Second Life and Virtual Worlds
I got an in-world IM from Vivienne Daguerre about free copies of Hexagon 2.5, Bryce 7.0, and Daz Studio 4 Pro. The free copies will be available for the month of February. Vivienne did an evaluation of the software and offer.
See her article here: Hexagon 2.5, Bryce 7.0, and Daz Studio 4 Pro–Free!
I’ve downloaded the programs but haven’t taken the time to start playing with them.
It is hard to keep up with the Linden Lab viewer. We do not see lots of changes in the user interface nor are there lots of new features being added. But, there is lots of stuff happening behind the User Interface.
It is not like there is any place where the Lindens are talking about the viewer. Esbee disappeared long ago. While still at the Lab, I never hear a peep out of her. I hear far more from Runitai Linden that leads the Shining Development Branch. He attends various groups and we get information from him. But, it is mixed with the context of the meeting.
The Lab has a number of development repositories where they publish code as they develop the viewer. One of these is the Viewer Development Branch. It is in BitBucket. If you code in large projects, you have some familiarity with code repositories, repo’s. For those of us that work with small short term projects repo’s are mostly over kill.
If you don’t write code/scripts, the whole thing probably seems rather geeky and mostly Greek. It is. Understand that the repo’s are typically where those writing code pass on notes, information, and their code to people that know what’s going on. The notes and descriptions they write are very much like notes we intend to only ever be read by our self. They are not overly explanatory.
The work is the roll out from Magnum to the main grid went well. The LSL function llSetRegionPos() is now on the main grid. Oskar says this is Kelly’s first major roll to the main grid for 2012. Yay Kelly.
Two of the release channels were running a release that had ghosting problems in week 4. The problem was in the new foundational region crossing code. Carmilla Linden fixed the problem. When they merged the fix with the release code for Magnum, a crashing issue was found. The roll of the repaired code had to be foregone. So, that code planned for Magnum was replaced with the same release as Blue Steel and Le Tigre.
A JIRA was filed, WEB-4260 – SLM deliveries consistently delayed in early morning hours. It raised some heat. Darrius wrote in his blog about it: Slow Spiral Into Demise. Forum conversation picked up and some bloggers picked up on the problem. I wrote about it in: #SL Market Place Woes.
It seems the commotion got some action. Zanara Zenovka noticed a change and posted about it in: Shock! Horror! Instant deliveries?
Whatever was delaying early morning deliveries seems to have been fixed. In my previous article I speculated that WEB-4260 might not be fixed as it would take people away from the Direct Delivery project. Seems they either decided to give WEB-4260 some love while depriving DD or had other people available. We’ll likely never know which.
This fix should make the European users and all the merchants much happier.
I hear lots of people bitch about something they know next to nothing about. Unfortunately they are not limited to Second Life. Oskar recently gave a good reply to one such… (put your own adjective and noun or pronoun here). I think it is worth reading Oskar’s response to understand what it takes to get server fixes rolled out. There is also some interesting information on timelines and drop dead dates for fixes rolling out.
WolfB——- Bears—- wrote:
So you have fixed the ghosting issue. Great.
But you’re not deploying the fix for another 30+ hours. Not Great.
If you do have an explanation for continuing to run server code which you know is broken, I would like to hear it.
The best answer would be that you are running the fix through QA processes. That still doesn’t explain why, when some regions are inaccessible because of the number of ghosted AVs, you have not reverted them to an earlier, known-safe, version of the code.
The code from the Magnum release channel has rolled to the main grid. That means, according to Simon Linden, we now have the new function llSetRegionPos() available across the whole grid. The existing function llGetEnv() gets the new return value frame_number. Plus a bunch of bug fixes. You can see them listed in previous Server News articles.
This release channel gets the performance enhanced server maintenance package. The big news is in the speed up of LIST handling functions.
This is the functions’ second time in a release channel, if I remember correctly.