will be a test using the SSAB Project viewer, which you can download now. That test will be after the Server Beta meeting Thursday in Morris, ADITI. The meeting starts at 3 PM SLT. The test will start whenever the meeting ends, scheduled for 4 PM. But, meeting do end early. So, be early.