Firestorm Q&A Meeting Summary

It looked like most of the development was there. The meeting was in voice. Questions were asked in local chat. Jessica Lyon was facilitating. She worked through the chat to answer most of the questions. Team members were also answering chat questions.

FS Q&A Meeting Feb 13, 2013
FS Q&A Meeting Feb 13, 2013

I think most of the audience was Firestorm (FS) fans. The meeting was civil and moved quickly without snide remarks or cheap shots, a nice thing for the team. It went well and was well done, I think.

Jessica took 15 to 20 minutes to start the meeting with news of coming things and to provide a warning.

As you might expect, the team is getting lots of questions about Server Side Avatar Baking (SSAB). The FS viewer will support it, eventually. For now FS is not yet merging the Lab’s SSAB code with the FS main build channel. Internally the team has merged to the Lab’s version 3.4.5. Jessica tells us that the internal version of FS is pretty bad off. It crashes often. The current release is far better than the current internal builds.

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Commerce Update 2013

The beginning of this month the Second Life™ Market Place got a new update. The update deals mostly with email. But, there are 7 bug fixes too. 

My Test Avatar @ IMVU
My Test Avatar @ IMVU

Market Place (MP) email now has a number of setting to turn on and off email notice of for different events. The new events are:

  • An email to the recipient when a redelivery of an item they should have received occurs
  • An email to the merchant when a redelivery of an item in their store occurs
  • An email of any change to revenue distributions on a listing are made: addition and removal
  • An email to the recipient of a revenue distribution when a sale occurs
  • An email when an item is unlisted or blocked as a result of a flag
  • An email when a review is added, removed, commented on or flagged and removed (all to the merchant)

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Gun Confiscation in California

This is a political and controversial topic. Skip it if you cannot handle intellectual debate in a civil manner. – We are hearing from mainstream media that the right wingers’ fears of gun confiscation are unfounded. The mainstream media has for weeks said that could not and would not happen. The proof that gun confiscation is a real threat has come to California. The state legislature has submitted the bills. Read these articles:

There are some things the media is not telling people. Let’s take two of the basic tenants of gun laws. The idea of a 10 round magazine being unnecessary for self defense is common. What people do not consider is that most hand guns have magazines of 10 or more rounds. So, the law effectively makes most hand guns illegal.

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Firestorm Q&A

There is an announcement on the Firestorm blog about a coming Q&A meeting. See: Wednesday Question and Answer Meeting.  

Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium
Phoenix Firestorm Support Meeting Auditorium

The plan is to have Jessica Lyon moderating and developers available for questions. Everyone is welcome. However… the region will only hold 70 people. It is first come first served.

The meeting will be Wednesday February 13, 2013, at 1:00 PM SLT/PST (or 13:00 military time), which seems a bit ominous with all the 13’s. The location is in the region: Phoenix Firestorm Support.

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Second Life News 2013-7

We have had about a week with the new rollouts. There doesn’t seem to be any major problems. Nothing had to roll back. I’m not clear whether the Interest List or the maintenance package will roll to the main channel this week. We’ll see something post later today when the Lindens make a final decision.

This seems so like SL -
This seems so like SL –

Interest List

The bot users have seen a huge drop in the data being delivered to them. Even beyond the amount added with the Interest List bug. Andrew Linden was considering what changes, other than the bug fix, may account for the saving in bandwidth use.  Some of those items are:

  • Removal of the data needed for the old particle clouds.
  • Fewer wind data updates.
  • Improved server side culling.

The whole point of the Interest List update was to improve server side culling, meaning to have the server only send object information for the objects an avatar can see. That has improved.

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