Virtual Landmarks

There is a new proposal on the Linden table. It comes from Toysoldier Thor and can be found in the JIRA as: SVC-8082Proposed Global Service for SL:  VIRTUAL LANDMARKS & VLM Mapping Services.

The Problem

Consider what happens when you have a home or shop in-world and your landlord decides to return the land to Linden Lab or for some other reason you have to move. The land is either going to disappear and all your stuff will be returned or your shop or home will be gone. You find a new house, apartment, and/or shop. There is little that can be done to stop that process.

Current Landmark Flow – By Toysoldier Thor – Click to Enlarge

But, consider. What about all the Landmarks that point to your shop or whatever that no longer exists? What do you do with the dozens to thousands of links in the Market Place to your non-existent shop? Did you know there is no easy way to just change the landmark you have included with a product you have for sale? You have to reload the entire product package.

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#SL Group Editing Update

You probably know that editing large groups over about 10,000 is a big problem. I mention it in #SL Server News Week 31.

Baker Linden is working on getting group editing fixed. At this Friday’s Server/Scripting meeting he had this to say:

I’m almost finished with the server side fix for large group management. I’m hoping that the changes I’ve made will also be compatible with legacy viewers (they -should- be). If the data changes, I’ll make sure to hit up a TPV user group before it goes live to let them add the necessary changes to their group UI windows. With my own tests, I’ve managed to successfully get data for the largest group on Aditi (~40k users) without problems. It takes a couple minutes the first time you do the query, but after that it takes around 3-5 seconds.

I ended up changing the way that works, from when I said that. I’m hoping I can get that data sent across with everything else. The biggest change I’ll be making will be instead of sending all 40k users at once, I’ll be sending groups of members to the viewer. It will make sorting more difficult, as you may get 40 “groups” of 1k members each (for example) this way, we also don’t push upwards of 5MB through UDP. Actually, the way the data is formatted, there will be changes (I’ll make sure legacy viewers get the data the way they’re used to).

It may move to that [HTTP protocol], but right now I have a UDP connection that transfers the data.

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#SL News Update Week 31

We are in the last stages of the Pathfinding Project. With any luck it will roll out to the main channel next week. As of Friday, it is the candidate for roll to the main channel. But, last minute problems could change that.

The Advanced Creator Tools (ACT) have been released using Run Time Permissions. The original intent was to release them using the Experience Permissions. Run Time Permissions are not use in Linden Realms.

Server/Scripting Meeting

The Griefer Monday and Griefer Monday Postmortem explain the problems encounter with the initial release of the ACT. At the time the Lindens decided to rework the Experience Permissions. When Andrew and Huseby Linden were asked about whether they would be releasing the Experience Tools using the Experience Permissions the answers were ‘Probably, but it is undetermined at this time’ and ‘No Comment’.

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Cloud Party Update

I hear what I’ll call rumors that Cloud Party has stopped growing… I suppose like lots of stats it depends on the details as to what that means. There are people exploring the possibilities of Cloud Party and the developers are continuing to develop…

Maxwell Graf is building Rustica stuff in Cloud Party. Some others are doing some fun things. You can keep up on the goings on at: Cloud Party Bugle. The blog has a nice list of tutorials for Cloud Party.

The frequency of posts there seems to be decreasing. Hard to say at this point.

Cloud Party has a Twitter channel now.

I don’t see lots of news flowing out of Cloud Party. We probably won’t until it moves closer to release, the end of Beta. I think it is early adopters and experimenters that are working with the start up developers.

#SL Content Improvement Week 31

Morph Targets and the Mesh Deformer seem to be main topics of interest for this meeting. Neither were on the agenda. We have gone a couple of weeks with no news on the Deformer. Maybe we will hear something from Karl via Metareality’s podcast Thursday.

While Morph Targets and Redpoly’s Collision Bone process are of interest, I don’t see where there is any news about either this week. People have shown up at the Nyx’s Content Creation group and Geenz’s Content Improvement groups asking, but there is no new information. People tend to take that as no progress. It may not mean that, but those doing work on the projects are not being communicative.

Missing Transcripts

If you have been using the wiki, you may have noticed that a problem caused the Lab to restore the wiki from a backup. Several hours of editing were lost. In that loss are some meeting transcripts. The Content Improvement Group has replaced their lost transcripts. So, if you were wondering…

MAINTENANCE – On 2012-7-25 at 17:45 PST we rolled the wiki back 26 hours to the state as of 2012-7-24 15:30 PST. We apologize for any inconvenience.

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#SL Server News Week 31

The main channel got the Advanced Creator Tools (AKA: Experience Tools). Torley Linden has a new video out showing a bit of what they can do. Watch it on Hamlet’s NWN in: SL Creators: What Will You Do With Your New Teleport Agent & Temporary Attachment Tools?

Server Scripting July 2012.

You can read the official Linden announcement on the SL Blog: First Set of Advanced Creator Tools Launched Today. These are the tools that were used in Linden Realms.

This set of tools gives us new Scripting Functions. We will soon start to see new teleport units appearing. They will use the new functions: llTeleportAgent() and llTeleportAgentGlobalCoords(). These are for intra-region and inter-region teleports. A nice feature in them is you can control which way an avatar faces when they arrive.

One of the odd kinks in how the functions work is for the teleport to work differently than they do now, at least permissions-wise, is one must own the TP device. That is where llAttachToAvatarTemp() comes in.

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