Second Life Third-Party Dev Meeting 2017 w38

The Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer will update early next week (#39). The last couple of blocking bugs are being fixed. Oz Linden thinks they are probably down to 1 problem last blocking problem, pipeline stalls. A special branch of the viewer is designed to find and fix that problem. Those experience the problem will get a copy of it for testing.

Voice is getting a new SDK update. It addresses couple long-standing problems.

There is a fix in Linden Viewers where the Lindens extended the retry time. So, they are being more successful connecting to voice. It takes longer to connect when there are problems, but it is more successful. If there are no problems, it is a quick connect.

Darling
Darling

Manually killing the viewer’s voice server prevents it restarting as it once did. Now, restart the viewer to kill and start the voice server. Then it works.

The Maintenance viewer just went out a couple of hours before the meeting (Friday noon). It uses new Vivox SDK. This version is Not compatible with previous versions. Some third-party viewers and Linux versions commonly require users to copy the app from the Linden viewer and drop it in the third-party viewer. Or to use older versions of the voice app with new versions of the viewer, for various reasons. That is not going to work.

Now the viewer and voice app will need to be versions made after the change to the new Vivox SDK are built in.

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Second Life News 2017 w38

Servers

The main channel is not updating this week. It will continue to run version #17.09.01.508236.

Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will update to version #17.09.14.508549. This version addresses: Improvements to address some problems that could degrade simulator performance in rare cases.

A Dot On The Map
A Dot On The Map

Magnum will update to version #17.09.14.508533. It fixes BUG-100505 – “llGetEnv (“agent_limit”) is returning an empty string in Magnum, Le Tigre and Blue Steel regions.”

The only interesting additional information from the Server-Scripting UG meeting is that work on the servers includes an effort to reduce the recent outages.

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AvaStar 2.0 – Sept 30?

AvaStar is thinking they will release AvaStar 2.0 around the end of September… yes, 2017. I like the AvaStar developers and support people. But, I’ve decided they are way too susceptible to feature creep. Fortunately, they release RC versions that keep us going. If you are using Blender, there is nothing equal to AvaStar for Second … Read more

Second Life to Kill OpenSim?

Hypergrid Business has an article about what Linden Lab’s® move to the cloud may mean for OpenSim grids. By knowing what may happen to OpenSim we can infer what is likely to happen to Second Life.

David Kariuki thinks moving to the cloud will allow Linden Lab to run on demand regions. Meaning if no one is in the region, the region would spin down and drop out of the servers, go offline. When someone is on the grid next door or TP’s there, the region loads into a server and spins up.

Brand New Colony (Sept. 2017)
Brand New Colony (Sept. 2017)

The result is fewer servers would be needed, a huge cost saving in hardware and electricity.

It sounds to me like this could be a performance problem. Would we have to wait while the region spins up? Or can a region load fast enough we wouldn’t notice? We don’t know.

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