Second Life News 2019 w18

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Last Friday there was a Third-Party Dev UG meeting that ran 48 minutes. The video is here. I’ve included the interesting stuff mixed in.

Servers

The main channel will stay with version #19.04.22.526534. No restart. This is the version pushed to reduce disconnects. In my experience, things are much better.

Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum will update to version  #19.04.25.526669 on Wednesday. The version is listed as having Internal Fixes and Fixed EEP Regressions.

Rider Linden met with an SL group, Visionaire, to explain EEP. It is an hour plus video.

From the Server-Scripting UG: [12:34] Oz Linden: And we’ve already put in place a bunch of improvements [think detectors & stats] to our RC monitors to help prevent a similar recurrence (with more coming soon)

As of the 4/18 server change was to roll the server OS back. In doing so some are seeing less script time available. One or two have seen a drop from 100% of scripts to only 30% to 60% run.

Oz says they have lots of performance data for that metric. So, they will be checking as they move to re-upgrade the OS. The simulator OS has to update as part of the pre-move to the cloud.

There are other script performance things planned. So, the Lindens will add in a look at the script slowing issue along with those. Continue reading →

Firmament Kickstarter Tops Goal

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This morning when I checked Cyan Worlds, Inc. kickstarted had topped the goal of US$1,285,000. Yay! This means the game Firmament will be built. Estimated release date July 2020. The video explains what the game is… sort of.

Cyan Worlds is the company that made Myst in the 90’s, a game that was the number one best seller until the Sims came out. They made a series of Myst sequel games. One is their Myst Online:Uru Live, which is still running and free to play.

The most recent release is Obduction. Continue reading →

Second Life’s Newest Continent – Bellisseria or Land of Linden Homes

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New Linden homes… neat. You can read the Linden announcement here, Fresh New Linden Homes are Here with New Themes and Larger Options. You can read the SOLD OUT notice that came 48 hours after the opening.

Their homes are on a new continent to the southeast of Sansara. As of 4/18 word is this Linden Homes continent is named Bellisseria. Will find a number of the regions are named with the prefixes SSP and SSPE.

Get The Freight Out Map of Continents

The new Bellisseria continent is connected by ocean regions to Sansara. Thus, the interconnected area we can sail and fly in has increased considerably. Initially, there were no public lands on the new continent where one could rez a boat or aircraft. However, at the time the group GTFO (Get the Freight Out) had members living in the new continent that had set their property to Rez-OK.

I am not providing the SLURL’s as I haven’t asked permission to share them and with new Rez-OK places popping up you won’t need them. These private places seem to be a thing shared only among the GTFO players/participants. Continue reading →

Second Life News 2019 Week #17

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Since last Thursday my teleporting and crossing to other regions has deteriorated. Then today in the middle of the Server-Scripting User Group my Internet goes down. :/ I get disconnected from Second Life think I got bit by the SL bug. Then can’t relog. My computer can’t find SL… A little more troubleshooting and I realize I can’t go much of anywhere on the Internet. Call COX. They are on it. They know it is down.

Fantasy Faire : The Celestial Plain (1)

Fantasy Faire: The Celestial Plain – 2019

About 30 minutes later I’m back up according to the router diagnostics. But I can’t connect to much of any place. Oh… but my laptop can. It uses the default DNS servers and my Desktop uses Google and OpenDNS free. So, I change the DNS servers my desktop uses and all is great. SL works again and better than it has all this last week. Well dang.

So, are my disconnections from the SL server bugs or my DNS server problems or both? No way to tell.

Servers

This week the Deploys post tells us the usual server rollouts are changing. Monday, no changes. Tuesday RC Le Tigre and RC Blue Steel are to update to version 19.04.22.526534. I can’t find any release notes for this but it is very likely targeting the disconnection problem. On Wednesday the same version may roll to the Magnum and the Main Channel depending on Tuesday’s result. Thursday will depend on what happens Tuesday and Wednesday. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #16

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This past Friday there was a third-party developers meeting. There wasn’t much new news. But there was a discussion of the teleport disconnect problem many are experiencing. More about that later.

Servers

Bugsly Linden made the Deploys Post this week. It is still marked as a ‘placeholder’…

The main channel is to be on version #19.04.09.526122, an update over last week (15).

New Personal Lighting in EEP – 4/2019

Last week a number of us had the impression the rollout had fixes for the teleport disconnect problem. And the week before that the RC’s had a version with such a fix. At the dev’s meeting, the Lindens were surprised that is what we thought. Well, DUH! Can’t imagine where we got that idea.

However we came to that idea, it is wrong. The Lindens do not have a fix. What they were rolling out is improved logging to detect the problem. We are seeing that this week’s update has more logging targeting the problem. From the discussion at the dev meeting, I have the impression the Lab is putting a lot of effort into tracking down the problem. Oz Linden is on it, which I think is something. Continue reading →

Big Black Hole – How big is the picture?

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It is making the news in various places that we have the first picture of a black hole… sort of. The part I find interesting is the size of the hole and of the picture, yeah, the size of the picture is impressive. More so than it looks

First Image showing Einstein predicted black hole. 4/2019

The black hole is in the constellation Virgo. The app Skyview (Android and iOS) or StarDate.org will help you find Virgo in the night sky. But you can’t see the black hole with your eyes. At 55 million lightyears away the hole which is 6.5 billion times heavier than our sun (10 billion kilometers in diameter – the diameter of Neptune’s orbit is 9 billion km) is too small to see.

To photograph it 8 radio telescopes located in Hawaii, Spain’s Sierra Nevada, the Chilean desert, and on the Antarctic ice sheet were used to create a huge virtual telescope. Each scope took images totaling about a petabyte of data (or 1 million megabytes). At that size, it was faster to fly the stacks of disks via FedEx to Massachusetts and Germany for processing by a supercomputer called a correlator rather than try to ‘upload’ the information. According to MeridianOutpost.com a petabyte of data would take 15,770 hours on an OC3 (155Mbps) connection (over 2 years). Continue reading →

Second Life News 2019 Week 15

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The Lab has posted “THIS IS A SCHEDULED EVENT Apr 10, 05:00 – 07:00 PDT”

Apr 8, 12:12 PDT
Scheduled – Second Life will be undergoing scheduled inventory maintenance from 5:00 AM to 7:00 AM PST on April 10th, 2019. During this time, residents may have issues with any inventory related activities including building, logging in, as well as avatar and object rezzing. Please refrain from rezzing in-world, in addition to transacting in-world, on the Marketplace, or on the Lindex during this time.

This coincides with the grid update in the RC channels. So, expect problems. PS: Maybe not. Deploys says no rolls Wednesday.

Servers

Why am I crashing constantly… is a growing thread in the SL Forum. I’ve been hearing of this problem since about December-January. Then it was only older computers and viewer versions. However, it has been growing. With the last main channel grid update, the problem seems to have exploded. The Lindens have commented on it, Darn Teleport Disconnects (4/8).

On my own-

On my own-

People currently have various ideas as to what is happening and how to fix it. There currently is no fix. So, don’t be doing drastic things; clearing cache, reinstalling, clean reinstalling, reinstalling Windows… none of these things are going to fix it.

Depending on who you talk to it is Animesh that is the cause or Enhanced Environment Project or the upgraded OS the servers are being updated to or it is the move to the cloud (we aren’t there yet). Take your pick. All causes have people unaffected by the it-is-this-cause.

As some users and the Lindens understand the problem it is server side. So, all viewer brands are going to suffer the TP disconnect problem. I’ve seen it with Firestorm and the Linden’s SL Viewer.

Restarting the computer and router/gateway may help a little. Continue reading →

Who is having SL Photo fun?

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Fun Photography – Every so often I mention the SL Forum thread ‘How does your avatar look today?’ (page 665 – Looks for short) In it, someone (name withheld to protect the guilty) posted a picture with their avatar in bunny custom… not the furry kind, the Playboy kind. So sexy.

The picture started a thing… my tail is cuter than your tail… no… not competitive just fun… people curious to see how they looked as bunnies and some probably were influenced by a bit of exhibitionism and took the opportunity to show off. I suspect some measure of that fun and look-at-me stuff runs through those all peeps posting in the thread. My hand is up.

The Bunny Pictures

However, there is a thing in the group about getting together for group photos. Probably one of the more fun things people in the thread do. I think of it as girls behaving badly… I’ll leave the interpretation of the term ‘badly’ up to you. Those older and younger than I seem to have different meanings for it. I intend this as the fun type ‘badly’.

Whatever, that ‘get together thing’ got Saravendi thinking (post). Seems things weren’t working out for people to get together in their bunny outfits. So, she very nicely PUT them together from the photos they posted. That was a hit. The idea grew, lots of Me-Too-Please posters followed. So, lots of additions and a growing picture which Saravendi was neat enough to keep editing. Continue reading →