Second Life and Virtual Worlds
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.
Well… everyone is talking about the decrease in the number of concurrent users. I have certainly noticed the currently online numbers displayed at login decreasing. In 2009 I was seeing 80,000 and climbing. Now it is rare to see 70,000 and common to see around 40,000 to 65,000 with the median generally reported to be about 52,000. So, is SL dying? Is the sky falling?
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.
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.
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.
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.