Not much going on here. The Deploy post arrived on Sunday. No rollout to the main channel this week. The RC Channels will get an update that eliminates a crash condition.
Open Source UG – 2014-34
Viewers
The main viewer is now 3.7.14-292638. This is the Library Refresh Viewer. There is a fix in this version for gray avatars. If you have gray avatars, look in your log file for Transferred a partial file errors. They think they have it fixed, but cannot know as they have not been able to reproduce the problem in the Lab.
You can find the list of updated libraries in the viewer’s release notes.
There is currently a problem with the Internet. Some time ago I wrote of the change from IPv4 to IPv6, which is a change in the standard way of assigning Internet addresses to devices. We were running out of addresses. New hardware capable of handling larger addresses has to be added and has been being added for the last couple of years.
Now another growth pain is starting to impact users as the Internet grows more complicated. We are seeing slow Internet and sites we cannot connect to because the routers that direct traffic from place to place run out of memory. The older routers can typically hold 512,000 addresses. Sounds like plenty. But, that is what they thought about addresses too.
The problems are hitting in the USA and Canada as older routers max’d out. The problem right now is that Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)routing tables have grown too large for some top-level Internet routers to handle. The result is that these routers can no longer properly handle Internet traffic. The result is they get confused and fail to rout anything, forget some routes and stop forwarding traffic destined for those routes, or just ignores that traffic. Whatever they do, your connection slows to a crawl as the system tries to find a way to route you packet to the destination or fails altogether.
You can figure out if you are running into this problem by doing trace route testing. See my Troubleshooting your Connection. If you are hitting the problem you will see your packets fail to get past some router.
The problem has to be fixed by the Internet Service Providers, mostly the backbone providers. About all you can do is suffer and complain to your ISP. The Trace Route information will help them get THEIR complaints to the right people.
If you want more information, search on 512k Internet.
There are some great fixes in this version. One for Mac users is the Alt-cam clicking that sent the camera flying away. There is still work being done on selecting things in Mac versions, so there is more to come along this line. And there is a 64-bit Beta Mac version. They also have a partial fix for the s l o w typing bug on Mac. I’ll refer you to Inara’s article for the details on that.
She points out that Mac users on 4.4.2 will be able to continue using it. It will not be subjected to Firestorm’s 3-version rule UNTIL all the Cocoa bugs are fixed. This is a big concession from the FS Team. It would be easier for them to not have to support more than 3 versions.
If you are running 4.5.1 Beta, it is going to be blocked soon. So, upgrade before you find yourself locked out of SL on that viewer.
That is the goal. Justine has an article up providing details on the latest testing. See: OpenSimulator Load Test 5 Report. The current tests are up to 400 avatars, which I think is pretty awesome.
It seems the new Bullet Physics is much more efficient than ODE. But, it is currently running as a single thread. This means that when they see frames rates dropping it isn’t from CPU overload. The bottleneck is in the Bullet Engine. Changing to multi-threaded would use more of the CPU and help keep frame rates up. But, changing to multi-threaded is a significant task and will be handled somewhere in the future.
They do load testing on Tuesdays. They need more human testers. Testing happens on the Conference Grid.
Three new blog posts for High Fidelity popped up this morning.
Paloma’s javascript project is one. It is about a 17 year old intern at HyFy. Using JavaScript she was able to program what basically is sound bars that react to her singing with no perceptible lag.
High Fidelity’s AKA covers “Easy” is a blog post with a video, they say they will tell us more later. I suppose it is kinda neat… blah…
Measuring the speed of sound is a post about HyFy’s obsession with eliminating latency, lag. Right now they are dealing with sound and measuring the speed of sound in various media they list as Skype and cell phones.
Of course that really isn’t measuring ‘sound’. It is measuring how fast these mediums can translate sound to digital form, transmit it, and convert back to analog sound for your ears. The trick for HyFy is to figure out how sound is behaving in the real world and at least duplicate that in their virtual world.
The point is cell phones don’t really need to convey a sense of presence. A half second delay in such a conversation just means people tend to start talking over each other. But, we do that in real life too. So, we don’t consider it a deal or even take much notice of it.
They show Skype is a bit better and there is the video feed to sync up. But, we still don’t take much notice of it here.
With HyFy they want to maximize the sense of presence. So, all the electronic delays have to be minimized to the point they give us the experience we have when we are face to face talking. All the testing is telling them what the system has to do performance-wise to achieve that. It sounds like they can pretty much do it.
We know that a new release of the Firestorm Viewer is getting close because the team has been talking about it. Today I am seeing the wiki changes that proceed a release. So, we are getting very close. The wiki changes mean they have likely gone to feature-lock. Not much point trying to write about what’s changed while things are still changing.
Firestorm Logo
The current version is 4.6.5 (40833). The new wiki pages are using 4.6.7.42398 as the new version number.
All this is in progress and may change, but I suspect it won’t. The wiki pages are being edited and THEY will change. It is hard to tell what is new and what is old in the pages as to some extent they seem to have been copied from a previous update page. There are several “Fix It” notes here and there.
The current editing on the page says the viewer merges to Linden Lab 3.7.5 codebase… the last release was merging up to 3.7.4… I am hoping this is just an editing stage and the 3.7.5 number is a place holder. The current Linden code base is at 3.7.13 with the Linden wiki now showing changes indicating a coming release of version 3.7.14, which may happen today or Monday…. That’s my pure guess, it could be longer.
The updates to Firestorm are mostly fixes. But, there is a healthy dose of new features and feature tweaks currently showing on the preliminary pages. It is not a huge page but there is plenty of good stuff listed and some nice feature improvements, like Radar now showing typing or sitting indicators and the ability to omit blocked avatars from showing on the map.
In all it looks like a version to look forward to.
I am using Firestorm more for photography now than I have over the past year. I also hope to do more machinima and get better at it. The Firestorm Viewer is certainly my choice for those tasks. So, I am looking forward to the coming release.
