Mesh Rendering Quirk

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Honor McMillian found a glitch in one of her photos. It has to do with how the viewer renders reflections of mesh objects. Bounce over to her site and see: Redefining Avatar in Second Life.

Render Problem with Mesh – Images by: Honor McMillan

Notice the ship’s reflection. One must include avatars in the reflection settings to get mesh items to show a reflection.

I would call that a bug.

Honor points out another problem she ran into while shooting pictures. That particular problem is the reason that photographers use viewers with the Derender feature. The feature allows you to right-click an object and select ‘Derender’. It then disappears from the scene. Unfortunately the SL Viewers do not have the feature. Firestorm does… if I remember correctly.

nVidia Drivers 306.97 Released

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The last driver out was 306.23 released on September 23rd. This newer 306.97 was released on October 10th. I’ve been running the 306.23 since the September release. I haven’t seen any problems in Second Life™ with 306.23. Unless the Pathfinding Characters failing to render correctly in the SL Development Viewer is related to the driver, which doesn’t seem to be the case, more later.

nVidia Driver Updates 306.97

I have seen the behavior of my Vista-32 change with 306.23. There seems to be a serious video lag in several places. Moving icons on the desktop is one place. Moving the icon appears to leave a copy of the icon behind. It can take 10 to 30 seconds or longer for the left-behind-icon to disappear. In some cases I have to do something to make the screen update before it goes away.

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#SL News 3 Week 41

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Server Updates

This last week we did get the roll to the main grid and a couple of small release candidates made their way to the RC channels.

The main channel got the package from Blue Steal as previously reported. That was a server crash fix package.

Server & Scripting UG Oct 2012

Blue Steel and Le Tigre got the same package, one that has some fixes for group SQL queries. These are not the Large Group Editing fixes. Those are still stuck in QA… I understand it is more the package they are in that is stuck rather than the actual group queries that are stuck. Simon Linden is NOT expecting the package with Large Group Editing to make it to an RC next week (42). Bummer.

Magnum continues to run last week’s (40) package, the backend infrastructure changes. The package that rolled to the main grid was added to this package. The combined packages will test this week.

The comments in the Deploys thread are few. So, it is probably safe to assume things are working well for everyone.

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Sudden Massive Lag Update

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This continues to be a problem for event managers. Toysoldier is getting more and more Lindens to look at the forum thread for BUG-355 – Increased Instant Sim Lag & Avi Crashes During Major Events – sim network issue. (Limited access)

Andrew did not realize people were putting in the tech info needed to actually find the problem in the logs. I hope he has realized and taken a look at the thread: Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crashes During Larger Events – Network Source?

Simon has responded in the thread: M7808.

Thanks for the reports, Toy … there’s some good information there that seems to shows the simulator getting into trouble when there are network problems.

If you are seeing the problem in your travels through the grid, read the thread so you know what to report and add your information. Please do not add noise. Just saying, “I saw that. Me too.” doesn’t help and actually hurts the process.

Toysoldier asks:

Next time one of your sims encounters one of these major lag events…. take a snapshot of the Advanced Performance screen and post it here.  The important stats to look at are related to the NETWORK stats. 

What has been initially noticed (and we would like more evidence of it from stale sims) is that some event triggers the the sim or the server kernel’s network driver or something related to the network to not process network packets at a normal flow.  Even at a low avi count and with other metrics looking normal, the network stats show unusually high pending downloads and very high un-acked packets.

But, we need more examples (snapshots of the performance stats) of a sim when it has fallen into this state.  Also make sure you mention date/time and the name of the sim. 

The thread: Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crashes During Larger Events – Network Source?

Second Life Viewer Statistics PING

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If you have looked at the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1), you have likely looked at PING. The term comes from the use of echo location in submarines and other marine uses. The active echo locators make a distinctive PING sound as the send a sound wave out. Electronics hear the echos coming back and create picture for human use.

Lots of PING – Image by: mknowles Flickr

When testing network connections we use a ping. It is actually a command to send a network data packet to a remote location and request a packet be sent back. The travel time tells us how well the connection is working.

What most people likely don’t think about is whether the Viewer’s PING is the same as the PING our operating system generates. For your information it isn’t.

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Second Life Market Place

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A little bit of dialog has started between merchants and Linden Lab. Rod Humble has engaged in the conversation. There is lots of history, debate, drama, and a ton of frustration. If you have never heard of the Lab’s Commerce Team you’ve missed one of Second Life’s great sagas. Well… may be not so great.

International Commerce Center by: jimbowen0306 – Flickr

The short story on the team is: the Commerce Team is responsible for the SL Market Place and I’ll guess more than half of all complaints about Lab’s poor communication ability coming from residents. I’m one that believes they are hiding.

The short story on the Market Place is: It doesn’t work. Yes, you can buy stuff. You often actually get what you buy. But, that does not mean the merchant gets paid. Merchant’s paying for advertising often don’t get the ads. They are often billed for what is supposedly free advertising. Merchant’s product promotions often end up in another merchants store and product images get mixed up between products and merchants… the list of failures is long and this is supposed to be the short story.

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