Server

First news out this week is that there will be no roll out to the main channel this week. One was planned, but problems over the weekend changed that plan.

SVC-8208 – L$ received notification not appearing when on an RC region. A problem related to this JIRA disrupted plans for today’s roll out. Because of the holiday another RC could not be selected. Also because of the holiday there is not enough time to develop fixes and load them into the release channels on Wednesday. This means we may not see a Wednesday roll. It may get pushed back to Thursday. But, these RC things depend on how things go today.

This means the high bandwidth use problem is going to remain on the main channel.

The Tuesday rollout to the main channels is going to happen, provided nothing goes wrong over the weekend. As of late Friday it looked as if the Magnum channel would roll to the main channel. That update contains these fixes:

• SVC-7641: Object on land sending excessive messages. The messages sent from the simulator about objects now contain location information, making them easier to find and return.
• SVC-8146: llRezAtRoot() does not set correct parameters (for sale) on rezzed object in Second Life RC BlueSteel 12.08.03.263047
• SVC-7641: Add object location info to messages, was “Object on land sending excessive messages”
• SVC-8124: Excessive “ParcelOverlay reliable” messages sent by regions since last rolling restart (2012-08-08)
• SVC-8136: Attachment point pelvis not being released

Magnum does contain the SVC-8124 fix that most acknowledge as the one that will fix the high bandwidth use problem.

Simon Linden says the code on Magnum has the same fixes as are on Blue Steel, but with more fixes. I think he means more fixes as in more work was done on the items listed rather than more items were added. But, more item fixes are listed as running on Blue Steel than Magnum. So, one is left wondering if Simon is a bit behind, skipping detail, I’m missing his point, or I figured it out.

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Baker Linden gave us an update on the large group editing fixes that are in progress saying, “I just finished up most of the group management stuff. The viewer is loading data successfully, and it should display everything as it did before. I’ll probably hold off on pushing it to QA until Tuesday, as I really don’t like dong commits late in the day, the day before the weekend. But I’m going to get everything ready to go out first thing Tuesday.

I’ll be working with Oz Linden to help me figure out how to deliver a developer preview build of the viewer for people to see the new code, and I’ll be working on documenting the new way group data is managed.

Le Tigre

It has gotten a little confusing as to what is or is not running in the Le Tigre release channel. It is officially now reported as an infrastructure package with no anticipated changes for the regions. There is some rumor that these are network exploit fixes. But, it is hard to know. Others have said it is an isolated SVC-8124 fix for the bandwidth problem, which is what I’ve been thinking. I’m at the point I just don’t know. I lean toward the network exploit fixes now. But, since we can’t see any operational differences the point is mostly moot.

SVC-8177

SVC-8177 – here is different behavior between the RC channels and the main channel involving permissions, objects loose modify permissions. This problem may be the sole reason that nothing rolled to the main channel this week. The RC’s are running a fix for the problem. However, there are some reports the problem persists.

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For some time people have been fighting with getting roads to work well in Second Life. The subject came up again this week. Andrew Linden gave us some information that may help some work around the problem:

It [the road seam bounce] is a really hard problem to fix… it is a basic quirk of the physics engine. It might be fixable with careful content workarounds, but it is very hard for us to fix by tweaking vehicles any further.

I don’t know the best way to work-around the seam jump. I’m guessing that you could add a “transition slope” at the edge of the roads pieces that drop down, and overlap the meshes there.

What happens is that the physics engine will produce collision points between the car and some surfaces that are “behind” others … if they are on distinct objects.

Server Updates

All of the software packages running in the release channels had problems. So, there was no roll to the main channel. The main channel will continue to run the same software as lat week.

Release Channels

Blue Steel and Magnum will continue to run last week’s packages with some additional big fixes.

Le Tigre is going to get a revised server maintenance package.

It seems there was a security patch in the previous week that caused problems for all the release channels and is the reason none are being promoted this week. Tomorrow it will be isolated into the Le Tigre package… I think isolated. It’s a security thing so the Lindens aren’t talking.

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