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Second Life: Third Party Dev’s News Week 10

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This was a short meeting, <20 minutes. There is some interesting news.

..● Hunting ●..
..● Hunting ●..

Viewers

As of 3/12 the main Linden release viewer is still 4.0.1-310054.

RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.312094

RC Second Life Maintenance Viewer version 4.0.2.312269

RC Second Life Quick Graphics Viewer version 4.0.2.312297 – This viewer updated Friday.

All three RC’s doing better than current release viewer. Oz Linden says one of these will promote early next week. As the Quick Graphics viewer has one more fix that Oz wants added it is the least likely. But, now way closer to being ready for release.

After they look at the data accumulated over the weekend, the Lindens will decide if the HTTP or Maintenance version will be promoted.

Second Life Project Bento Viewer version 5.0.0.311861 – Project Bento is close to having a final version of the avatar skeleton. But, the project is not to release ‘real soon’. There are things to fix before it is ready for prime time. Expect it to stay in beta until may be summer.

I recorded the last Bento UG meeting. But, I had a problem with Viewer sound. I couldn’t tell until after the meeting that FRAPS was not getting the sound… to my recording is useless.

Second Life Project Oculus Rift Viewer version 3.7.18.295296 – This version hasn’t been updated in a long time. The Lindens are running into some non-trivial challenges with the latest Oculus Rift SDK. But, they are determined to get a viewer working with Rift.

Other News

TLS 1.2 – Beehu Linden made a PSA. Beehu is requesting all TP Dev’s test their viewers to confirm they are working with TLS 1.2. The Lindens are removing support for previous versions of TLS. This change is part of their compliance effort. Soon you will not be able to do money stuff and some other related security things… whatever those are… no one said, unless your viewer supports TLS 1.2.

Progress on the Linden 64-bit viewer is good ans we will see an RC viewer ‘soon’. Progress is fast and things are going well as the past changes to the compiling tools the Lab uses has made this design process much easier.

There is still no support for the new Havok version, the physics engine for Second Life. Once the 64-bit version is working well the Lab will look at a viewer side Havok update.

STORM-2116 – Improved support for Retina Displays. It seems the Alchemy viewer has this problem solved for Apple device users. The Lindens are looking at bringing those changes to their viewer.

Servers

Server side work is focused on anti-griefing updates. That explains why we aren’t hearing much news from the server side of the team. The Lindens don not talk about security fixes. Test™

The question was asked about the Registration API’s ETA. This is the connection interface to Second Life that allows third parties to provide a signup and entry way to Second Life. Grumpity Linden is estimating it is going roll out in late March or early April, but this first update will not be the complete update. Some additional features will come out in a later version.

Web Site

The Lindens will be cutting off old RSS stream for the Grid Status page. Steven Linden is pointing out that the change to the new Grid Status site and removal of the old RSS feed could break some TP viewers. You can see the new status pages at http://beta.status.secondlifegrid.net. Months ago this site appeared. The Lindens have been working on it and will ‘soon’ change over to it. Steven is estimating about the middle of April.

As a user that browses to the current URL you won’t notice a change as the current URL pointing to the old Status page will be changed to point to the new site.

Second Life Update Week 8

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Servers

Last week (7) saw an unusual rollout for an update with a security fix in the under lying Linux code.

Peace..
Peace..

This week (8) there is no roll to the main channel. There will be a roll to the RC channels with all three getting the same package; RC BlueSteel, LeTigre, and Magnum. There is a Server crash fix and some minor improvements…

So, not much news on the server front. 

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Server Update #2 Week 7

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Thursday we had a surprise roll out to the RC channels of the main grid. The package was a fix for a security exploit. Friday early in the morning the update rolled to the main channel of the grid.

2016.0220
2016.0220

So, what was going on? The details were published by April Linden ‎2016-02-19 11:18 AM in the SL Forum/Blog. See: Why the Friday Grid Roll?

This exploit was in part of Linux system software. The Linux developers made the patch. The Lindens had to figure out what it would do to the Second Life(TM) system. Was it needed? Yes, crackers could exploit SL. Would the patch break anything in the SL system? Nobody knew. They had to find out. So, the Lindens put a lot of effort into getting this exploit resolved.

Server Update Week 7

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We were not expecting any updates this week. But, we got one. The RC channels have been updated in a surprise roll out. We will likely see the package roll to the main grid as soon as the Lindens are confident the software is working well.

Jail
Jail

This departure from schedule is due to a security exploit.

As of now the Lindens are not talking about the exploit. But, they seldom do. We might hear a bit after it rolls to the main channel. But, I won’t be holding my breath.