Second Life

Things about SL

Great Insights

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On Loki and the Goonies, Loki has posted an insightful article on Second Life gaming. You may have seen and even played his Evil Giant Worm Massacre. In true entrepreneurial style Loki is looking to provide a service and have it support his effort. The money to pay tier has to come from somewhere.

Evil Worm Massacre

Destination Guide

The Destination Guide is helping Second Life users in many ways. For merchants it attracts shoppers. For clubs it helps bring patrons. For game developers like Loki it brings new players. For the typical resident it provides a way to find interesting places.

Loki points out what is needed to make the Destination Guide a tool for all levels and types of users.

One of Second Life’s biggest problems is revealing the extent of Second Life and its massive content.

Loki has what I think are great ideas for improving the Destination Guide and Second Life.

#SL Market Place Problems

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Market Place Problems

Those of us marketing items in the SL Market Place web site are having new problems. I saw where one merchant was suddenly finding a number of their items were ‘Unavailable’. This usually means a problem with one’s Magic Box. But, their box seemed to be working. I decided to check mine.

WEB-4152

WEB-4152 – Fewer listings are shown per page than my pagination settings should display, is a JIRA issue my Merchant’s Dashboard warned me about today. I don’t log into my Market Place Dashboard often. I am hoping some staff will get replaced and someone will come in and fix the Market Place.

I have my Inventory set to show 10 items. The list contains 8 items. Changing to 25 items I see 20 items displayed. I have 25 items.

However, if you click from page to page, you do see all your items. Items are NOT skipped. They just push to the next page. I wonder how complicated this feature can possibly be. Lists like this are a click in Dreamweaver.

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#SL’s New Attachment Points

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Additional attachment points are always handy. We are apparently getting two more.

Neck

Those of us working with rigged mesh to make avatar bodies and clothes can see the neck bone in the skeleton. Even before a large number of people started looking at the skeleton and asking why can’t we attach things there, people were asking for a neck attachment point.

New Neck Attachment Point

If you are wondering how people knew about it… animators knew about it because the ‘neck bone’  can be controlled in an animation.

Now the neck attachment point is in testing in the Development Viewer. See  JIRA STORM-1672. Previously labeled VWR-26120. If you like the idea, vote for it by clicking WATCH.

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#SL Mesh News Week 44

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Good meeting on mesh problems this week and the state of SL Viewers. For 3 or 4 months we have been having problems with the SL Viewers. Runitai Linden is working with many of the viewer’s OpenGL issues affecting us. These problems extend into third party viewers using the V3 render pipeline from the Lab. So, what can we expect?

Viewer Fixes Lagging Behind

Those of us that use project viewers and the development viewer know that many of the problems in the main SL Viewer and SL Beta Viewer have been solved. But, those fixes from the project and dev viewers are slow reaching the main viewer. Plus these viewers have had problems most residents would not want to put up with.

There are, what I consider, two primary hold ups delaying fixes moving to the main viewer. First is the chaos of rapid development. Multiple teams are tackling various aspects of the viewer. That makes for quicker fixes, but adds the problem of integrating and testing the fixes. More people and teams mean more work is done but communication problems increase. This means we see fixes in project viewers that take time to reach the development viewer which precedes the SL Beta Viewer which precedes the main viewer.

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#SL OpenGL Fixes

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In this week’s mesh meeting the topic of viewer fixes being stuck in the development pipeline came up. For some time we have been dealing with viewer issues from OpenGL.

Runitai Linden said this in the Mesh Meeting:

The GL compatibility pass that hasn’t shipped yet is still in QA — it’s a very large change and there are still several regressions that need addressing before it ships.

In regard to fixes not making it to the main viewer:

It’s really a side effect of having a rapid release cycle — not every release can contain all the bugs that have been fixed because integrating them takes time — we have to pick which ones go in first.

Some of the remaining problems with the fixes are performance related, taking the Mac side to 5 to 10 FPS on good hardware. Until that problem is found and fixed it holds the process up for those related fixes.

For those with serious OpenGL issues, try the Shining Fixes branch of viewer development. SL Shining Viewer Download – build 3.2.1-244115 today.

Also, the SL Development Viewer (build 3.2.1-244112) has a number of fixes in it.

Be warned these viewer will have other problems and probably new bugs and returning old ones. Its part of the development cycle.

#SL Server News Week 43

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Over the weekend regions going offline became a problem. On Tuesday a Grid Status notice was posted regarding the problem. So far there is little more information on the problem. There is a little more below.

Main Channel

An update running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre has been promoted to the main grid. This update has fixes and a new feature. It brings an LSL (Linden Scripting Language) function labeled  llManageEstateAccess(). Some are already using the function to build tools that lets group members ban people without the member having to be an estate manager. Very handy.

Release Channel Update Window

The Lindens are improving the Wednesday timeline for updates. The window is to be between 7 and 11 AM PD/SLT. It can take longer if the hit bumps. In general updates to all three channels should happen within the window. Magnum is updated first, then Blue Steel, then Le Tigre. So, you can approximate where in the window your region fits.

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