Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers meeting. Chakat NorthSpring has a video of the meeting: Second Life: Third Party Viewer meeting (21 November 2014). These meetings are consistently getting shorter. This one is down 30± minutes or so.
A couple of extra Linens were in attendance Friday; Brooke, Xiola and Bazz.
Oz Linden did his usual recap of viewer devlopment. He says they have lots of stuff in progress.
Simon Linden Tells us:
Yes some of the chat servers have been having troubles in the last few days. I’ve been looking into that … the code running there isn’t super new, and the outages might be timed with some of those [hardware update] restarts.
In any case, there is an update soon for the chat servers, and already another in the pipeline.
This week there are no rolls for either the main channel or RC channels. Next week is a no change week. So, I expect no roll outs that week either.
We can expect tweaking to the CDN system. This week whatever they are doing that requires multiple restarts is ongoing.
The main reason for no updates is the hardware updating requiring the restarts scheduled for this week. Estimating time for any individual update or the group is difficult as Simon says, “We also have to actually open up the server box and look inside to see if it needs an update, so it’s random how long each one takes.
This shouldn’t do anything grid-wide, aside from extra region restarts.”
This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. This is usually the best source for information about developments in the pipeline at the Lab. This week there is not a lot of news.
Benchmark RC Viewer – I been talking about this one. It is the one that ends the use of a GPU table to figure out the default video settings for a new viewer install.
Maintenance RC Viewer – This one is a collection of fixes and feature improvements.
AISv3 Fixes aka Attachments RC Viewer – This is a viewer version created to fix problems with AISv3 that were holding up Firestorm Viewer development. The problems were Linden Lab problems and we could see them in the SL Viewers. But, the bugs were a reason the FS Team was not merging the code into their viewer. More on this later. The AIS fixes were moved into this RC Viewer and the code changed to solve issues and make for easier merging into third party viewers.
Oz says this set of code changes are relatively easy to merge and this is the RC Viewer now seen as most likely to promote soon.
There is a new article up on the Firestorm Viewer site. See: Be Careful What You Wish For. I can read a lot into the article. That doesn’t mean I have it right. The things I am pretty sure of follow.
We have known for some time that the FS Team planned a viewer release for November. It seems the release date is sliding. I am guessing Jessica is feeling pressure or anticipating blowback from users when the release goes out and thus posted the article. We know from her own words blogging is not a thing she really enjoys. Thus we can assume something is motivating the post.
Jessica is explaining the difficulties of releasing a viewer and deciding what is and is not going to be in this release. Her estimated release date is ‘a few weeks’… the word ‘few’ is ambiguous. Dictionaries define ‘few’ as a small number of things. As examples they give 2 to 5. But, in my family 2 to 5 was a ‘couple of’ and ‘a few’ was closer to 10. We have no way to know what ‘few’ means to Jessica. But, I suspect this puts a viewer release nearer to the end of November and possibly into December.
The Deploys of Week post is up. The big news is CDN.
The Content Delivery Network upgrade will roll to the main channel, the entire grid, this week. That will be happening Tuesday morning.
All three RC channels will get the same maintenance package. The detailed release notes are not out yet. All the Deploys post says is there are ‘some improvements’. We’ll probably see more information coming out tomorrow (Tuesday).
The Snack channel is a small pre-test RC channel. It is used when the Lindens want to start out with a very small sample for testing. It was used for the initial testing of CDN. It is no longer needed and the regions in the Snack channel will be rolled back into the channels they were previously in and the Snack channel will disappear until it is next needed.
The main viewer is 3.7.17-294959
A Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.17.294943, which is on the Alternate Second Life Viewers page. You can read its release notes here: 3.7.17 Release Notes. Fixes and improvements are:
Login Viewer version 3.7.17.294959 – Release Notes – This is the viewer with the new login screen.