Pathfinding Meeting Week 32

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Thursday we had a meeting with Lorca, Falcon, and Stinson Linden. We got some questions answered. Motor Loon had a good whine about Pathfinding, the keyword being good.

Performance

The Lindens have a couple of days of stats to look at now. The result is the average performance of the grid has not changed. This means that while most regions are NOT optimized, they are not pulling down performance.

Pathfinding User Group

The Process

Falcon pulled up the Pathfinding code and explained what the code is doing in English. What he said follows.

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Pathfinding Vehicle Fixes

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There are some interesting threads appearing in the SL Forum.  Most of the most outraged are people that don’t follow events or know the history of history of Second Life™. There are a few us trying to help those people. But, if they keep their heads buried in what they are doing and only in their primary interests, we can’t do much for them.

If you’re reading this blog and/or Inara’s Living in the Modem World, you are pretty well informed. I think we provide more news than you can get from the SL Forum and Blog. This morning I saw Inara’s: Pathfinding overview. It is a good overview/summary of Pathfinding.

The Problem People

Many of the vehicle makers have used a hack to create lower Land Impact vehicles and to get around other limits. Now they are crying about vehicles using those hacks being broke. I guess they did not include a script updating process either. I use DCS2 and UCE game meters and they send me a new boxed meter whenever they have updates. It is an easy process for them and me.

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HTML HUD’s

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About a year ago Kelly Linden debuted HTML HUD’s. See: #SL Server Update Week 34 for my first mention of HTML HUD’s in 2011. We have not seen many of these being used. The advantage of HTML HUD’s the reduction in scripts and prims needed to make a working interface.

Darien Caldwell is one of the creative types making such HUD’s. He has pointed out that these JIRA’s are a problem:

VWR-29448 – HTML (Shared Media) HUD objects exhibit Unintuitive Focus and Control Behavior. This is about how the HUD’s work and look within the viewer. Most floated in the viewer go transparent when they lose focus. We know that we have to shift focus to the panel, by clicking it, before we can click buttons in the Panel. HTML HUD’s do not go transparent when losing focus. This means we click buttons in them, probably expecting something to happen, and nothing happens. That nothing is deceiving. The first click shifts focus. A second click will activate the button.

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#SL Server News Week 32

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There isn’t a lot of news yet this week. I think everyone knows that Pathfinding rolled out to the main channel. You can find most of the information about Pathfinding in the SL Wiki: Second Life Pathfinding  Category. The new Pathfinding Tools are in the Beta Viewer.

It is unclear, at least to me, when those tools will roll into the production release viewer. There is no estimate when the third party viewers (TPV) will have all the tools. I expect the Linden and TPV’s to catch up this month.

Server Scripting August 2012

Simon noted Tuesday that the crash rate for Pathfinding (PF) regions had jumped up after the roll out. But, it seemed to be stabilizing and coming down. I suppose when one adds 5 times more regions the possibility of finding problems goes up five-fold too. Whatever, as of the time of the meeting the Lab was only collecting data and watching the system.

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Second Life Pathfinding Performance

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I’m seeing a load of misinformation on Pathfinding performance. Back in May I wrote an article getting into Pathfinding (PF) performance. See: #SL Pathfinding Update Week 20. Scroll down and read the section on The Size of the Problem.

Navmesh w/X-Ray Enabled

PF has several different aspects. One could break it into two main parts. One is the part where PF figures out where everything is in the region and how to treat it, as what are obstacles and where are the paths. This is a slow and calculation intense process. But, it really only has to run at region start up, when a region’s ground topology changes, or things are built on the ground. It is sort of an initialization process.

Another part is when PF has to find what has moved, like a door opening. Things like a door that cut across paths are called cuts. PF has to find things that move and ‘cut’ the Navigation Mesh mostly referred to as Navmesh. The cut calc’s are very fast. They only need to revise the previously calculated Navmesh.

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Second Life Player Retention Week 32

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This is a long article. I think it may shape your thinking about Second Life™ and change how you deal with events in SL. So, I hope you read it and consider the concepts. Because while everyone has their ideas about Second Life™, ranging from; what it is to what it will become, what the Lab is thinking, planning, and doing… some basic paradigms have changed and few seem to have noticed.

The Inspiring Orientation – Learn to Fly

One area of thinking about Second Life important to a considerable number of users is what will retain more visitors, converting them to long term users, residents if you will. If you take a simplistic approach to things an answer and/or solution to player retention problems is likely to elude you forever, as humans as a whole are anything but simplistic.

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