Second Life

Things about SL

HTML HUD’s

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About a year ago Kelly Linden debuted HTML HUD’s. See: #SL Server Update Week 34 for my first mention of HTML HUD’s in 2011. We have not seen many of these being used. The advantage of HTML HUD’s the reduction in scripts and prims needed to make a working interface.

Darien Caldwell is one of the creative types making such HUD’s. He has pointed out that these JIRA’s are a problem:

VWR-29448 – HTML (Shared Media) HUD objects exhibit Unintuitive Focus and Control Behavior. This is about how the HUD’s work and look within the viewer. Most floated in the viewer go transparent when they lose focus. We know that we have to shift focus to the panel, by clicking it, before we can click buttons in the Panel. HTML HUD’s do not go transparent when losing focus. This means we click buttons in them, probably expecting something to happen, and nothing happens. That nothing is deceiving. The first click shifts focus. A second click will activate the button.

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#SL Server News Week 32

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There isn’t a lot of news yet this week. I think everyone knows that Pathfinding rolled out to the main channel. You can find most of the information about Pathfinding in the SL Wiki: Second Life Pathfinding  Category. The new Pathfinding Tools are in the Beta Viewer.

It is unclear, at least to me, when those tools will roll into the production release viewer. There is no estimate when the third party viewers (TPV) will have all the tools. I expect the Linden and TPV’s to catch up this month.

Server Scripting August 2012

Simon noted Tuesday that the crash rate for Pathfinding (PF) regions had jumped up after the roll out. But, it seemed to be stabilizing and coming down. I suppose when one adds 5 times more regions the possibility of finding problems goes up five-fold too. Whatever, as of the time of the meeting the Lab was only collecting data and watching the system.

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Second Life Pathfinding Performance

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I’m seeing a load of misinformation on Pathfinding performance. Back in May I wrote an article getting into Pathfinding (PF) performance. See: #SL Pathfinding Update Week 20. Scroll down and read the section on The Size of the Problem.

Navmesh w/X-Ray Enabled

PF has several different aspects. One could break it into two main parts. One is the part where PF figures out where everything is in the region and how to treat it, as what are obstacles and where are the paths. This is a slow and calculation intense process. But, it really only has to run at region start up, when a region’s ground topology changes, or things are built on the ground. It is sort of an initialization process.

Another part is when PF has to find what has moved, like a door opening. Things like a door that cut across paths are called cuts. PF has to find things that move and ‘cut’ the Navigation Mesh mostly referred to as Navmesh. The cut calc’s are very fast. They only need to revise the previously calculated Navmesh.

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Second Life Player Retention Week 32

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This is a long article. I think it may shape your thinking about Second Life™ and change how you deal with events in SL. So, I hope you read it and consider the concepts. Because while everyone has their ideas about Second Life™, ranging from; what it is to what it will become, what the Lab is thinking, planning, and doing… some basic paradigms have changed and few seem to have noticed.

The Inspiring Orientation – Learn to Fly

One area of thinking about Second Life important to a considerable number of users is what will retain more visitors, converting them to long term users, residents if you will. If you take a simplistic approach to things an answer and/or solution to player retention problems is likely to elude you forever, as humans as a whole are anything but simplistic.

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Looking Ahead Week 32

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Viewer Development

Viewer development process changes a bit. The Lab is changing the release process a touch too. More likely now we will see Third Party Viewer (TPV) Developers releasing betas and development viewers rather than production releases, the later being the stable version intended for general use.

The Lab has gotten much more metric driven about their crash rates. They are putting more effort into holding the lid on the Linden Viewer crash rates. This means code in the Beta and Development viewers are likely to see more testing and changes before new code makes it into the release viewer. That is good thing, but may slow things down.

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Groups Editing Update II

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Baker Linden gave us another update on how he is coming along with fixing group editing. There is hope but there are some issues to be solved too.

Baker said, “I’m in the middle of debugging the server code.

For announcements, I’m pushing legacy viewer support to the back burner.  The new group data format is similar enough that some things should show up in the group list (I haven’t tested that yet), but not everything  [will show up] ([i.e.,] currently group roles, and potentially other pieces of information).

 I could also be lying to myself about that as well; it may be totally incompatible — I’ll have to wait and find out when I get to the viewer side of this. This is why I’m pulling it off the list — if it works, fantastic; if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.

I think it’s not worth the time spent to support legacy viewers; I’d rather ship the fix, allow TPV to support the new format and allow people to actually use this feature. It’s just a matter of reformatting the data, but that extra work means more time spent on it and not delivering the feature.

 I doubt it’s going to be that big of an issue.”

Remember. He is new.

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