Second Life News 1 Week 43

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Interest List

Andrew Linden is still working on rewriting the interest list code. He says he is seeing light and should have working code soon. He hopes to have it done this week (43).

Server-Scripting Oct 2012

Andrew told us, “…Dan Linden noticed that the “number of objects in view” right after the login curtain comes up, in a busy region, is less in my code than server-trunk, which means that my interest list wasn’t doing as good of a job of loading initial content. But I think I’ve got that fixed, and am planning on implementing the “gradually increase camera far clip on login” behavior that some 3rd party viewers have already hacked on their end, which should help the initial login sorting.”

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#SL News 3 Week 42

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Blake Sea and Le Tigre

You probably remember the region crossing problems sailors and pilots had with the previous Havok Physics Engine update. Putting different versions of Havok on adjacent regions creates problems. Havok was never designed for use across multiple versions of Havok. It’s use by Linden Lab™ is the only known use that encounters that problem. So, we will likely have crossing problems with each update of Havok.

Morris Region, ADITI Grid

With the addition of Pathfinding and possible other gaming features to Second Life™ we are likely going to see more updates of Havok, but fortunately, less crossing problems. ‘More’ is like a couple a year.

Region Organization

Some weeks ago the Lab tried placing adjacent regions in the same or adjacent servers, physically adjacent servers. This made what Oskar Linden described as a ‘MASSIVE improvement’ in performance. Now it is standard operating procedure to keep the regions and servers organized.

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Patterns Updated

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I was looking for an update of Patterns today. I didn’t see anything. BUT… I tried playing Patterns again this evening. I has updated from 0.01a to 0.01b. You get the update by just opening the game. It updates itself.

You start over. Your saved games are gone. I expect that once the game is out of Beta that will change. At least I hope.

So, I’ll be busy for a while.

Mesh Deformer Update Week 42

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Darien Caldwell is working on what I call the second phase of the Mesh Deformer. A bug in the Deformer has come up in that process. I suppose this is a minor bug… it is easy enough to work around. But, one does have to work around it and know about it. I talked with Darien in the Open Source user group meeting, which Oz Linden rescheduled then didn’t make it to. 😛

Thin shape – Height 53 Torso 50 – Click Enlarge

Darien has posted an explanation of the bug in STORM-1716, which anyone can see and most can post to. This is the comment:

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Scripting & Server News Week 42

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For the release candidate on Le Tigre we have some new information that comes from the wiki release notes just recently updated. Some of those are:

Havok Update

The Havok Physics Engine updates to version 2012.1 in the release candidate. In week 35 I reported that this version was coming. At the time we had just updated to 2010.x, I think. This update enables Havok’s terrain optimized that simplifies the physics shape of the terrain for improved performance. This feature can be disabled by region owners and estate managers with the Region Debug Console command “set optimize_terrain false“.

Havok Physics

Some are reporting vehicle crossing are slower.

llGetSimStats

llGetSimStats() has yet to show up in the Linden Scripting Language (LSL)  pages of the wiki. Fortunately the release notes say:

Currently, this function accepts only [[SIM_STAT_PCT_CHARS_STEPPED]] as its parameter, which returns the % of Pathfinding characters skipped each frame, averaged over the last minute.  The returned value corresponds to the “Characters Updated” stat in the viewer’s Statistics Bar.

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