#SL Fun Things

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Coming from Myst Online MadPea has always fascinated me. If you don’t know who MadPea is, you are missing out on once of Second Life’s creative groups. While skimming through my reader I saw Honour’s quick review of MadPea’s Show and Tell. They do a show and tell thing on Sunday’s at 2 PM SLT. It was just 2 PM so I popped over. It’s in-world at the MadPea Base.

MadPea Show & Tell

I got there and had to change viewers. Sculpties or Mesh was going nuts and filling my screen. A quick change of viewer and all was working as expected.

Show and Tell

This show and tell thing is about people showing things they have built, as Honour describes it, their inventions.

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#SL Server News Week 12

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There haven’t been any rolls to the main grid for a couple of weeks now. Rolls to the Release Channel have also been slow. However, the updated region crossing package is back on all 3 release channel s; Blue Steel, Le Tigre, and Magnum.

This is the multi-threaded crossing code. It is still in Phase I.  The Lindens are optimistic about it. As of Friday 3/23 it had been working well. It was looking like it would roll to the main channel Tuesday 3/27.

We are not likely to see any change when this package is rolled out. This code is the foundation for coming changes that will improve performance.

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Extend Your #SL Gesture Keys

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Way back in the Emerald Viewer days, like 2010, when I was only half as old as I am now… o.o  Yeah, my wild and reckless youth…  Emerald allowed gestures to be attached to any key. For my combat games that was a huge advantage. Well, it seems one can easily change which keys gestures can use in any viewer. This article is about how to do that.

Modified Gesture Keys

Read the entire article and pay attention to the warning near the end.

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#SL llListen() Functions

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When I first started learning to write scripts for Second Life I heard how bad LISTEN was for performance. In last Monday’s Scripting UG I learned that a llListen() is not as bad as I was previously told. That will certainly change how I script. If you are curious about how LISTEN affects your scripts, read on.

Frames

Everything in SL seems to be keyed to frames. The meaning of fames in SL basically the images rendered to the viewer. We see that in the Viewer Statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) as both viewer FPS and server FPS. Both the viewer and server take a fragment of time and do all the calculations to figure out where everything is and draw the picture we see on the screen.

The servers run at 45 FPS, unless they over load and start to slow down. Your viewer runs at whatever it runs. Ideally your viewer runs at 45 FPS. It been some time since I’ve seen my viewer run that fast. But, 45 FPS gives the server and viewer 22.2 milli-seconds to figure out where everything is and draw it.

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#SL Scripting llGetAgentList()

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Kelly Linden announced Monday in the Scripting UG and again in the Tuesday Server/Sim/Scripting Ug that he has progressed far enough on the function that it is now in QA and winding its way to a Release Channel. It is probably two weeks away from a roll out on an RC.

You can find pre-release information in the wiki: llGetAgentList(). The page was posted 3/20.

This function will return a list of the agents in a specified area within a single region.  The areas you can specify are;

  • AGENT_LIST_PARCEL – returns only agents on the same parcel where the script is running.
  • AGENT_LIST_PARCEL_OWNER – returns only agents on any parcel in the region where the parcel owner is the same as the owner of the parcel under the scripted object.
  • AGENT_LIST_REGION – returns any/all agents in the region.

The function will return a list of avatar keys. The limit is 100 avatars per the wiki. There is no discernible order or randomness to the list.

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Second Life Dev Viewer 3.3.2 (251752)

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The build process’ linking for the Development Viewer is not working correctly. So, the Snowstorm Page is not updating as it should. It is stuck on 3.3.2 (250772). However, there have been a number of builds and improvements in the Dev Viewer. We just can’t get to them.

However, you can get the latest Development Integration Viewer. This is not a daily use viewer. But, the current rumor is it is stable. I find it is only using 650±mb of ram. That is way down from 1.2 to 2.1mb I have seen in previous versions.

Another branch named Viewmaster is the branch the bug chasers are working on. It is said to be very very stable. Now if I can just figure out the link.