Second Life News 2017 w50

It is the holidays and everyone is busy. Plus we are coming up on the No-Change-Windows. So, while there is some news, things are slow.

Servers

Last week the email update rolled out. So, if you haven’t verified your email address, you have stopped receiving your offline emails of IM’s.

🐼483🐼

🐼483🐼

Main Channel – We get an update to version #17.12.01.511131. All we know about this version is there are internal changes.

If you think about the usual pace of server development at the Lab, which we see when shinnies are in progress, and the months of ‘internal improvements’, where we aren’t seeing much change, you start to think the Lab is slacking off. I doubt that.

Since the community is complaining about content theft, we’ve had a few hints they are dealing with it, and we know the Lab doesn’t talk about security fixes… I assume there is quite a bit of work going on to fix exploits. But, we can’t really know.

RC Channels – No update this week. The RC’s will continue to run last week’s version #17.12.01.511131. Mazidox Linden found a bug in the planned updates and stopped the release. So, next week… probably not. That is the start of a no-change-window. Continue reading

Second Life News 2017 w49

Problems

Sunday people were losing their Linden homes. The Lab started looking for the cause Sunday and Monday got it fixed.

Dec 3, 09:38 PST Resolved – We have identified and corrected the issue that caused some Linden Homes to be abandoned. We are working to assist those affected; please file a Support ticket at https://lindenlab.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new if you need help with this issue.

Dec 2, 20:00 PST Update – We are still actively investigating an issue involving some Linden Homes being abandoned for some Residents. We appreciate your patience while [we] continue to investigate.

Dec 2, 13:49 PST Investigating – We are currently investigating an issue where some users & apos; Linden Homes may have been abandoned inadvertently. If you have been affected by this, please file a support ticket at the following page: https://lindenlab.freshdesk.com/support/tickets/new. Please watch this post for further developments. [ https://status.secondlifegrid.net/incidents/dfgl51dm33lz ]

I was curious what Linden Homes look like these days. They have changed. They are nice. Finding them to look at is a bit trick. The Linden Homes stuff on the website is here: Customize Your Home. I’m not sure this link will work for everyone. It is in your Dashboard->Account->Premium Membership->Explore Your Linden Home. They have pictures in the website. But, I wanted to SEE the homes. Continue reading

Content Creation 2017 w48

This week the Content Creation UG met. There isn’t a lot of new news. We are at the point the Lindens are grinding out fixes. Developers are wanting to start building animesh products. But, the state of animesh just isn’t there.

I’ve used Medhue’s video. The audio sucks. I had my volume maxed and it was still a problem for some voices. But, you can hear most of it. My summary and index follows.

0:00 – The next Animesh viewer will be a merge of the existing main viewer 5.0.9.329906, which is the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer. There may be a couple of Animesh fixes in the release. But, primarily the change is to 64-bit.

1:17 EEP – Rider was on vacation last week. So, he didn’t get much done. He is currently moving things from the viewer into the sim host. Meaning the server side of inventory is being built. Rather than manually importing Windlight presets from other viewers and collection into the program folders, we will have inventory items. All those presets will be Windlight settings things we keep in inventory. Continue reading

Second Life and the CLOUD

Inara Pey has apparently sat through a dry video of Tara Hernandez’s, Senior Director of Systems and Build Engineering at Linden Lab, presentation at Amazon’s Las Vegas promotion for their services. She has written about it here: SANSAR AND SECOND LIFE IN THE CLOUD: LL SPEAKS AT AWS RE:INVENT. The video is here:

That is a 34-minute video on YouTube. There are some gems in the video that interest Second Life™ people.

I had not realized the first iteration of SL used a graphics engine designed to circumvent the Windows graphics and go directly to hardware. This go-to-hardware was the early game-graphics optimization used by most of the industry. That is long gone. Now OpenGL is the optimization that interfaces with all the various graphics systems in use with SL.

Inara covers the main parts SL’ers will find interesting. But, the video is loaded with tidbits about Second Life and how they are changing away from the problems with ideas for Sansar. So, some seldom talked about SL things are described in the video.

There is about 10+ minutes of tech description on Sansar and how it works. And toward the end some words on how they plan to adapt Second Life for life in the cloud.

Second Life News 2017 w48

Update: An hour or so after I post the Deploys thread gets an update.

Servers

There is no deploy post this morning (checked at 9:30AM & at 12:30PM). My region ‘restart tracker’ has not seen a restart on the main grid. So, I am assuming no restart or updates this week.

Cherishville and the way from the christmas tree

Cherishville and the way from the Christmas tree

That leaves the main channel running version #17.11.11.510664. As there were no new RC packages last week the RC channels are running the same package. And as there is no Sever-Scripting meeting this week, we don’t know what is planned for Wednesday, if anything. I am guessing nothing.

Update: The RC channels got an update to version #17.11.17.510835.  The big change is email.

  • IMs sent to an offline resident will only be sent to verified email addresses
  • Internal Changes to Outgoing Emails

The SL Marketplace is having issues. Item listings are disappearing. The Grid Status page states the problem is being investigated.

Viewers

The main viewer is version 5.0.8.329115, which was placed in service week #42.

Second Life Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.510354 – – No update, released week #44.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.9.329906 – No update, released week #47.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.8.328552 – No update, released week #42.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.0.506743 – No update since week #27. We keep hearing an update is imminent…

Second Life Project Animesh Viewer version 5.0.9.329815 – No update, released week #46.

Second Life Project Render Viewer version 5.1.0.510604 – No update, released week #46. Last week’s article gives you the details of this project.

We are in the holiday season. Things move slowly.

Third-Party Viewers

Nothing new popped up in my Feedly.

So, while I thought last week was a slow news week, this week is shaping up to be even slower.

Pine Lake – November 2017

Pine Lake is a post-apocalyptic build in Second Life™.  I’m not that much into doing travel guide stuff for SL. But, occasionally I find a place that is like… Wow! Pine Lake is such a place.

PineLake_001 - Landing Point

PineLake_001 – Landing Point

You can get a kinda lame idea of what the place is like from their Flickr Group. The images there today do not do the build justice.

It is the attention to detail that impresses me. Wow! Just wow. The amount of detail is incredible. Continue reading

Second Life News 2017 w47

Servers

The Main channel was restarted with version #17.11.11.510664. This update includes Internal Fixes and a fix for BUG-139176 Issue with OBJECT_REZZER_KEY reporting incorrectly after linking and delinking prims. This version has run on the RC channels for a couple of weeks.

The Fire Within

The Fire Within

There will be no updates to the RC channel this Wednesday. The next day is a holiday in the USA. So, the RC channels will continue to run the packed just promoted to the main channel.

The internal fixes are typically security fixes and data collection changes. Recent some of those changes had to do with various copy exploits. Simon Linden says they have caught a bunch of people trying to use those exploits.

However, there are still exploits allowing copying without the Lab being able to detect it. So, Simon asks that people keep filing JIRA and Abuse Reports. Lindens are still working on closing the exploits. So, the reports guide their work. Help by filing a report, if you have actionable information. Continue reading

Second Life Third-Party Dev Meeting 2017 w46

The next Third-Party Dev meeting is 12/15.

Alex Ivy

Alex Ivy RC Viewer is holding up well in testing. Actually, better than ever.

There is the one startup crash, they haven’t been able to reproduce. The one they think likely from benchmarking crashing systems. They think they have a fix. The supposed fix will be in next update of Alex Ivy, likely arriving from QA just after Thanksgiving.  If that fixes the crashes, then they will be ready to release Alex Ivy in Early December as the main viewer.

Zenos Profile Photop

Zenos Profile Photo

This is sort of a big deal. I’ve been using 64-bit viewers almost exclusively. They are WAY more stable than 32-bit viewers. If you are not running a 64-bit OS, update ASAP.

When Alex Ivy is released the Lab will have a 32 & 64-bit Windows viewer. They have a 64-bit Mac viewer and no 32-bit Mac.

Linux

If things go as planned, they will build a Debian 64-bit Linux viewer. They will not be able to put much time in on QA. But, they plan to get a Linux build out.

The Lab is counting on the community to provide QA and fixes. Otherwise, this won’t be a working Linux version. Think of the Lab as providing the foundation. The rest is up to the community.

Oz Linden tells us there is a 64-bit Linux version in the Rendering branch. More about the rendering branch below. Continue reading