Bits and Pieces of Second Life

Crash Report? - Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr
Crash Report? – Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr

Bliss Couture is having a closing sale. Most things are 90% off. That was a costly shopping trip.

The Second Life™ Wiki’s information on building vehicles has been updated a bit. See Linden Vehicle Tutorial and VEHICLE_BANKING_EFFICIENCY.

It is the first of the month so FaMESHed is having their monthly event. Teleport to FaMESHed.

View Candidates

The Google Breakpad RC Viewer is back. The Lab has found that most of the problems they had with Breakpad were caused by Windows XP. The Lab will take a new tactic with XP. But Breakpad is going to be in use for Win7, 8, and Mac… I think Linux too, but I am not clear on that. 

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SL Inventory Problem

In machines with limited memory there tend to be more inventory problems because of a crash while the viewer is closing. Latif Khalifa, Singularity & Radegast TPV Dev, explained that as the viewer closes it compresses the inventory list and saves it in the SL cache folders. (Those are the files with names ending in inv.gz.)

I’m not that into what this part of the viewer is doing or how it does it. Hopefully I have this mostly right.

If the system is almost out of free available memory, the task crashes as runs out of memory needed for the compression process. The result is not noticeable until the next login when parts of the inventory are missing. Of course the files can be rebuilt from the SL server and the inventory is not really missing, the viewer just thinks it is. 

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Second Life News & Group Bans 2014-9

At the Beta Server User Group Baker Linden did a recap of the coming Group Bans feature. You can read that recap on Inara’s blog: SL projects update week 9/2: group bans update. She is pretty much quoting Baker, which is what I would do, so I’m not going to repeat the quotes here.

SB2014-9_001
Server Beta UG 2014-09

Group Bans is moving into testing on the Preview Grid. We’ll hear when the Lindens have a test viewer ready and are ready for testers to help. We will probably hear something next week (10). Third Party Viewer Dev’s will be testing their viewers as soon as the test package is on ADITI, which is expected to be next week (10). 

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Somato

Inara has an article up on Yuzura Jewell’s Somato… a program that simplifies texture baking. The idea is to project an image you have onto a 3D shape. Then bake in shadows.

Somato
Somato

Yuzuru asked I check out the program. I’ve been spending my time on other things and just haven’t gotten to it. But, I want to let you know Yuzuru has Somato out. So, check out Inara’s article: Somato: create textures and shadows for sculpts and mesh.

Learn more and download page for Somato.

New Second Life Zipper Project Viewer

The Lindens have announced a faster installing viewer: Project Zipper Viewer. See the SL Blog announcement: Try Project Zipper for Faster Viewer Installation.

The download is: Project Zipper Viewer version 3.7.2.286810.

I am expecting a surprise to arrive any day. This release would seem to be part of the infrastructure change needed. It might also indicate why the surprise’s arrival is taking longer than expected.

I’ll test the new install process if I can fin d the time. But, there are a number of things to play with just now. Plus there is some real life work intruding on my play time.

Second Life News 2014-9

Tomorrow (Tuesday) the main channel will get the update that has run on the RC channels for the last two weeks. This is a small package with a couple of bug fixes. One is ‘logout due to premature region restart’ bug. The other bug fix is for some obscure email issue.

Server-Scripting Meeting 2013-51 - Andrew's last meeting.
Server-Scripting Meeting 2013-51 – Andrew’s last meeting.

RC Channels

Both Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get a new package. The Lindens describe it as an infrastructure update. I have no details on what in the infrastructure the update may be enhancing. We may learn some more tomorrow.

The Magnum channel is getting a different package. This is the package several of us were trying to figure out the status of last week. This package has the AISv3 updates. To make use of the new features you must use the Sunshine Project Viewer.

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