#SL #SecondLife Outages

by

[POSTED 1:41PM PST, 16 February 2012] We are experiencing an outage which may have caused some Residents to be logged out of Second Life.  Some regions will also be unavailable. Secondlife.com, the Marketplace and our support services for tickets and live chat are also unavailable.  We are working on the outage and will update this blog as more information is available. (Reference)

This is the second significant outage in two days. Valentine’s Day saw a hardware failure that took down the Market Place and some of the web services.

Today I watched my little Concurrent User Meter drop by 17,000+ users in one tick. In about 15 minutes the logins were hitting 1,000+ per minute. I suppose everyone was trying to get back in.

#SL Pathfinding Update

by

I see today that the Lab has published the list of regions in ADITI where the new Pathfinding functions are being tested.

Pathfinding/Alpha release notes

Regions

These SLURL’s may or may not work when you click them. It depends on whether you have set up the secondlife:\\ protocol in your browser. The easy way yo get to these SLURL’s is to log into ADITI and paste the SLURL into the location window at the top of the viewer.

Obviously, I think, you can use the World Map to find the PathTest regions.

Pink Prims Bug

by

A number of people updating to SL Viewer 3.2.8 are getting pink prims. See the image below.

Image by Blaise Glendevon

There are two fixes. Neither are that great, but they will get you by until the Lab brings out a fix. The fix is thanks to the Firestorm/Phoenix Team, as far as I can tell. See: FIRE-4945 – Pink/Fushia textures when basic shaders enabled on ATI 3000-4000-5000 series cards.

Read more

Nirans Viewer Gets Mesh Def 0.2

by

A couple of days ago Qarl release a revision of the Mesh Deformer code. Today Niran got it working in Niran’s Viewer. Niran posted a comment on the Deformer update article. Nirans link leads to this Nirans Viewer Download page. The 1.24 version is still on the Download Button. Find the 1.25 version, which has the Mesh Deformer.

The download is slow this morning, but I’m having network problems.

As soon as I get a copy downloaded and the network retuned, I’ll be checking out the new deformer.

Remember. The Deformer is still alpha code.

Blender Bad Habits

by

Hibit Spad posted a link in the SL Forum to an interesting Blender article, Blender Bad Habits. There are 10 bad habits that the author, Light, encourages people to unlearn. I have a few of those habits.

I think it is well worth the look.

I think the author is mostly on about those making video tutorials for Blender. I think the bad habits were taken from tutorials. I have to say there are WAY more horrible tutorials on YouTube than there are good ones. I came to the conclusion that on YouTube you REALLY need to know the author of a video tutorial. I can go nuts as someone rambles through a tutorial.

A not so bad a habit is the attribution given by Blender.org to Domino and Gaia. See: Blender 2.62: Collada I know who Domino and Gaia are. I haven’t heard of Juha, but congrats and thanks to all three.

A Second Life compatibility option was added for exporting armatures, along with a number of other fixes related to transformations and armatures.

State of the development

There has been much discussion about the state of the Collada integration, it’s not currently working very reliable yet, and this needs to be solved somehow. A new team now started working to improve Collada support to get it more useful for integration with external tools and game engines, improving the existing OpenCollada based I/O module. Members of the team are:

  • Domino Marama (development)
  • Juha Mäki-Kanto (development)
  • Gaia Clary (Organization, Documentation and all the rest)

Other developers interested in joining development are welcome. There’s a wiki page where we collect plans, application support info, test files, and a list of issues to solve.