Firestorm Beta Release

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On the 14th the Firestorm-Phoenix Team posted on their blog about the release of a beta version viewer.  The Large Group Editing changes for the server side have been rolled out on the grid. This roll out creates a bit of a problem, but not really.

UDP Cutoff

Once upon a time using the UDP protocol for Second Life was a good idea. Now that the devices that make up the Internet’s infrastructure are smarter and more HTTP aware the use of UDP for downloading large group member lists is not such a good idea. Also, the way users have decided to use groups has changed from what the Lab initially designed for. So, users are sending much larger data sets across the old UDP protocol used for the Group Member List download.

Firestorm Release

UDP packets can be lost and there is very little that can be done to recover them. For SL-users that means the user list of large groups often (usually) fails to load.

The new code now limits the list size to 10k or less for all UDP requests. For those using the SL Viewers and several Third Party Viewers (TPV) the limit makes almost no difference as they already had problems trying to edit lists over 10k.

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#SL News 1 week 46

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Viewer

There is a new Development Viewer out: Second Life 3.4.3 (267007) Nov 14 2012. This viewer has the Large Group Editing and the new HTTP Protocol code. I’ve been playing with it. No crashes so far. Things rez fast. Seems pretty good. I get 15 to 17 FPS in my home with Lighting & Shadows, Ambient Occlusion, and Sun/Moon shadows on.

First Server Beta w/o Oskar 11/8/2012

Loki’s The Well

This is a fun Halloween build by Loki. It costs L$25 to get the HUD to play. It is worth the L$25. Try it you’ll like it. It will scare you at least once. With a little exploring you get a neat shoulder pet.

SLURL: The Well

Update: See Loki’s analysis of the popularity of The Well: T H E W E L L – Aftermath

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#SL Commerce Team Posts

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A new post appeared a couple of days ago, 11/12 titled: Be Heard – Proposed New Marketplace Categories. The proposed categories are posted in the wiki: Second Life Market Place: 2012 Category Changes. Each section of categories has a feedback link. The feedback link goes to the Survey Money where you fill out a form.

It has been noted by Trinity Yazimoto in a post titled: When division is a communication strategy…… that the Linden post ‘No Comment.’ There is a certain irony in that.

Whatever your thoughts regarding the Commerce Team and their communication skills (cough) take the time to check out the categories. Add any that you feel you need for your services or products.

 Items Being Removed

There seems to be some effort to clean up categories in the Market Place. This seems to be resulting in a number of items being removed from the Market Place for ‘wrong category.’ So, if you are like me and seldom look at your existing products … it might be time to check them.

Petition

Pamela Galli (with 4,700+ posts – join: 2007) started a petition and then posted a link to the petition on the SL Forum. That didn’t last long. It has been removed. But, you can find it here: Linden Lab: Punish Criminals, Not Victims. Unfortunately Pamela is trying to get the ToS changed to increase Linden Lab’s liability, which is never going to happen.

Unfortunately IP theft and DMCA abuse are problems everywhere, not just in SL. The remedy exists in the RL courts. Our problem is the cost of prosecuting verses the cost of digital goods in SL is such that it makes no sense to pursue most cases. I’m not sure there will ever be a fix.

I do believe there should be a better way for the Lab to track the creation process and enforce or at least provide documentation about who uploaded what when. I think that the theft and abuse problems are hurting player retention. I think it has a significant impact on player retention and the willingness of people to build for SL. I can’t say improving the Lab’s enforcement is going to improve player retention and that will be worth the costs incurred. But, if a better way can be found I think it would be to the Lab’s advantage. I premise that on ‘better’ including being cheap.

I’m not sure a ‘better’ is possible. I do know that the Lab will not take on more liability because of a petition. Whatever can be done is going to need to be a creative process between the Lab and users.

#SL Materials System Information

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There isn’t any new information, so I won’t call this an update. But, there is probably some information you have not seen.

Geenz Spad, a developer of the Materials System, has a web site with information about the Materials System. See: Geenzo.com. The article outlines the process that started in February 2012 and went public about July or August 2012. It is worth reading if you have something you wanted added to the viewer or Second Life™ or have any other proposal for Linden Lab to consider.

In the article the features environment intensity and specular exponent are mentioned. We hear little about these in most discussions. Without the features in the viewer to demonstrate them it is harder to explain them. I’ve linked to a couple of page I hope will help.

I’ve mentioned that Maestro Linden spoke of the server side of the project being in testing on ADITI. There once was a code repository where people could pull and compile a viewer with the latest viewer side version of the project. That seems to have disappeared from public view.

We have no ETA on when the project will go into open Beta, meaning when we get a project viewer.

#SL Large Groups Edit Rolled Out

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Builder’s Brewery sent out an announcement about the Large Group Edit Change (SVC-4968 – readable by all) that rolled out this last Tuesday (week 46). The new code should be on all regions now. The Beta viewer has the code to take advantage of the change.

Whoever wrote the announcement wasn’t quite up on what the changes do and how they affect you but, for practical purposes they are close enough. If you have followed the coverage here, I think you’ve heard better details.

A quick recap of Large Groups, somewhere over 10,000 to 15,000 members, is they could not be loaded for editing. If you fiddled enough you might get a 20k or so group to load. The actual size of a list that could be loaded depended on how well SL was performing and your connection. This made it generally impossible to edit large lists. So, members that hadn’t logged into SL for a year or more could not be pruned out of the group. Roles in the group could not be changed. That has been fixed.

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Second Life World Map Borked

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You may or may not have noticed that the world map has some problems. Depending on what region you search for it may or may not show up and may not show a map tile (image). 

Missing Map Strips

The image shows Sunny Point failing to rez an image of the region. If you jump out of the viewer and try to find the region in http://maps.secondlife.com/, you will find it does not come up at all.

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