This is stuff I found interesting as I poked around the Second Life™ blogosphere. Fantasy Faire 2019 – Yes, it is coming. The theme is “Builders of Hope!” April 18 to May 5. The official, I guess official, website where you can get a taxi, as of 4/18, is Fantasy Faire 2019. Word is this … Read more
Interesting meeting. Simon Linden is busy investigating the problems causing a disruption in service last Saturday. So, no new news on Animash. We do have news on EEP. All the news is in the first few minutes. The rest is discussion. You may notice the difference in panning between this video and the previous video. … Read more
The inventory problem of last Saturday (2/16) is under investigation. Once they understand what happened, they will decide what to do to prevent it from happening again.
Dog Days
Misplaced jelly-dolls… you may have seen this bug. Some over-dressed avatar hits your ACI limit and ends up stuck on your screen like a HUD. Eeew… The Lindens think they have it figured out. Seems the info for an attachment to the overdressed av arrives before the location to attach it to. So, the viewer sticks it on a HUD attachment point.
The problem is more likely to happen in a crowd.
The workaround seems to be to un-jelly and then re-jelly the problem av. But some Lindens think this an unlikely work-around.
We have some news. Nothing too earth-shaking Firestorm did get their Animesh supporting viewer released. EEP server-side is behind expectations by another week. But better to fix before grid-wide release. The third-party dev UG (YouTube video) was last Friday.
Servers
No roll to the main channel. We are staying on version #19.01.25.523656. They found an issue while the planned to roll version was in RC last week. So, there will be a new RC of this one Wednesday. But the regions reaching two weeks without a restart will be getting a restart.
Take over
An issue for some has come up. If the regions are restarted at different times their day/night cycle gets out of sync with adjacent regions. When the main grid is restarted for an update all those regions are pretty much in sync for daytime. Regions that have been restarted at various times for some reason get left out of the two-week no update restart, at least I think that is what is being complained about.
Seems the Lindens are not deliberately trying to do a daylight time sync. It is just however it works out. They consider when daylight happens as up to the region owner.
We have been waiting for this update. This is the one that adds Animesh. If you haven’t heard of Animesh… well, where have you been? This is the feature that allows us to animate mesh things. So, better horses and dogs…
Firestorm Viewer has had a beta version of their viewer out. It had the Animesh feature too. People often prefer not to update to a beta version. With ~75% of Second Life™ users running on Firestorm and a significant number not updating, Animesh has not been a thing in SL. Now we are likely to see it explode as new animated things begin to be released, animals, pets, babies, Non-Player characters (think Santa and store-bots), new machines…
The Firestorm Update 6.0.2
So… This is version 6.0.2.56680. It has some new features. Inara has a couple of writeups about the two Animesh versions of the viewer, FIRESTORM 6.0.2: ANIMESH RELEASE (this release) and Firestorm 6.0.1: Animesh Early Access (the previous release). Check those writeups if you want lots of details.
Otherwise… Besides Animesh, we get a few fixes, about a half dozen I have never run into (see release notes). The ‘splayed hands’ problem has a fix. Some install parts of the viewer updated; all the Linden 6.0.1 fixes and additions, changes to the code playing sound, the code handling the images – Kakadu – was updated, and the OGG library that has to do with… audio compression of files, you know the sound files we upload versus voice.
There is an ongoing quest, for those of us texturing clothes and things in Second Life™, to upload better quality images. So, here is some new information on making better textures or aka diffuse layers. See Compression Depression.
Beq Janus, is one of the people working with the Firestorm team and has tweaked the mesh uploader and other parts of the viewer, been involved in tracking down bugs, and figuring out workarounds for various problems. Now she is on about a discovery made with the help of Whirly Fizzle, all starting with one of Hamlet Au’s New World Notes posts about Frenchbloke Vanmoer… who?
Beq’s Blog – February 2019
Whoever, down in the Debug Settings it is said there is some magic. Unfortunately, it isn’t there, often as is the case with magic. The magic appears surprising to some as they do not understand the trick and think the wand, hand waving, and abracadabras actually do something magical.
However, there is a lesson to be learned and another step in the quest for better SL image uploads.
