Second Life and Virtual Worlds
There are a few interesting things that came up in Andrew’s late Friday afternoon meeting.
Andrew has been building a script to turn on Encroachment Return across the grid. The feature made it through QA and has been rolled out for some time. But, enabling it in thousands of servers is not small chore.
The script was run Thursday morning. So, you should now be able to return encroaching objects.
Information is starting to leak out about new features coming. We are getting more details on the features we know are coming. So, it has been an interesting week.
Also, meetings are overlapping with the same subject coming up in different meetings. Rather than have parts of the subject scattered throughout various articles, I’m trying to condense them. So, information in the article is from one or more meetings. Thus the title change.
The image shows the meeting place for Open Source. This is the site that is the subject of the build competition being run. See: Hippotropolis Theater Design Competition.
From this week nothing has rolled out. On the other hand the last two weeks have seen a major change to the better in stability stats. While teleporting is still a problem, the number of failed teleports is decreasing.
There is not much happening. The Release Channels had the Inventory Apps Package running. That package is not going to roll to the main grid. So, there will be no roll to the main channel.
A change to llGiveInventoryList() began impacting people last Thursday, as the Release Channel rolls were delayed one day. Those using RLV and selling RLV related products started to encounter problems when in the Blue Steel and Le Tigre release channels.
By Sunday Kitty and Marine, movers and shakers of the RLV features, had found the problem and filed a JIRA. It got lots of community support and scorching flames. By Monday morning the Lindens realized they had broken a significant part of Second Life. The result is this Wednesday, 3/14, the change to llGiveInventoryList() will be rolled back.
Several interesting things were discussed in Friday’s Server Scripting meeting.
In pre-meeting conversation I heard a new texture compression process is being tested for storing textures in video memory. The feature is in one of the project viewers. I’m unclear on which project. While there are some video artifacts it almost cuts memory use in half. There is a Debug Setting that turns it on. It is off by default. …and I don’t know the name of the setting.
It seems the current iteration of the feature also compresses the User Interface textures resulting in some oddities.
Simon Linden says the new software packages rolled to the release channels Wednesday are working well. Another region crossing bug was found. So, they are planning to roll the Bug Fixes package to the main grid next week. I think that means the Le Tigre and Blue Steel will roll to the main channel and Magnum’s will stay on a release channel.
This week we got a roll to the main channel. This update contains some voice improvements/fixes and I think the Phase I region crossing code.
Oskar is on vacation, so Maestro will be handling the news and meetings until Oskar is back.
These two channels get a maintenance package that has only bug fixes.
This channel has the region crossing project (Phase 1 Project) from last week, with an additional fix for a case in which some avatars would get stuck in a region and be unable to TP out.
There is quite a bit of news this week. Some interesting stuff.
Andrew Linden has talked with the ‘land people,’ whoever they are, and the feature that allows one to return encroaching objects is ready. The feature has been in progress for weeks. Mesh objects created some problems apparently. The code is already rolled to the main grid and apparently has been there for some time. But, now it is ready to be enabled. Andrew is working on a script to go through and enable the feature on all the mainland regions.
He is in process with the script. Exactly when it will be ready and the encroachment feature is enabled is not yet set. I would guess a week or two, but there is no way to know. However, once Andrew is sure his script works, he’ll tell the support team and give them an opportunity to make a blog announcement.