Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This week following the Thanksgiving holiday we move back to the regular server updates. The Main Channel gets the maintenance package that was running on all three release candidate channels. This package has the fix for linksets and objects larger than 64 meters. (BUG-166 – Something invisible pushes avatars around.)
While some saw linksets larger than 64m as a good thing, it was being used to grief people and also accidentally causing problems. With this release the problem is ‘fixed’.
In the USA Thursday 11/22 is Thanksgiving Holiday. So, week 47 is going to be a ‘no change window’ for Second Life™ upgrades. Also, the normal Server Beta User Group meeting won’t happen.
Some people are hearing of script lock ups. Examination of the servers where this is reported reveals memory use at the 32-bit process limit. Maestro Linden thinks recent sensor changes were the source of that problem. In any event the sensor memory leaks have been fixed. I’m unclear on whether those fixes are in the current RC channels.
Still some locks up are being seen. If you are experiencing them, file a JIRA BUG. Script item, region, and as precise a time as possible are needed.
There is a new Development Viewer out: Second Life 3.4.3 (267007) Nov 14 2012. This viewer has the Large Group Editing and the new HTTP Protocol code. I’ve been playing with it. No crashes so far. Things rez fast. Seems pretty good. I get 15 to 17 FPS in my home with Lighting & Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Sun/Moon shadows on.
This is a fun Halloween build by Loki. It costs L$25 to get the HUD to play. It is worth the L$25. Try it you’ll like it. It will scare you at least once. With a little exploring you get a neat shoulder pet.
SLURL: The Well
Update: See Loki’s analysis of the popularity of The Well: T H E W E L L – Aftermath
Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.
Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.
A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.
Some interesting things are happening. The Server Beta User Group met Thursday in Morris, ADITI. This was Oskar Linden’s weekly meeting. Oskar is gone, it is fact. Maestro Linden is taking over the meeting… or may be Coyot Linden. I’m not sure it has been decided. But, it is the intention to keep the meetings going. Also the Deploy threads in the forum will continue.
I think it looks like Maestro Linden will run the meetings. Maestro hopes to get more developers from the server project attending the meeting. There are a number of server enhancements and features moving forward. We hear very little about them. Getting more developers involved may give us more information.
In News 1 I covered the roll out packages, so I won’t repeat that information.
They have found a new crasher bug in the code running in Magnum. Maestro says they have already found a fix for that problem.
This week the main channel got the code that had been running on Blue Steel and Le Tigre. This means the new version of Havok 2012.1 is going to be running in all channels as of Wednesday. So, the region crossing problems for vehicles should stop… well those caused by the Havok version difference.
The release notes are here for version: 12.10.26.266333. I’ve listed them several times in previous articles so I’ll skip providing them again.
This channel is getting a maintenance package. It will include bug fixes generated from code running on the Magnum channel in week 44. The most notable change is in BUG-166 – Something invisible pushes avatars around on Dore. This fix has to do with link sets larger than 64m failing to rez.
What was happening is griefers were rezzing 256x256x256m mega prims, which users can’t see, unless they have estate manager status. It looks like the Lindens are bringing back restrictions on rezzing objects larger than 256x256x10m. That size was selected because some race tracks make legitimate use of large thin objects to achieve seamless race tracts.