Second Life News 2017 w24 – New Shiny

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Servers

There was no roll to the main grid this week. The channel continues to run #17.05.26.326655.

Blue Steel will get a new package Wednesday, #17.06.01.326763. Includes internal fixes.

Le Tigre will get a new package Wednesday, #17.06.12.327066. Includes internal logging and features and an improvement to region starts.

Magnum also gets a new package, #17.06.12.327060. Shoutcast Player fix included. Other changes are an upgrade of the OS.

Tuesday done less left before WE 😜
Tuesday done less left before WE 😜

Shoutcast is the feature that many use to publish the name of the song playing in a music stream. There was some old time fundamental problem with how those scripts worked. Some fix in the server side created a problem with those scripts, broke them. (BUG-100737) The Lindens were not going to build the bug back in. So, they are providing a fix that works similarly. But, all the Shoutcast scripts will have to change.

The fix is something about the characters in the HTTP request stream.

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Second Life – State of VR – Gear VR

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If you are hoping I am going to tell you we have VR for Second Life™, I’ll disappoint you. However, it apparently is possible. But, it isn’t easy and the whole VR thing is a mess, especially if you want to do it cheaply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmC4nDabAkw&

For an instance of a mess, when you place a phone in Gear VR it auto-launches the Oculus app. Doesn’t matter what app you have running, the Oculus app launches and takes over the device. A bunch of people tell you to insert to the headset without connecting the phone to the headset. WAY lame, but doable. However, without the USB connection made the phone can fall out of the unit.

So… you have to get Samsung’s BK Package Disabler (US$1.49) get around this problem. They have a free version if you rooted your phone. If not, you have to hope the retail package will install. If you did root it, no problem just delete all you phones accounts, installed the root-version of BK, and redo all your accounts… lovely.

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Second Life Server News 2017 w/23

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In the area of server updates, there has not been much exciting news. Or even mildly interesting. Changes have been about data collection, which will guide future changes, and infrastructure changes. But, this week there are some interesting changes people are noticing.

Who knew?
Who knew?

A few people were reporting long down times after this week’s update rollouts. Others noticed there were two rollouts Wednesday. Mazidox Linden took the blame for that. Maz rolled the wrong version to the RC channels. So, a second roll was required to get the correct version in place.

So, both Blue Steel and Le Tigre got two restarts. Lucy is certain that if Maz had had a bear it would have told him he was making a mistake… Forgoing the Bear solution the roll procedure is changing to hopefully reduce this mistakes reoccurrence possibility.

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Second Life – Content Creation UG 2017 w/23

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Getting this video out was a problem. Adobe Premiere started crashing and refusing to show video in the Project Editor panel. Plus, the Hippotropolis region was crashing during the meeting. That made for an interesting meeting and made more work putting the video together.

There were lots of audio challenges in this video. I tried to clean up several places. Cathy Foil’s microphone is over driving the system. Vir Linden apparently talks into a fixed position mic. He tends to move toward and away from it when talking. Anyway, I did what I could with it.

Meeting Summary

Vir Linden starts the meeting talking about viewers. The AssetsHTTP viewer is still in QA, but expected to update the RC in week 24.

Work is continuing on animated objects. Vir has the server and a pre-project viewer working so one can see animated objects. Other viewers crash. So, that has to be handled.

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Second Life News 2017 w23

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The main channel got an update today. Simon Linden tells us this is a good one. While we can’t see changes, no new shiny, there is considerable system performance improvement on the back side.

Quoting

We updated the main server channel this morning. The most interesting part of the update is internal – not normally visible. But, we got a big improvement in the caps router … an essential part of keeping regions and viewers happy.

… we made one part of the big system work better.

A caps router directs the regions’ requests for various tasks to the correct servers. I don’t have a lot of information on how all the parts work. I know there are a number of regions in a server host. The server host establishes a connection to the various other computers in the system that handle various tasks. It then provides each region with information needed to connect or receive information from those backend servers.

Places Are Not Evil - People Are
Places Are Not Evil – People Are

Getting a copy of your inventory list, seeing friends online, talking to the asset server… these are all capabilities of the system, caps. Of course, voice and chat are part of the servers provided by backend servers.

You may be aware that when servers are updated on the Tuesday and Wednesday restarts that a number of regions fail to come back online as they should. One noted problem is not being able to log into a region. You may be able to TP into it, but things don’t work well. That region is likely in a host that has failed to connect to the caps, is suffering what is called caps failure.

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