Second Life

Things about SL

The Phoenix-Firestorm Survey

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The Phoenix hour is a bi-weekly show facilitated by Phaylen Fairchild (the nosey heifer – hilarious inside joke – see 52:00±). In the video Jessica Lyon is speaking for the Firestorm/Phoenix team. This week’s meeting is mostly about the recent survey on five features in the viewer, which the Firestorm team ran. The following is a summary of the meeting. The times are HH:MM:SS or just MM:SS and they are approximate. The words here are my paraphrasing of the video not a transcript. So, my take may be different than yours was or would be or than what Jessica intended. Simply it is what I took from what they were saying.

The Phoenix Hour

If you watch the video be warned that while the video starts at 00:00:00 the sound failed until about time mark 07:00±. So, you can skip into the video without missing anything. Also, the video is mostly just talking heads. So, if you listen without watching, you won’t miss anything. The only URL presented I give as a link below.

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#SL Server Updates Week 26

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Servers - Image by: dumbledad @ Flickr

Today one of the long pending updates has finally rolled out to the main grid. With any luck, it will work fine and a roll back can be avoided. So, what is in this new roll out?

Mono2

The big gun in this roll out is Mono2. Kelly Linden is generally blamed for the Mono2 Update… well… attributed is probably a better word. But, since no good deed goes unpunished… we can thank him while gathering tar and features. Whatever your feelings on Mono2, it has been a long time coming. Today it was rolled out to the main grid.

Mono2 is an update to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) system. The original language is one created by Linden Lab for use in Second Life (SL). Scripts are used by residents to make things like doors open and teleports teleport. Scripts are written in a language. Many of you will have heard of JavaScript, which is used widely with web pages. LSL is a somewhat JavaScript like language used exclusively in Second Life with a dialect used in OpenSim (OSSL). I suppose one could say the relationship between JavaScript and LSL is a bit like English and Spanish being Latin based languages. Your ability to speak one does not allow you to speak the other, but any other Latin based language will be a bit easier to learn.

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Second Life Mesh Meeting Update Week 26

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Mesh cost is still an annoying topic of conversation. It is still undefined. But, we are getting closer to a cost and we are learning more about the reasons for the costs. The Lindens are definitely being more open about the Linden costs. That hasn’t done much to improve the manners of residents participating in the meetings. 🙁

Mesh Meeting

Mesh UUID Swapping

This subject keeps coming up. Kyrah Abattoir  asked the question in a new way. Quoting, “Figuring out a sane and conservative way to implement “set by UUID” for Meshes, builtin delay by link set for example, to prevent excessive mesh swapping/animating attempts, yet allow loading and unloading a mesh for legitimate uses. It seems to me this question assumes a swap can be done and that it is frequent swapping that overloads the sim. Originally many hoped that mesh could be animated as sculpties are.

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Work Around for Rigged Mesh

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For those of us using Blender 2.5x the problem with rigged mesh not exporting correctly is a known issue. A couple of days ago Tapple Gao posted a fix for that problem in the SL Forum. See: Rigging working in Blender 2.5

This is a geeks only fix. The fix submitted to Blender.org is code that must be used when COMPILING a version of Blender. The fix is simple enough, simple as in short, and I suspect will be in the next release of Blender.

Someone may put up a build of Blender with the patch implemented. Until then the fix doesn’t do most of us any good.

#SecondLife Server Updates Week 24.5

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The week of 6/12-18 there was not a main server roll out. The week of 6/19-25 we did get a roll out on the main grid. The roll out had the group chat fixes.

Group Chat

Group chat has been receiving attention. The Utility Servers were updated over a week ago. Now the region simulators are updated, a minor fix.

One of the Group Chat Problems found was the Utility Server for chat had to send chat messages to multiple people in a region. If ten people were in a region the server had to send ten copies of chat updates to the region. This change allows the utility server to send the sim one message and the simulator distributes the chat updates. This sim change is not something that makes a lot of difference to most users. But, any load taken off the utility servers running group chat helps.

The previous update to the utility servers has made a significant difference to group chat for everyone. Enough so that this alarming JIRA was filed: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-7031

Group Chat Performance

The above image is a plot of chat messages (messages + group status updates) per minute sampled over one day. Each dot is one of the 16 utility nodes.

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