Server

Second Life Server Updates Week 14

by

Lots of things are changing. They aren’t visible changes that offer us new buttons or things to do. They are things that improve the operation of Second Life. I’ll point out some of the changes in the recent server updates.

Main Grid

The code preparing things for a change over to XMPP Chat have propagated through the main grid.

The Estate Management controls for handling special users, think teens but its not limited to teen, to deal with access, L$, chat and etc. are in the main grid now. I’m not clear if the new viewers, think Development and Beta, have caught up with the change. So, residents may not be able to use the features yet.

Read more

Second Life Server Upgrades Week 11

by

We have our new roll outs for the week. The Release Candidate areas have seen several roll backs as some tenacious problems persisted. One weeks old problem with the Sever-Maintenance upgrades by Andrew has been found and fixed. So, the feature is rolled out again in this round of Release Candidate area updates.

There are two similarly named but different projects named server-maint and maint-server. I’m unclear on the difference between them. The projects are about a group of fixes and enhancements for the simulator servers. Some of the more specific and interesting items follow.

Asset Delivery Path and Caching

Read more

Second Life Server Updates Week 5

by

The Beta Server Groups minutes are out. Here is some of the things I found interesting.

Asset Delivery – A new Linen, Log Linden, is working on improving asset delivery from the backend side of SL to the region servers. Most everything in SL is an asset. So, this makes for a big possibility for speed improvements.

It seems the delivery process from asset servers to sim servers is HTTP protocol. However, only textures are delivered to the viewer via HTTP.

Read more

Second Life Group Chat Upgrade Coming

by

We are getting closer. In Oz’s office hours meeting Gez Linden, the project owner, explained the next steps for moving forward on Group Chat. Soon a Group Chat Project Viewer will be out. Code will be available. An in-world group will be started for the project. The first testing will be on the ADITI (Preview) Grid in a couple of weeks.

Some ADITI sim’s are already using XMPP group chat. Once the Project Viewer is out the next level of testing can begin. The first release will be trying to achieve parity with existing chat. Once the new chat is doing everything the current chat can, the code can be rolled to the grid. We should see a big reduction in chat lag. Plus, the new XMPP chat will be separate from the SL SIM servers. So, we should see less region lag too.

Read more

OSGrid Update Week 4

by

OSGrid has been upgrading the backside of the grid. My regions have been offline most of 2011’s weeks 3 & 4 as the database converts to a new format. The latest release of the simulator software has some changes. These are the ones I found interesting.

Terrain Files

The sim software can now handle terrain files made using Terragen. Once the grid is back up I’ll be checking out the new file type as it imports and exports Terragen (.ter) format. Also, this list of supported files types for terrain files was updated. Hopefully it will be easier to work with terrain in Photoshop and L3DT. Thanks Kevin Cozens.

Read more

Second Life Parcel Encroachment

by

This feature is being rolled out to the main grid Tuesday. It has been in testing for the last couple of weeks. The feature failed its first round of testing in the release channel. This week it passed, so now it gets promoted to the main grid.

This is the feature that allows you to return prims located in another parcel that encroach on your parcel. It is the center of the prim that determines which parcel it is on. So, a prim can be located on parcel 1 and extend into parcel 2. As things have been previously the owner of parcel 2 was just screwed. Now the owner of parcel 2 will be able to return an encroaching prim.

Read more