Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The Linden made series of viewers
The week the main channel will stay the same this week, no update.
The three RC channels are getting a new update Wednesday. The package is only described as having some internal changes.
The main viewer is 4.1.2.321518. No change from last week.
This is not the week for news. Because of the US holiday Thanksgiving Second Life™ is in technical lock down, no changes. So, there are no server upgrades this week, main or RC channels.
Viewers are included in the tech freeze. So, the main viewer at version 4.1.2.321518 will remain there until Monday 11/28 or later. Word is it is much more stable than the previous version. It has a lot of fixes.
Well, for about a minute… when all the guns in Second Life broke… Now, there are work around steps and viewer fixes and… Whatever, you can again shoot those deserving of annihilation.
So, what happened? Why can’t I shoot that scumbag werewolf and save the hot mini-skirted damsel? Seems the Lindens fixed a problem in the process of building Horizons, that’s my thinking. As they expanded controls for use with Advanced Experience Tools (AET), Horizons is an advanced experience, the scripting functions needed a bit more control. So, as reported some time ago we got new SIT commands. See: Second Life News 2016 w45 and for more details Scripting.
I suspect somewhere in that process the Lindens noticed some REALLY OLD bugs, think beginning of SL time, which are now just oddities for most scripters and fixed them to make it easier (and likely make it more logically correct) to do Horizons. The result is all the weapons designed to deal with those bugs/oddities broke.
RL has kept me away from recent meetings I wanted to attend. The Bento meeting being the more interesting one in my mind. Fortunately Inara Pey made it to the Bento meeting. See: Project Bento User Group update 34 with audio.
Word from the meeting is the recent Project Bento viewer release fixes some of the tenacious problems. It adds a Reset Skeleton and Animation selection in addition to just the Reset Skeleton into the avatar’s right-click drop down menu. This is an attempt to handle most of the problems a few older animations have when run on a Project Bento viewer without changing how Project Bento’s animations handle bone/joint position. Think compromise.
The main channel of servers updated today, starting at 3AM SL Time, according to the grid status notices. That is the time of day with the fewest users. My tracker shows the minimum number of concurrent users is between 2 and 4 AM each day, about 19,000 to 25,000 this year. Peak use is about 2 to 3 PM and 2 to 3 times as many people, averaging about 55,000 in 2016 and peaking at 58,153.
This update ran on the RC channels last week. It contains some changes to the scripting language, a bug fix, and minor internal changes.
There is no new update for the RC channels, probably next week.
The Deploys thread did not update until late Tuesday. It usually updates late Monday or early Tuesday. Caleb Linden has been writing the updates for the last few months. I would guess this is not his favorite task.
So, the late posting and the election results diverted me away from getting my Tuesday SL News article published.
The main channel did not get an update. Today, Wednesday, we are getting an update to the RC channels. So, for the last week all channels have run the same package.