Server

Not much exciting stuff this week. There is some confusion as to what is happening. If I understand correctly the Maint-Server updates are still in the Blue Steel channel and they have been rolled to the main grid. The updates are a collection of fixes to known problems, a couple of bugs that crash sims and a logging thing that should help performance have been added to Blue Steel and will now be testing.

A little disappointing is the fix for jumping vehicles, the bounce as they move from prim to prim, which in testing on the ADITI grid has been removed. The fix worked with Havok 4 (which was on the main grid in mid 2010) but has been shown to create unexpected side effects with Havok 7 in ADITI. See JIRA SVC-5880 for the history of this fix. So, the lab will backup and try again.

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So what is a Physics Material?

These are materials that can be applied to an object. They allow one to adjust friction, density, gravity multiplier, and restitution… and I have no idea what the restitution part is about. So, with a material you could make a balloon that floats away. Balloons are more fun indoors. Vehicles behave better with 5x gravity.

Eventually these settings will be scriptable. More testing is needed to see if there are griefer exploits the Lindens have not thought of. Once they are pronounced safe, the scripting side will be added.

Material settings do not work on avatar attachments. Avatar attachments are excluded from physics calcs, so Physics Materials have no effect when worn.

Falcon Linden is going to offer a bounty for first person to crash an Experimental Mesh region (ADITI) using Physics Materials. The region is apparently not set up yet. The controls will be in the Mesh Project viewer.

Several new features are in testing on the Preview Grid. This new stuff is coming to the main SL grid in the next few weeks. Until then you can preview it in ADITI.

llCastRay is a Linden Scripting Language (LSL) function. You may or may not know that SL guns rez and fling prim bullets. Rezzing prims produces lag. Rezzing prims with scripts causes even more lag. llCastRay is a replacement for that process. One may be able to develop weapons with less lag using llCastRay.

Details on the function are in the SL Wiki: llCastRay()

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It seems that the XMPP Chat the Lab has been implementing and testing in ADITI is not providing the improvements hoped for. So, progress on implementing XMPP Chat is stalled. The effort is changing to finding out what is the causing chat problems we have now.

According to what the Lindens say in the Beta Server Meeting the new XMPP Chat was no better than the current chat. The decision has been made that the Lab will not be replacing our current chat with a new system that is no better.

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This week Fast Assets moved to the main grid. This is sort of a change from doing things in a sort of single cue of first in-first-out to multiple cues. The idea being to reduce anyone person’s wait time. One should see the world rezzing faster.

Moving into the Release Channel testing are various bug fixes. None too exciting, but they are progress.

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.