#SL Scripting News Week 45

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There is some news from the Scripting User Group. Meaning something I find interesting.

Le Tigre Oddities

The current update (week 44) running in Le Tigre is showing some scripting oddities. Most are around scripts that use the llTakeControls(). Kelly says it look like the control events are firing too often. So, if you are trying to steer a vehicle things are going awry.

Paraphrasing Kelly said something like: We put a cap on the total time the scripts for an agent can trigger. This is the time outside normal script time. When you press a key we give your scripts, that have control, an extra chance to run. This happens in ‘agent time’. To prevent abuse we added a cap per framer per agent (1ms per frame per agent). It is pretty large right now (it is adjustable and we may drop it later). Disabling scripts on a parcel only stops the script time block. The changes make it so you get at most 1 extra script run per frame.

Anything that adds more data to serialize per script is difficult. There is some potential to use a lot of script time but the recent changes on Le Tigre limit that severely.

Kelly says, “1ms is generally enough time to run ~20 scripts. More if they are ‘quick’.”

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#SL New Translate Panel

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I noticed we have a new panel in the Second Life Viewer 3.2.2 (244260) Oct 31 2011. You probably know, if you follow this blog, that Google’s free translation service used by many games is changing to a paid service. That means our translator in the viewer will stop working about the end of this month.

New Translate Settings in Preferences -> Chat

The new panel provides an option to switch to Bing’s free service. It also provides a place to add your Google API key, which you get from Google Translate API. In my article Language Translation in Second Life I estimated my cost of translation services if I had everything I chat translated. I think I could easily get by for US$20 per year. Since I don’t translate everything, it would probably be way less.

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#SL Server Performance

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People notice problems and complain when the problems interfere with their Second Life. We say much less when things work well. In the line of the latter there is an interesting aside to Friday’s huge meeting in Denby.

Simulator User Group 11-2011

The meeting was the weekly Simulator User Group. It typically has 10 to 20 attendees. This past Friday it filled to capacity. At one point there were 80 people in the region and 30 to 40 in the two adjacent regions.

The meeting was interesting in its own right. But, an interesting bit of information is how well the region did handling the crowd.

In the image I have with the article #SL Server News Week 44 you can see a region performance meter displaying the script count, memory use, and time slice used by each avatar’s scripts. The maximum script count was 174, which is high but not uncommon. It looks like the median script count is around 10.

I was curious to see how the region was holding up. I wasn’t about to start dancing or running in circles. I did not want to do anything that would have any possibility of crashing me out of the region. I  had problems getting in when the occupancy count was 54.

The viewer statistics (Ctrl-Shift-1) show region performance. Time Dilation is an indicator of how well the region is or isn’t handling the region’s script load. With 60+ avatars in region Time Dilation was staying in the range of 1.00 to 0.90 most of the time, which I think is rather impressive.

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#SL Server News Week 44

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A few surprises this week, not the good kind. Some problem has been preventing regions from shutting down and coming back up on the new code. This affected thousands of regions. All of the ones affected by the problem are in the main release channel. Support was swamped. The roll out of the new server update was delayed for several hours.

Server Scripting User Group 11-2011

Speculation by some is that the recent OS Update was causing the shutdown problem. Oskar Linden pointed out that they have had shutdowns since the update and those shutdowns worked just fine.

Tuesday’s roll out was delayed as problems were resolved. The roll finished on Wednesday. So, Wednesday’s roll was pushed to Thursday. The details for the week follow. Simon Linden says investigation is ongoing and some fixes are in the pipeline.

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New Things Coming to #SL

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For some time I’ve read the blogs and posts of SL users saying the Lindens developing Second Life needed to spend more time in SL. The idea being that if they used the product rather than just developing what they think we need, SL would be a better place. I think it is a good idea.

It seems Rod and Will think that is a good idea too. Hamlet posted, “Linden Launches Monster-Dodging Game for Premium Users UPDATE: Rod Humble Explains — It Was Made With New Tools Coming Soon for SL Game Developers” which is about a new game in Second Life. He has been chasing down his contacts in the Lab to find out what is up with that.

A quote he got from Rod says they built the game not to be building games, but to learn what tools are needed to be able to build games in Second Life. That pretty much is the idea many of us have put forward for Lindens. Walk in our shoes and you’ll understand. The Lab has now done that. They built a game to find out what we are up against.

Whether walking in our shoes is a better idea than listening to us is yet to be seen. I am more and more certain that the idea of transparency for the Lab’s development is a thing of the past. Much like Obama’s idea of government transparency has faded.

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