Ebbe Visits Server-Scripting UG

We haven’t heard much about what is in the works at the Lab. I suspect that Lindens are somewhat conditioned to not say anything about things that have not been officially cleared for release. But, today Ebbe Linden, Ebbe Altberg – Linden Lab CEO, was at the UG meeting. Since he is the last word on what can be released for public consumption, he can speak more freely. I’ll provide news updates then get to Ebbe’s comments.

SS2014-24_003

Ebbe Linden – 6/2014

Servers

There is nothing more to say than I reported yesterday. See: Second Life News 2014-24. Continue reading

Linden Lab Ahead of It Self?

I see the Lab has announced the roll out of the second phase of the Sunshine Project, also known as Server Side Avatar (SSA) baking. See: Project Shining is now complete! This is the part we have been referring to as AISv3. These are the additional server side changes to the Agent (LL-ese for Avatar) Inventory Service (AIS) to fix remaining problems with avatar appearance failures.

TheSta_014

The current main SL Viewer has the viewer side code for the latest Sunshine updates. But, only the Blue Steel RC channel has the server side of these changes. So, we won’t actually see the effect of these changes in most of SL until those changes roll grid wide. Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-24

Servers

The Deploy announcement is out. The GROUP BAN project is to be promoted to the main grid. That will make it grid wide. You need to get the project viewer to take advantage of the feature. But, whether you have the viewer or not, if you are banned you are banned and will not be able to re-join the group. The project viewer is only needed to DO the banning.

The Trace - 2014

The Trace – 2014

So, this means there will be a rollout tomorrow morning for the main channel.  Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-24

Server Main Channel

There is no roll to the main channel this week. Last week the channel was re-rolled to fix a security issue that slipped through. But, there are no feature additions or changes.

RC Server Channels

Blue Steel was rolled to the same software as the main channel last Wednesday to fix the security issue mentioned above. This week the channel will get an updated version of the Inventory Update package. This is the AISv3 updated made as part of the Sunshine server side avatar baking project.

Le Tigre will get the Group Ban project with the security updates.  Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-23 #2

ADITI Grid Fixed?

For weeks… well months… we have had problems with the Preview/Beta Grid (ADITI). Logins and inventory updates were not happening. A password change would show up everywhere in the SL except the Preview grid. Which mean all of a sudden people could not login, unless they tried their old password.

Also, inventory updates were not happening. In the recent couple of weeks fixes were made. The Lindens did get the password problem resolved. But, the Lindens tell us an unrelated prevented the inventory updates from happening.

Those are now thought to be fixed. I plan to give it a few days before changing my password and trying for an update. Continue reading

Second Life Interesting Bits 2014-23

SL Go 7 Days

This past week the SL blogosphere has been talking about OnLive’s announcement that they now offer a 7 DAY trial period of their SL GO product. If you don’t know what SL Go is, OMG! Well, see #SecondLife Gets a Mobile App (early March 2014). Prior to this the trial period was far too short for anyone to get an idea of whether this was a useful service. This longer trail should allow one to use SL Go long enough to learn the basics and actually use it to gain a sense of what it is like.

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

OnLive 2014-10 Games Page

The last few days I have been experimenting a bit with viewers, something I used to do frequently in my quest for the best viewer. Those were the days when viewers were each very different and had very different feature sets. To some extent that is still true, but I think much less so than in the past.

What I have found is that where FS and SL Viewer get 6 to 20 FPS in a crowd of avatars SL Go runs a pretty steady 40 to 50 FPS on the desktop and my S4 in the same crowds. Impressive.

You might want to give it a try.  Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-23 #2

Coming Soon

Simon Linden is working a problem to fix a problem that leaves attachments appearing to still be attached. The problem is especially noticeable when a script removes an attachment after a region crossing. See SVC-7626Script object detachment doesn’t appear to remove worn object in the viewer. This is an older JIRA of a related problem. Apparently the actual JIRA being worked on got MOVED into the Linden’s private MAINT channel rather than cloned.

Server/Scripting UG 2014-23

Server/Scripting UG 2014-23

The apparent problem is some timing issue in how the servers send messages to viewers. Simon describes the problem as:  Continue reading

Second Life News 2014-22

Yesterday afternoon at 3:25 PM PDT Linden Lab posted to the Grid Status page that a previously planned service outage would be scheduled for this Wednesday. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, so as you read this, the work is complete and an all clear was posted at 6:51AM.

During that time various backend services were offline and logins were offline. You can see the break in the graph of concurrent  users.

Graph via etitsup.com - 2014-05-28

Graph via etitsup.com – 2014-05-28

Presumably this was the outage planned for last Thursday, before Tuesday’s problem when the login servers ran out of assignable user numbers. (I am guessing that fix is still in progress, but there is no official statement.) If this is the rescheduled outage then some hardware change was being made to some of the many components of the various databases.

While the Lindens think there may be some small improvement in performance they also suspect it will be small and probably not noticeable. I call these types of gains ‘stop watch’ gains, because they are smaller than we normally can notice unaided.