Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
The Region Crossing news is hot. The new code is in use across the Magnum Release Channel. The stats on the improvement are impressive. The new improvement is referred to as Region Crossing Compression or just Compression.
There are some nifty graphs showing what is happening. Notice a little after ten compression is activated. The graphs take a significant step down.
The chatter is the region crossing changes are being activated today. I have yet to chase down the sources. The release notes for Tuesday’s rollouts show the rollout to Blue Steel. In world chat is that they are active on Magnum. One person quotes Oz Linden saying activation will be immediate.
I have to do some reading and searching to find out the details. Is this activation just for the release channels or the entire grid? I’ve been to Magnum. (Magnum RC Sandbox 1 — boxes 1 to 4 are the region names). I find it works well going from some of those regions and not so well for others.
Update: 2011-01-06 2:00 PM SLT – It seems the activation is for the Magnum release Channel. That is about 10 to 20 % of the main grid.
There is a meeting with the Beta Server team at their regular Office Hours, today at 3 PM in the ADITI Preview Grid, in Morris.
It seems an avatar carries 4 to 10 megabytes of data from region to region. It is unclear just what all that includes. Your baked avatar textures may be part of that. The state of scripts you are wearing is included. So, it is actually quite a lot of data.
Over the holidays not everything stopped. There has been progress and changes in Second Life. One SCRUM Summary even commented on the massive amount of code coming from Linden teams prior to Christmas. From all that, these are some of the things I found interesting that have been happening.
Work is progressing on STORM-807 – update returnability of objects based on new encroachment rules. This change should appear on the main grid in early 2011. The feature will allow a parcel owner to return an object that over laps their parcel. Objects are located by their root prim’s center. If part of prim or some of the objects linked prims extended into another parcel there was/is little the one encroached on could do. That will change.
This is a two sided feature. It is going to the Le Tigre release channel today. But, viewer code is needed to make the feature available to residents. One can apparently return items now, if they use a newer viewer with the Sim Console. Press Ctrl-Shift-[back tic] to see if the Sim Console will open. You can read more here: Parcel Encroachment
Dolphin Viewer has a new version released today, 1.5.41.3627. The release notes are part of the announcement. See: DolphinViewer 1.5.41.3627.
Nothing really earth shaking is in this new release. This version has support for the new group limits. The proposed 40 group limit anticipated for Second Life and the higher group limits for other grids like OpenSim. The actual limit is set server side. At login the viewer gets the group limit and adapts. So, you are likely to see different limits in different worlds.
KirstenLee has released a new version of her viewer. See: Kirstens S20(45).exe.
KirstenLee didn’t say much about this viewer and I’m not finding the (45) release notes. Her brief description of the changes is the adding of all the Mesh and Viewer fixes available from Linden Lab.
Kirsten also expects this to be the last release before a version change over to S21, which will have her new render engine. It will be interesting to see how it performs.
A couple of hours after I noticed the release notes being put up the downloads were announced on the Phoenix blog. The release announcement is here: 1.5.2.818 Final Major Release! And here: 1.5.2.818 SSE windows Bug. Ouch.
Update: About 3:03 PM SLT 12/22 the fix 818A was released.
This is a two part bug. If you have a newer computer (no more than 3 years old) then you are likely not affected. This is a problem with computer CPU’s. You have probably been messing with computers long enough to know the CPU is the heart and brain of the computer. As time passes more abilities are built into the CPU, they are taught new tricks. SSE is one of those tricks. Older computers, CPU’s, can’t do the trick and newer ones can.