Everyone has had trouble with the Market Place’s delivery system failing. Plus the in-world magic boxes have been an annoying pain. Moving them is a pain. Having a place for them is a drag. Well, things are going to change.
Direct Delivery Beta
You may have heard that our inventory starts to have problems when we exceed more than 250 or so items in a folder. As the inventory API changes that soft limit is changing to something like 10,000 items per folder. That could be part of the change to support Direct Delivery.
Tuesday saw the usual rolling restarts and new software. Again it is bug fixes and a few new features.
Users are unlikely to see any changes. With a stop watch one might… might… notice a speed up in inventory download speed. Parts of the gzip feature have made it to the main grid and some parts are still in testing in Release Channel areas only. However, only the related project viewer uses the feature. It will be some time (a couple of weeks?) before we see this feature used in viewers.
No word on XMPP chat changes. As far as I know now, that is still in testing on the ADITI grid. I know group chat really sucks right now. A large percentage of my chats in groups return a can’t connect. Very annoying.
Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?
A new version of the Dolphin 2 Viewer is out. The released planned for this slot was to be a 2.6 version. But, things change. Bug fixes, features, and the load of changes coming out of the Lab seems to have pushed this release out the door. It may be several weeks before we see the next release. There is lots to upgrade going into 2.6. The Development viewers are coming out in 2.7 versions.
I see today that AM Radio’s regions are going to close in 6 months. (See: AM Radio Regions Closing Down In 6 Months – by Daniel Voyager) It seems every week or so some region is closing. I have to wonder how many regions are closing and if the closings are a Second Problem or just the natural evolution of the grid.
Live Regions in SL Grid - Statistics @ Metaverse
Metaverse publishes stats on the number of live regions available on SL. Since December 2010 the number is static. Growth can be said to have reached plateau… or stopped depending on how one wants to spin it.
The tools used to build our viewers are not the hot topic among most residents. However, the VS2010 in this latest project test build is all about the tools. VS2010 means Microsoft’s Visual Studio IDE (Integrated Development Environment). Getting to where this tool can be used to develop the SL Viewer has been a main topic in the viewer development circles. Why is this important to you?
Celtic Myst
It will be a big deal for those with newer computers. First, the VS2010 is a tool much like Microsoft Word but for programming. Developers use it to write programs. It enables links to programming libraries, like Word has Thesaurus and Dictionary. It has syntax checking that is very much like spelling and grammer checking for word. Imagine if you could literally not read a document, it scrambled all over screen, just because a comma was in the wrong place. That is the level of precision with which programmers must write. VS2010 provides lots of help and support. While that is nice for the programmer, the benefit seen by residents is faster updates and bug fixes.
