Bits and Pieces of Second Life

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Crash Report? - Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr
Crash Report? – Image by: ♥ellie♥ @ Flickr

Bliss Couture is having a closing sale. Most things are 90% off. That was a costly shopping trip.

The Second Life™ Wiki’s information on building vehicles has been updated a bit. See Linden Vehicle Tutorial and VEHICLE_BANKING_EFFICIENCY.

It is the first of the month so FaMESHed is having their monthly event. Teleport to FaMESHed.

View Candidates

The Google Breakpad RC Viewer is back. The Lab has found that most of the problems they had with Breakpad were caused by Windows XP. The Lab will take a new tactic with XP. But Breakpad is going to be in use for Win7, 8, and Mac… I think Linux too, but I am not clear on that. 

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Other Aspects of Fitted Mesh

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There is currently some discussion about aspects of the new avatar bones being used in odd ways. The third party viewers in some cases have adjusted some things in the upload code to allow use of bones and joints in ways not completely support by the Lab.

New Outfit - 2014-09
New Outfit – 2014-09

As the discussion goes, those aspects may be blocked at the server soon. That would mean things like weighting mesh to the attachment points would no longer be allowed. We do not know whether the Lab will or won’t decide to block such use. So, don’t panic. But, if you have a good use case for your uses, get it into a Feature Request as soon at the JIRA’s new Feature Request channel opens up.

I am not done with my testing of the new avatar yet. But, so far there is no model avatar I can find that is in use in Blender that can be imported to SL and behave as the SL avatar does. The supposed exact same avatar is not an exact copy nor do the sliders affect it in the same ways. It is close, but not the same.

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SL Inventory Problem

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In machines with limited memory there tend to be more inventory problems because of a crash while the viewer is closing. Latif Khalifa, Singularity & Radegast TPV Dev, explained that as the viewer closes it compresses the inventory list and saves it in the SL cache folders. (Those are the files with names ending in inv.gz.)

I’m not that into what this part of the viewer is doing or how it does it. Hopefully I have this mostly right.

If the system is almost out of free available memory, the task crashes as runs out of memory needed for the compression process. The result is not noticeable until the next login when parts of the inventory are missing. Of course the files can be rebuilt from the SL server and the inventory is not really missing, the viewer just thinks it is. 

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More JIRA Change

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Oz Linden in last Friday’s TPV Dev group meeting was saying they are determined that the JIRA will NOT go back to the way it was pre-2012-Change. There will be strict limits on user-to-user comments.

When specifically asked how the Lab would be enforcing those limits he repeated what we already know from the official announcement.

Oz has pointed out they will be managing the JIRA by the rule set, meaning the JIRA permissions system. There will not be issue-by-issue moderation. I take this to mean they are not wanting to devote engineer’s/programmer’s time to JIRA moderation. But, I suspect the Lindens will take faster action against individuals that abuse the system this time around. But, no Linden is saying that. We will have to wait to see what they do. 

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BREAKING: #SecondLife JIRA Change 2014-09

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We have a major change in the SL JIRA System. Today at 9:55 AM a new post by Linden Lab appeared. Changes to Our JIRA Implementation. I think this is good news.

 All users will be able to see all BUG issues, all the time. YAY!!

JIRA Change 2014
JIRA Change 2014

More controversial is the change: You’ll also be able to comment. Before an issue is triaged, everyone can comment to help isolate and describe the issue more clearly. Do remember, there are some basic guidelines for participation that need to be followed.

Those guide lines have not changed since June 2011, which was before the previous JIRA Change that closed the JIRA. So, this is going to put an enforcement burden on the Lindens using the JIRA.

I think another measure will reduce the problems we had before: Once an issue is Accepted and imported by Linden Lab’s QA team, the original reporter will still be able to comment, as will Lindens and a small team of community triagers – a group that includes some third party Viewer developers and others selected by Linden Lab for having demonstrated skills in this area. 

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Second Life News & Group Bans 2014-9

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At the Beta Server User Group Baker Linden did a recap of the coming Group Bans feature. You can read that recap on Inara’s blog: SL projects update week 9/2: group bans update. She is pretty much quoting Baker, which is what I would do, so I’m not going to repeat the quotes here.

SB2014-9_001
Server Beta UG 2014-09

Group Bans is moving into testing on the Preview Grid. We’ll hear when the Lindens have a test viewer ready and are ready for testers to help. We will probably hear something next week (10). Third Party Viewer Dev’s will be testing their viewers as soon as the test package is on ADITI, which is expected to be next week (10). 

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