Second Life – Page 453 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Second Life Roll Out Problems

2011/11/08 by Nalates Urriah

It seems today’s roll out is having problems. Last week some regions were not coming back after a restart for update. It seems something similar is happening today. If your region is not coming back, do ticket and post on the Deploys thread.

#SL Beta Project LR

2011/11/08 by Nalates Urriah

Last week New World Notes and several others, as well as myself, blogged about the game the Lindens built. This week we have some more details on the game.

FAQ

There is a shiny new FAQ page in the Knowledge Base. Project LR Frequently Asked Questions. As one reads the page it becomes obvious this page is written for residents. There is less behind the scenes, techy, and motivations for the game and more about how to play.

In the explanation we learn that premium members can earn Lindens by playing the game.

Access

Also, it is not possible to teleport into the region. One must find a portal. See the image to know what they look like. For now it seems portals are placed in premium sandboxes. However, if you find one and you are a premium member and it does not work, don’t panic. When the game region population reaches capacity the portals shop working. Wait a bit and try again.

Dying

Never fear. Dying in the game doesn’t hurt… much… right. There are things in the game that can kill you. When you die you are teleported and reincarnated in a resurrection circle. I suppose it is a bit like Entropia. I am seriously considering a premium account.

#SL Scripting News Week 45

2011/11/07 by Nalates Urriah

There is some news from the Scripting User Group. Meaning something I find interesting.

Le Tigre Oddities

The current update (week 44) running in Le Tigre is showing some scripting oddities. Most are around scripts that use the llTakeControls(). Kelly says it look like the control events are firing too often. So, if you are trying to steer a vehicle things are going awry.

Paraphrasing Kelly said something like: We put a cap on the total time the scripts for an agent can trigger. This is the time outside normal script time. When you press a key we give your scripts, that have control, an extra chance to run. This happens in ‘agent time’. To prevent abuse we added a cap per framer per agent (1ms per frame per agent). It is pretty large right now (it is adjustable and we may drop it later). Disabling scripts on a parcel only stops the script time block. The changes make it so you get at most 1 extra script run per frame.

Anything that adds more data to serialize per script is difficult. There is some potential to use a lot of script time but the recent changes on Le Tigre limit that severely.

Kelly says, “1ms is generally enough time to run ~20 scripts. More if they are ‘quick’.”

#SL New Translate Panel

2015/04/132011/11/06 by Nalates Urriah

I noticed we have a new panel in the Second Life Viewer 3.2.2 (244260) Oct 31 2011. You probably know, if you follow this blog, that Google’s free translation service used by many games is changing to a paid service. That means our translator in the viewer will stop working about the end of this month.

ChatTrans — New Translate Settings in Preferences -> Chat

The new panel provides an option to switch to Bing’s free service. It also provides a place to add your Google API key, which you get from Google Translate API. In my article Language Translation in Second Life I estimated my cost of translation services if I had everything I chat translated. I think I could easily get by for US$20 per year. Since I don’t translate everything, it would probably be way less.

#SL Server Performance

2011/11/062011/11/05 by Nalates Urriah

People notice problems and complain when the problems interfere with their Second Life. We say much less when things work well. In the line of the latter there is an interesting aside to Friday’s huge meeting in Denby.

ServScrip2011-11-04b — Simulator User Group 11-2011

The meeting was the weekly Simulator User Group. It typically has 10 to 20 attendees. This past Friday it filled to capacity. At one point there were 80 people in the region and 30 to 40 in the two adjacent regions.

The meeting was interesting in its own right. But, an interesting bit of information is how well the region did handling the crowd.

In the image I have with the article #SL Server News Week 44 you can see a region performance meter displaying the script count, memory use, and time slice used by each avatar’s scripts. The maximum script count was 174, which is high but not uncommon. It looks like the median script count is around 10.

I was curious to see how the region was holding up. I wasn’t about to start dancing or running in circles. I did not want to do anything that would have any possibility of crashing me out of the region. I had problems getting in when the occupancy count was 54.

The viewer statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) show region performance. Time Dilation is an indicator of how well the region is or isn’t handling the region’s script load. With 60+ avatars in region Time Dilation was staying in the range of 1.00 to 0.90 most of the time, which I think is rather impressive.

#SL Server News Week 44

2011/11/05 by Nalates Urriah

A few surprises this week, not the good kind. Some problem has been preventing regions from shutting down and coming back up on the new code. This affected thousands of regions. All of the ones affected by the problem are in the main release channel. Support was swamped. The roll out of the new server update was delayed for several hours.

Speculation by some is that the recent OS Update was causing the shutdown problem. Oskar Linden pointed out that they have had shutdowns since the update and those shutdowns worked just fine.

Tuesday’s roll out was delayed as problems were resolved. The roll finished on Wednesday. So, Wednesday’s roll was pushed to Thursday. The details for the week follow. Simon Linden says investigation is ongoing and some fixes are in the pipeline.