Second Life News 2014-22

by

Yesterday afternoon at 3:25 PM PDT Linden Lab posted to the Grid Status page that a previously planned service outage would be scheduled for this Wednesday. From 6:00 AM to 7:00 AM, so as you read this, the work is complete and an all clear was posted at 6:51AM.

During that time various backend services were offline and logins were offline. You can see the break in the graph of concurrent  users.

Graph via etitsup.com - 2014-05-28
Graph via etitsup.com – 2014-05-28

Presumably this was the outage planned for last Thursday, before Tuesday’s problem when the login servers ran out of assignable user numbers. (I am guessing that fix is still in progress, but there is no official statement.) If this is the rescheduled outage then some hardware change was being made to some of the many components of the various databases.

While the Lindens think there may be some small improvement in performance they also suspect it will be small and probably not noticeable. I call these types of gains ‘stop watch’ gains, because they are smaller than we normally can notice unaided.

Second Life Bits and News 2014-22

by

The Memorial Day holiday is over in the United States. I’m back and staff is back to work at the Lab.

Content UG 2014-21
Content UG 2014-21

Servers

This week there are no server rollouts.

I’ve seen a couple of comments about unusually intense griefing. But, I haven’t seen it happening in my travels, but SL is a big place. I know there are some places that get lots of attention from griefers. Other regions like mine seem to seldom see a griefer.

I do get noobies coming from a landing hub that get trapped in my house and can’t figure out how to get out. It is sort of like having flies in the house… they fly around bumping into the walls.

Read more

Second Life Materials Scripting 2014-21

by

What we can do to automate materials is limited by the lack of script functions to change materials. The legacy materials have scripting functions. Those however only change the older material properties. There is no script control for normal and specular maps.

Simon Linden is working on LSL functions for materials normal and specular maps. Maestro Linden has been testing them. This week (21) Simon did not see them ready for any testing in ADITI. But, that they have been working on them and playing with them is great news. 

Read more

Group Ban 2014-21

by

This is a feature many large group owners are wanting… desperately. Once it rolls out things should be nicer in several ways.

This is the feature that bans and ejects a user or group of users from a group. Now we can eject them. But, on open groups the ejected user just joins up again and they are back. Group ban will add them to a list server side and the servers will not let them join the group again. Pesky problem solved.

On Wednesday an infrastructure part of the feature rolled out to the backend servers. This isn’t anything we can see now, but the main grid is a step closer to having Group Ban. One more change is needed before the server RC channels get the new code for Group Ban. The Tuesday down time messed up that schedule. I suspect it will recover quickly.

Maestro says that only one region server update will need to go through the RC channels. That assumes no bugs.

There is a set of viewer changes winding through QA and then RC. But, we are getting close to having Group Ban.

Second Life News 2014-21

by

Second Life Down

The Lindens had some excitement Tuesday. The roll of new server software started as usual. But some time in the morning logins started to fail. About 8 AM something went wrong. The chart of concurrent users from etitsup.com was given to me by Shug Maitland.

The Disturbance
The Disturbance

You have to correct the time for SLT/PDT as the chart shows local time for the UTC-4.5 zone for Caracas and/or St. Pierre. Add 4.5 hours to the times to get Second Life or Pacific Time. 

Read more

Oculus 2014-21

by

Hypergrid mentions an article published by Wired regarding the Oculus Rift.

The article is interesting, giving insight into the creation of the Oculus Rift people and the technology. The article includes a video that to some extent I see as a separate article in its own. Consider the video an overview on Virtual Reality (VR).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o8vsU0Dw-4

There are some interesting bits of information within Wired’s article. For instance, the Oculus people have been bombarded by requests from the Hollywood crowd, the techies that make the media, for information and participation in projects. So many that Oculus hired a director of film and media. 

Read more

Pages: 1 2