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Second Life News 2013-30 #2

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Some of the most interesting news comes from the Third Party Developers meetings. This is not a meeting that is well publicized. I suspect many think that having just the well informed attend is more productive. I tend to agree.

This article is 2,600+ words. It has some work-around methods for some current problems that people are experiencing. It covers some of the most informative news about SL that is available.

TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30
TPV Dev Meetin 2013-30

Server Side Appearance

SSA is going extraordinary well. The stats coming in are as expected, which means the backend is performing as expected. This means the Lab’s estimates for the amount of hardware needed are going to be correct.

View adoption is going pretty well. About 75% of users have adopted an SSA capable viewer. (84% of Firestorm users – see chart) Looking at that the other way, something like a quarter million people login each day with an old viewer. Also, the numbers vary quite a bit from day to day. 

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Second Life News 2013-30

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I’ve been hoping the SSA feature would roll to the entire grid. The Lindens just aren’t listening to me. The main channel is going to get the Experience Tools package, which is an infrastructure upgrade that is basically invisible to us.

Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30
Content and Mesh Meeting 2013-30

Blue Steel get the package that ran  on Le Tigre last week. This is bug fixes and a change to Materials handling to improve performance. It gets the Experience Tools upgrade and may be a fix or two.

Magnum and Le Tigre are going to get the SSA package. It updates to include the Experience Tools update and a couple of fixes. The combined region count for Le Tigre and Magnum is near 4,000 regions.

The way this is going we might see all three RC channels running SSA in week 31.

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Second Life News 2013-29 #3

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Not much new. The Lindens usually providing us information are either on vacation or tied up getting their projects out.

Group Bans

Baker Linden hasn’t been around the meetings lately, at least ot the ones I’ve made it to. Simon says he is working the UI for Group Bans. So, there is progress. It is hard to know if the UI work is at the end of the process or early in the process and needed for testing. So, no ETA.

Viewers

The Linden Lab Official: Viewer Source Repositories page of the wiki has been updated. I see the term ‘default cohort viewer’ appearing now. The page states, “The default cohort viewer here is the default [viewer] provided by the downloads page. The other cohorts are candidates being evaluated to be the next default; all are believed to be stable.”

The current version of the default SL Viewer is 3.6.1-278007.

The current Beta version is: 3.6.2-278602. 

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Second Life News 2013-29 #2

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Dagger Faulkwing alerted me to a change in the RC roll outs.  Maestro posted a change on the 16th about 3:30 PM PDT. It seems they will place the SSA package on the Magnum channel as originally planned rather than leave it on the Le Tigre channel.

It was originally planned to move the SSA package to the larger Magnum channel (2,454 – Le Tigre: 1,431). Using a larger channel would give the Lindens more information on how the SSA servers are handling appearance baking loads. In this case about twice as many regions.

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Second Life News 2013-29

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We are getting a new rollout today. This is the package that ran on the Magnum channel last week. This is a package with fixes for Pathfinding. The continuous re-bake of the Navmesh is one of the problems solved.

Server Scripting 2013-29
Server Scripting 2013-29

If you had not turned off the terrain re-bake notification it could get annoying. So, this will be a welcome fix. It only affected regions that had multiple parcels with boundaries under water. So, not a common problem.

Release Candidates

Le Tigre is going to continue to run the Server Side Appearance (SSA) package. I was expecting this to move to the larger Magnum channel. But, that is not the plan now.

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SSA Follow Up 2013-28

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We now have SSA enabled on the Le Tigre Release Candidate channels. For a list of regions running SSA see my article: Le Tigre Regions List. So, what is it like? Well, my opinion is it really depends somewhat on the viewer you are using, but generally better.

Non-SSA Region
Non-SSA Region

So, far my best experience has been with the Production release of the SL Viewer version 3.6.1-278007. I’ve had some crashing as I tp from SSA to non-SSA regions. But, otherwise, it is the best I’ve seen.

The Beta version of the SL viewer is another story. It is the worst of those I tried. I expect that to change. It is called beta for a reason.

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