#SL Large Group Edit Update Wk40

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Wednesday we got three packages rolled to the Release Candidate (RC) channels. The changes for Large Group Editing were in the package that rolled to the Le Tigre channel. While the packages rolled to Blue Steel and Magnum worked well, something went wrong in the Le Tigre roll out.

Large Groups – Image by: KittyKat3756 – Flickr

Something in the code is miscalculating the prim cost/count and forcing the return of large numbers of prims. You can imagine the screams. Very quickly the Lindens realized they had a problem. While they didn’t know the cause as of Thursday, they do know a massive number of prims were being returned.

The Le Tigre regions were rolled back and the package running on Blue Steel, a maintenance package, was rolled over Le Tigre. Unfortunately that roll could not undo the damage of returned prims. So, the damaged regions had to be restored to the region state previous to the damaging roll out.

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#SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 40

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There is good news coming from Oz Linden about the viewer. You probably remember I’ve been writing about a memory leak in the Beta and Development viewers. Their crash rates were way up from previous rates. Oz thinks the latest Beta Viewer 3.4.1-265434 has the problem resolved. Grab a copy of the viewer and try it out. They need as much testing data as possible. The data from over the weekend will give them good information on whether they have found the problem or not.

The Project Download Page

The problem has been difficult to reproduce. That means it is very hard to know what to fix. In #SL Viewer 3.4.x Week 37 I wrote about the problem in more detail.

The Development Viewer has been stalled at 3.4.2-265141 for about a week. The Lindens have been pulling updates and fixes out of the viewer code to narrow down the cause of the crashes. I suspect they are doing that work in a temporary code repository (repo for short) and using internal builds for testing. So, we don’t see activity in the Dev Viewer repo. The latest fixes are probably only in the Beta version.

If the problem has been resolved, development can move forward again. Oz says they have several interesting features waiting in the pipeline. He just won’t talk about them. So, what’s interesting to him, a  p r o g r a m m e r, and us may be different… But, there is hope there is something fun waiting.

Keep your fingers crossed and run a copy of the Beta Viewer. Use the link in the left column labeled SL Viewer Release. The Beta Viewer’s link is a little further down the page. I downloaded it yesterday. I’ve only used it for a short time. I will be using it more latter today. However, it has yet to eat my computer or crash

Patterns Released on Steam

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I got an email from Rod Humble today. It had my key and download instructions for Patterns.

New Patterns

Thank you for your recent pre-order of the genesis release of Patterns, a new and exciting shared 3D creative space from Linden Lab.

This email contains important information about how to immediately download and activate your purchase.

We’re happy to announce that Patterns is now available for download on Steam, a digital media and gaming distribution service. In order to activate your purchase, you will need the following activation key.

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Blender 2.64 r56026 Released #SL Review

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A new version of Blender is out. Yay! Get your Blender 2.64 download here. I strongly recommend using the archive install. This review is a quick first look. I’ll write more once I’m using it, if something is too fun not to share.

Blender 2.64 Released Review – Click for Video

Install

I recommend using the Archive install. I wrote about how to do that type of install and the reasons for it in: Blender 2.57b Released. It can make your life with Blender much easier. I know running SETUP seems easier. But, there are so many gotchas with the Window’s install it turns out to be much easier to install the Archive.

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#SL News 1 Week 40

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Not much news this week. Plus I have been trying to resuscitate dying laptops. Seems to be a rash of those this week.

UPDATE: 1:54 PM PT – Le Tigre had serious problems and is being rolled back to the previous version. The regions have to be rolled back to get an earlier version of the server software. That is an automated process. Next all the regions in Le Tigre have to be manually updated to a previous SIM state prior to the problems. There are a over 1,000 regions to do. It is going to take some time.

Main Channel

There was no roll of a new server package to the main channel. Last week no Release Candidates made it to the RC channels, so there was nothing to roll.

There is a the New Lag Problem. This problem is pretty much invisible to the Lindens, meaning it is not showing up in their stats. Nor is it an easily reproducible problem. Both of those things make it invisible to the Lindens for all practical purposes. However, those running events are pulling their hair out dealing with the problem.

So, if you are an event manager or promoter, you will want to record the date and time, nearest minute, the lag hit, get as close as you can. Attend the Server Beta and Server & Scripting user group meetings (Time & Location) and provide at least the server version, region name, and date time of the problem.

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Current State of Mesh Clothes

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The new Mesh Deformer Project Viewer seems to be working well. See the left column for a link to it. I’ve been playing with it in ADITI. I’m excited and seriously getting into finishing some of my models (clothes). I’m spending more time weighting and tweaking now that I think we know how the Deformer is going to work.

Problem Clothes

I will caution you that the Deformer is only in testing. It could change. But, I think it is pretty much as it will be at release time and I could be wrong. So, keep that in mind, if you plan to go crazy with mesh clothes making…

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