#SL News Week 37

Well… let’s start with the JIRA Change. In the Content & Mesh User Group meeting Nyx, Vir, Hoz, Oz, and Alexa Linden were all there. I suppose they were there to handle JIRA Change blow back. It wasn’t that bad.

Alexa Linden in a fun avatar at Content-Mesh Meeting

The first topic of the meeting was the JIRA.

“Given that the jira is no longer going to be an effective means of accurate two-way exchange of information, how can we communicate with other users about problems with the content creation processes and their solutions, especially in the context of this user group where the commonest question is “can you give me the jira for that issue”? Drongle McMahon

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Anonymous Attacks Go Daddy

I am hosting on Go Daddy. Today my email is wacky and clients are calling trying to find out why their web sites are down and email is failing. A tiny bit of digging and call to support to confirm and yep, it is true.

CNN

Not my favorite news source, is reporting that Anonymous is attacking Go Daddy. This hurts many of the owners of 53 million domain names for which Go Daddy provides DNS. Register a domain with Go Daddy and they host the DNS regardless of who hosts the actual site. So, this is affecting lots of people.

Anonymous member claims to take down GoDaddy

FNC has an article too:

Every GoDaddy-registered site temporarily knocked offline

So, you may or may not be able to get to my site today and right now I cannot receive or send email. 🙁

Valve-Steam and Second Life

With coming presence of Second Life™ on Steam™ gaming several possibilities open up. Probably just as many questions come up too. It is too early to know how Valve™ and Linden Lab™ are going implement the union. But, people in general are interested in what Value is doing and thinking.

Valve’s Steam

An article I came across this morning is: Can Valve Go Beyond Gimmicks With Its Gaming Goggles And Wearable Computing? The opening paragraph is what caught my interest.

Virtual reality and the quest for the perfect controller are the stuff of science fiction, but in reality traditional controllers work perfectly well for gaming. Much more exciting than wearable computing is the possibility of a Steam Box.

A good virtual reality controller for Second Life would be great. Has this been in the works for awhile? Is this some part of plan? I suppose it could be… or not.

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Scripting Week 36

llCastRay

SprSrsNoFun brought up an aspect of the llCastRay():llCastRay seems to not function properly once you get to a certain velocity.

The object with the script that executes llCastRay() starts to return somewhat random results once it reaches a certain speed. This is one of those real time problems that involve timing of the script, server, and physics engine. Since the server’s script and physics engines are asynchronous they are not in lock step. So, when the script fires the function may be in a different frame than when the physics engine sees it fired. One may not get the results they expect.

Simon Linden said it this way, “Well, your llGetPos() might execute on one frame, and the ray cast on another, after things have moved.

Andrew answered, “SprSrsNoFun, the problem you’re seeing is that the script engine is running asynchronously with the physics engine. That is to say, the moments your script gets to run is spotty, and not necessarily synched with the physics engine.

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#SL News Final for Week 36

Wind

Andrew Linden has been working on Second Life™ Wind. You may not know it needed some help, and may still. Wind is rather random and quickly changes direction and speed. Andrew did some work on it. It should change less often now.

Sever-Scripting Meeting September 2012

Andrew Linden told us, “While working on the interest list stuff I spent some time optimizing how updates to the terrain and wind are prepared for the viewer. While I was at it I decided to see if I could tweak the wind, which has been described here at these user groups as “useless”.  So that it might be a little more what people are looking for.

[It is still] probably not useful for the sailing community, but I think I’ve managed to slow down its variation, so that it doesn’t get so wild sometimes. It will eventually be up on ADITI for people to play with if they like. I know wind isn’t really used for much except for some flexi prims that bend to the wind.

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Second Life Group Edit Update Week 36

Baker Linden was at Friday’s Server-Scripting User Group meeting. He updated us on this week’s progress.

My news is that my group member changes will soon be deployed on ADITI. You’ll need a development viewer to test (on ADITI). You can find them here:

I’ll be posting in the JIRA (SVC-4968) on which regions this will be enabled (on ADITI).

There may be some issues during testing. When getting the member list of a large group, other info (group title, group info, etc.) may not properly load. This is an issue with the speed of ADITI’s  SQL server and shouldn’t occur once live on AGNI. To receive the rest of the data, wait for the member list to appear (this can be upwards of a few minutes), go back to the My Groups panel of the people floater and view the group profile again. The query will be cached this time, and the member list will appear quicker than it did before (depending on your connection speed). The rest of the information should be received this time.

If you find any problems while testing, please send me [Baker Linden] a message in-world (on AGNI) or email baker -at- lindenlab -dot- com.

This means we are getting close to having the update in a viewer for use on AGNI, the main grid. I think 4 to 6 weeks, but it may be sooner. When this rolls to the main channel older viewers not using the new group editing API code will be limited to editing groups equal to or less than 10,000 members.

I expect all Third Party Viewers to be adopting this code. I suspect the Phoenix viewer may be pushed into the ‘old’ viewer group and not get it. But, its awesome decedent: Firestorm, will certainly get the update.