Problem-Fix

Connecting to Second Life

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People have been having problems connecting to Second Life™ for as long as I have been using SL, probably longer. As the viewer is shifted to use more HTTP protocol services some are seeing better performance and others worse performance. Whatever the case, more use of HTTP is coming.

HTTP Library

Monty Linden has been working on the communications library used with Second Life. In general we know that work as the HTTP Library. The library is a file that contains all the code to run the HTTP communications channels for the viewer.

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Second Life Deferred Render

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There is a problem with Deferred Render (L&S = Lighting & Shadows) crashing some viewers. The Firestorm Viewer team thinks most people cannot run L&S. That may say more about who is using Firestorm and Phoenix rather than SL users. But, as far as I know there are no good stats to answer the question of how many people can run L&S, at least not in regard to SL users.

As we move forward this will be a more important issue. It certainly makes a difference in how Second Life™ appears on your screen.

What it is?

Deferred Rendering is a high fidelity render of lighting and in some systems shadows. There is no limit to the number of lights that can be rendered, which is a big step up from the 6 or 8 lights we could previously render in SL.

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#SL Group Edit Roll to RC

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SVC-4968 – The large group editing problem JIRA is going to roll to the Release Candidate Wednesday 9/19. This is way ahead of what I was expecting.

This means that sometime around noon anyone with a copy of the project viewer (see the JIRA to get a copy) can visit a region in the RC channels and edit groups with more than 10k members. If you have never logged into the JIRA, I have links too.

You may not want to be the first person to try this new feature. But, you may. Whichever, realize that the viewer feature is not a completed and polished product. There is no progress bar and it can take some time for a large group to load. So, be patient. Some large groups, 40k, could take minutes to load.

Older viewers will not be able to take advantage of the feature. Third party viewers (TPV) are getting the feature. We will likely see it in TPV’s before it appears in the Linden Release Viewer, especially considering the problem the 3.4.x series is having.

Animating Second Life Petites

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Judith Flow

I woke up way too early this morning… browsing through the forum I came across a post by Judith Flow about working with petite animations, which I am clueless about. Judith has a process for correcting animations so they work well with petite avatars.

Check it out: How to: make your animations Petite Mesh Avatar Compatible

Thanks Judith.

I would appreciate comments on how well this works from those that have been working with Petite avatars and animating them.

#SL Group Edit Update Week 34

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Baker Linden got us some new information this week in the Server-Scripting UG on the fix for Large Group Editing Problems.

For the last two months he has been trying to solve the problem of getting large data sets to transfer reliably via the current API (application programming interface) running over UDP (an Internet protocol – think of it as a spoken language), which is the protocol all viewers use now to get group member lists. It is when that UDP transfer fails that people have problems with group member lists failing to load. Those failures also create some simulator side issues that degrade performance.

Large Groups – Image by: KittyKat3756 – Flickr

The practical limit for use with UDP is a member list of about 10,000 members. Any group larger will not reliably download. On some connections even the smaller 10k list will have problems. Sometimes larger lists will download. Sometimes they won’t. Baker has optimized the SQL query that pulls the list and eliminated as many timing problems as possible. I get the impression that several SQL tricks were tried, like breaking up queries and batching group of members for transfer were tried. But, in the end it simply is not going to work. So, the new API is going to use HTTP for the transfer. Eventually the UDP service tube for group member lists will be eliminated.

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Bad News on Bandwidth

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Just after I got my article out on Bandwidth and  SVC-8124 I heard that there will be no promotions from the release channels to the main channel. This means the fix for SVC-8124 will NOT roll to the main channel next week.

There is a problem with permissions. See: SVC-8177 – There is different behavior between the RC channels and the main channel involving permissions, objects loose modify permissions. This is going to prevent any roll to the main channel.

The Bandwidth problem will continue for another week. I’ll have to see how they handle the fixes to the release channels next week to know how this is going to work. But… the Lindens tried several fixes, I think for 8177,  and they failed. I think the result is they are rolling back the release channels to unwind the 8177 fixes and get a main channel version with a 8124 fix running on the main trunk code. With any luck they can get the 8124 code in and they will make it through the RC QA.