Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life News 2017 w/32

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Servers

Corrections made 8/9

The main channel was updated with version #17.07.27.327933 this morning, Tuesday. Last week the main channel was running version #17.07.11.327548. Both of these are listed as having “internal changes”. Geek-speak for changing data reporting, debugging, and performance information… usually.

Street at sunset
Street at sunset

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum were supposed to update to #17.07.27.327933 tomorrow, Wednesday. But, Simon tells us that isn’t going to happen. There probably won’t be a restart as they restarted with last week’s update. The Lindens try to restart regions once every two-weeks even if there is no planned update.

No big problem, but enough of one the Lindens decided to hold the RC update back. It had to do with regions names not being applied correctly in the restart, so they never appeared to come online.

The Deploys thread is dying. There is very little discussion or information to be gleaned from reading the posts. They are basically a day, time, and link to release notes. So, I suspect fewer people are reading the posts. I expect the posts to go away at some point.

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Second Life – Content Creation – None

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This week the Lindens are having their planning meeting. Several of the weekly User Group meetings have been canceled to allow Lindens to be at the planning meeting. The Content Creation UG meeting is one of the canceled meetings.

Summer Secrets
Summer Secrets

Next week (32 – Aug 10) there will be a meeting. The week after (33) and the one after that (34) there will be no Content Creation meetings because Vir Linden will be on vacation. So, there only will be meetings August 10th and 31st.

Second Life News 2017 w/31

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Servers

The main channel is planned to run version #17.07.11.327548. I am taking that from the Deploys thread for the week of 7/31. It indicates a planned roll for Tuesday. But, this is the version that was running last week… no, two weeks ago. So… I’m not sure what’s up. However, the main channel region my home is in did restart 8/1.

Mimsy Moo
Mimsy Moo

Blue Steel, La Tigre, and Magnum are to get #17.07.27.327933 on Wednesday. Same fixes as last week with additional ‘internal fixes’. That roll posted as completed 8/2.

Viewers

Main viewer 5.0.6.326593. No change.

Second Life Alex Ivy Viewer version 5.1.0.507412 – No change. Still running a high crash rate, according to the Lindens. My 64-bit hasn’t been crashing. But, I may just be lucky.

Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 5.0.7.327958 – An upgrade from last week. This is the version most likely to get promoted.

Second Life Voice Viewer version 5.0.7.327253 – No change.

Second Life Project 360 Snapshot Viewer version 5.1.0.506743 – No change.

Related

This week the SL Lindens are meeting to plan and decide on which projects to take on next. Also, lots of SL users are distracted with Sansar. So, we aren’t likely to see much happening this week.

Second Life – Third-Party Dev News 2017 w30

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Some new news this week. Some of it BIG!

Viewers

The Maintenance RC Version Viewer updated. The update includes a couple of important crash fixes. Oz Linden is requesting third party developers include one of them as soon as possible.

This past week was a perfect storm for the Lab. A backhoe literally cut a network cable. This cut off a significant number of people, dropped connection disconnects. Of course, for them, it was WTH! They then tried to log in again. The Internet being redundant, as it is figured out a new connection path suddenly thousands of users started trying to log in.

The login servers peaked and started to lag. Low-level code in the viewer’s login process started timing out and retrying the login. The code was very aggressive and thousands of users began unknowingly hammering the login servers. The storm of logins created what was essentially a Denial of Service attack. The result was more and more people were blocked from logging in which resulted in more hammering. A Catch-22. 

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Second Life Content Creation UG Video Index 2017-07-27

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Another CC UG Meeting. There are some interesting bits of new news. Check the Index to select parts of the video of interest to you or watch the whole thing.

Index

0:00:41 – Meeting starts. Vir tells the SL version of the Bento Avatar is back online. For a time its home at Amazon Cloud was down. That has been fixed. There were still some link issues from the SL Wiki. I don’t know if those have been fixed.

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Testing the AvaStar Model vs LL Avatar Model

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About 5 years ago I was testing the various models available for use in Blender and comparing them to the SL default avatar. Now Gaia of AvaStar has done that for you. Check it out.

I think it is really nice to have this information. But, there isn’t much use for it. Mesh clothes built based on the default avatar are simply never going to fit well. The sliders will always change the classic avatar and mesh clothes at different rates.

The classic avatar use morphing. Mesh clothes use rigging. Those two things respond differently.

However, the AvaStar model will get you as close to a match as is possible.