Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
You may or may not have noticed that the world map has some problems. Depending on what region you search for it may or may not show up and may not show a map tile (image).
The image shows Sunny Point failing to rez an image of the region. If you jump out of the viewer and try to find the region in http://maps.secondlife.com/, you will find it does not come up at all.
Griefing is an ongoing problem in Second Life™. I am seeing a new round of user complaints regarding griefing. Most of the recent complaints I’ve seen involve free sandboxes. The most recent notable example is VooDoo’s complaint that I mention in: #SL Adult Content Problems.
About five days after my article posted a thread started on SLUniverse. See: LL looks like idiots when they can’t keep griefers out of thier own info hubs. The ‘colorful’ title pretty well says it all.
It is pointed out that Linden owned sandbox regions in the LEA Project are user moderated. Allowing users to moderate regions has possibilities. The use of user-moderators also has special problems. Darrius Gothy wrote a really good article on those problems back in 2011… (sounds like my grand dad). See: Griefing: User Sponsored Enforcement Groups.
Some interesting things are happening. The Server Beta User Group met Thursday in Morris, ADITI. This was Oskar Linden’s weekly meeting. Oskar is gone, it is fact. Maestro Linden is taking over the meeting… or may be Coyot Linden. I’m not sure it has been decided. But, it is the intention to keep the meetings going. Also the Deploy threads in the forum will continue.
I think it looks like Maestro Linden will run the meetings. Maestro hopes to get more developers from the server project attending the meeting. There are a number of server enhancements and features moving forward. We hear very little about them. Getting more developers involved may give us more information.
In News 1 I covered the roll out packages, so I won’t repeat that information.
They have found a new crasher bug in the code running in Magnum. Maestro says they have already found a fix for that problem.
Whirly Fizzle has been doing some poking at the Deformer. She He sees it as working very well with avatar physics. She He has made some new Collada files and uploaded them to test with the Deformer.
We still need more clothes to test with. The lack of test items is slowing the QA process for the Deformer. Apparently the testing clothes in the closet were uploaded with a previous version of the Deformer Project Viewer. So, they don’t deform. Oz Linden is going to clean the closet out. So, there will be just about nothing in it.
For weeks we have been trying to get people to provide test clothes. This is an old problem in Second Life. People like to complain about the Lab not getting things right, but when people are asked to help, they don’t. They will however be quick to rave and rant about what the Lab SHOULD have done.
The best we can do is send notices to our favorite mesh designers and ask them to help and more responsibly provide something ourselves.
I got interviewed by Ginette Pinazzo. She is a strongly opinionated mover and shaker in the Adult Content community. I met her when I started to attend the Adult Content User Group meetings. I realized she had opinions and knew Second Life™ history. It wasn’t long before I realized some people like her and others seem to detest her. Others just don’t understand her. But, are any of us really understood?
Ginette and I talk every so often. She is active in the Zindra community and adult content in general. Her interests seem to extend beyond those confines as she is often working with the art community. She is often talking with and sometimes hammering on the Lindens to make things better.
This week the main channel got the code that had been running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre. This means the new version of Havok 2012.1 is going to be running in all channels as of Wednesday. So, the region crossing problems for vehicles should stop… well those caused by the Havok version difference.
The release notes are here for version: 12.10.26.266333. I’ve listed them several times in previous articles so I’ll skip providing them again.
This channel is getting a maintenance package. It will include bug fixes generated from code running on the Magnum channel in week 44. The most notable change is in BUG-166 – Something invisible pushes avatars around on Dore. This fix has to do with link sets larger than 64m failing to rez.
What was happening is griefers were rezzing 256x256x256m mega prims, which users can’t see, unless they have estate manager status. It looks like the Lindens are bringing back restrictions on rezzing objects larger than 256x256x10m. That size was selected because some race tracks make legitimate use of large thin objects to achieve seamless race tracts.