#SL Server News Week 50

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I’ll do this update and another later in the week. We have some good news and some bad news.

First, the good. It seems the kernel (3.0) upgrade is working and roll has reached 20% of the grid. We may see that roll out increasing its pace. It does mean a region restart so many regions will be seeing 2 restarts today and some tomorrow. Others will be seeing an additional restart later in the week.

FBS Dagger's Large Airplane

Second, the Le Tigre region was rolled to the main channel. (Release Notes) Some people are reporting teleporter device problems. It seems to be associated with posJump(vector target_pos). However some people are having problems and others are not.

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Testing Broken Stats

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If you see the appearance here changing… Or odd things are happening… it is because I was trying to debug an issue with this blog’s stats. I was changing themes, adding and removing plug-ins and widgets now and then for testing.

The problem seems to have been at WordPress.com. Today (12/16) my stats started working. Now I have to reconfigure the plugins and widgets and get things working again.

Please forgive any inconvenience…

#SL Phoenix Viewer Problems

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Users have found some problems in the recent Phoenix 1.6.0.1591 release. Three errors were considered critical and quickly fixed. The result is a Phoenix 1.6.0.1600 release.

Visit the Phoenix Viewer Download page and get a new copy.

This release fixes:

  • Opening of scripts while LSL Preprocessor enabled causes crash to desktop. PHOE-3593
  • Scripted dialogs from deeded objects fail. PHOE-3600
  • Right click > wear from inventory is broken. PHOE-3583

#SL Last Names Coming Back

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I saw Danial Voyager’s post about a comment in LL’s CEO’s Feed. Rod wrote that last names are coming back in 2012.

You may have been following the JIRA Feature Request to being last names back. See SVC-7125 – Bring Back Last Name Options!

This JIRA had 2,139 votes and 696 watches. That is probably some sort of record. It certainly shows that the most residents do not know the importance of clicking Watch.

There is a stream of new comments added to the JIRA item just about every day.

Racism?

The lack of last names seems to have created a form of racism. New SL users with the last name Resident are claiming discrimination. The only way to know is create a new Alt and walk a mile in their shoes.

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#SL Scripting News Week 50

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Kelly Linden thinks tomorrow (Tuesday) the Le Tigre update will roll the main channel. Chances are good it will work this time. It contains a large number of fixes and some improvements.

Once it rolls to the main channel there will probably be no further upgrades until next year. After this week Second Life enters a no change window and a number of Lindens take holiday.

Vehicles

Havok and script functions are being looked at to improve movement in SL. In the wiki is a function… well more of a subroutine… warppos() that handles movement over more than 10m. Some consideration is being given to making the function a built-in function, may be llWarpPos(). No promises.

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#SecondLife Global Illumination

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You may not have noticed the Graphics Setting feature: Global Illumination. It began appearing in viewers some time ago. But, now it has disappeared from the SL Viewer. So, what’s up?

What it is…

Global Illumination is the label used to describe how light is handled in 3D games. Its purpose is to make lighting more realistic. It adds ‘reflected’ light effects. This means if you are standing with a blue wall to the right and the sun to the left, some blue light will be reflecting on to your right side.

Status

Back in May 2009 the Lab, Runitai Linden, posted a video showing new features they were working on. See: SL Tech Demo above.

The video (above) includes Mesh and Global Illumination. At about 1:34 in the video you can see a sun cycle that shows an example of Global Illumination. (GI) Notice how the sun seems to reflect off surfaces and illuminate other surfaces. That is the Global Illumination.

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