Second Life

Things about SL

#SL News Update Week 20

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Some transcripts got posted and there are some bits of news.

Balancing

You may remember that the Lindens started balancing the regions by running adjacent regions in the same physical server, or at least physically nearby servers. They also made changes to the system so that popular regions would not load into the same server. The change improved performance and up time.

Beta Server

Since there was no new software roll to the main channel this week, they took the opportunity to do more balancing work. More busy regions were moved in to non-busy hosts. Oskar Linden says this makes a huge difference. They were going to get us some neat graphs and do a blog post, but that has never happened.

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MetaReality Week 20

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Metareality Podcasts

I was curious what is going on with SL9B and what the LEA deal was about. I saw that there was something about it in MetaReality’s lates podcast, May 18 – link.

Remember. At best I only paraphrase. While the podcast is intersting, there isn’t much I wanted to expand on or things I was that into… so I didn’t write much. But, the time marks should get you to anything you want to hear.

00:20 Start with SL9B

I’ve been busy with RL clients and not keeping up with SL. So, the cast was interesting. Daniel Voyger has a good article in what will be happening: SL9B resident centralized birthday formal announcement.

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#SL Server News Week 20

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We did not get a roll to the main channel this week. The Region Crossing Phase I package failed in Release Channel (RC) testing. Since it failed, no new roll. It was worked on and is now running on Le Tigre and Magnum. Region Idling I wrote a short piece on that a couple of … Read more

#SL Pathfinding Update Week 20

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The Lindens were not overly happy with my explanation of Pathfinding (PF) to Hamlet (see: SL Pathfinding a Potential “Tsunami” (If We’re Not Prepared)). I didn’t expect it to get quoted when I wrote it. So, I took less time with it than I would have if I knew it would appear on Hamlet’s blog. Hamlet ask if he could quote me after I wrote it, which is OK. I could have rewritten some of it to be more accurate and more geeky. But, I didn’t. So, I got some stuff right and some stuff wrong and it got out there.

PathFinding I
Editing Pathfinding Attributes

Whatever… The Linens got busy in Thursday’s PFUG meeting and explained which parts were right and wrong. We got lots of good information. The technical corrections are easy. The most disagreement was on how much drama there will be. I have no doubt there will be some drama. There always is.

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#SL Region Idling

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Simon Linden announced today that Region Idling will roll out to the Blue Steel Release Channel this Wednesday. If all goes well it will be completely invisble to Second Life users. So, if we can’t see it what good is it? Well, I’ll ‘splain.

When a region has no avatars in it and no one is looking into the region, what good does it do to run full blast? None. So, the plan is to have a region slow from 45 FPS to 10 FPS and release the CPU to spend more time on other regions. Ideally, the other regions running in the simulator will benefit from the extra CPU cycles.

You can read the announcement here: Region Idling coming to Second Life.

Possible Problem

The only likely problem the Lindens are expecting is scripts that use the function  llGetRegionTimeDilation() may have a problem. The function is not going to fail. But, if the script is using it as a region monitor to signal a problem with a region, it is likely going to be fooled and report a false positive. Normally 10 FPS is an indication there is a problem. Now going to 10 FPS to idle is an expected behavior. The scripts will have to rewritten.

 The FAQ’s on Region Idling

There is a FAQ page up: Region Idling FAQ

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#SL News Update Week 19

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Mesh Deformer Examples

It seems Inara & I are credited in some measure for getting the word out that mesh clothing examples are needed. Oz says a steady stream of examples are coming in now. If you want any say in how the Mesh Deformer works, get your samples to Oz Linden.

Server Beta Test Group

Spell Checking

Eventually the Linden SL Viewer will get spell check for chat. There is some user interface feedback to be handled and a couple of fixes. Then it can be merged into the viewer and begin moving through the QA pipe. No telling when the work will be completed.

The dictionaries to be packaged with the spell check are; US and UK English, Spanish Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

See STORM-83 – Interactive Spell Checking. Also get a copy of the Spelling Project viewer.

People Search

There is some cleanup work for display names that is incomplete that apparently affects people search. Hopefully the cleanup work make people search better. Until then you may find it works better if you type in a name and click the drop down to search for people.

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