Let it Snow! Isles of Lyonesse (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments – Week 50 Recap

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread in the forums for the most recent news and updates.

On Tuesday, December 9th, the Main (SLS) channel was updated with the server maintenance package deployed to the three RC channels in week #49.

On Wednesday, December 10th, all three RC channels received a new server maintenance package primarily comprising fixes for Experience Keys / Tools issues.

Server Deployments and the no Change Window

Week #51 (commencing Monday, December 15th) marks the run-up to the Christmas / New Year holiday break.

While it is still subject to official confirmation, it looks likely that the server maintenance update deployed to the RC channels will be promoted to the Main (SLS) channel on Tuesday, December 16th. However, due to the no change (code freeze) window coming into effect for the holiday period, there is likely to be no updates made to the RC channels until normal operations are resumed in week #2 of January 2015.

SL Viewer

Wednesday, December 10th saw the to remaining release candidate viewers updated to match the most recent release viewer:

The Maintenance viewer RC updated to version 3.7.23.297296. This includes a broad range of fixes for for voice, rendering, avatar distortion, inventory, sounds, the viewer UI, and more, plus a series of fixes for avatar attachments

The HTTP Pipelining RC viewer updated to version 3.7.23.297272. This reduces pipelined texture and mesh fetching time-outs so that stalled connections fail quickly allowing earlier retry. The time-out value is changed from 150 seconds to 60 seconds.

It is likely that one of these two viewers will be promoted to the de facto release viewer in week #51, prior to the no change window coming into force for the holiday period.

All other official SL viewer versions remain as per my Current Viewer Releases page.

Other News

Map Tile Issues

Some people may have noticed that World Map tiles reverted to some very slow loading behaviour recently (after being shifted to the CDN for a faster delivery of tile textures to the viewer back when use of the CDN was first being rolled-out). The lag in tile rendering should now be fixed.

Group notices from Group “(none)”

There has been an intermittent and recurring problem with group notices being received with a group of “(none)” assigned to them. This has been ongoing for a while, and those affected by it can detect no discernible patten in how it occurs; just that once or twice a week, rather than a notice carrying the group name as a URI, it is received with “(none)” as a clickable (and unresolvable) link. Some reports suggest that people will receive perhaps two or three such notices in a row before they again start receiving notices with the proper group name.

The problem doesn’t appear to be endemic to any specific viewer, and can occur randomly with notices from any group. Due to its intermittent and random behaviour, it is hard to pin down a specific cause – such as the viewer failing to resolve the associated group name. However, should you encounter the problem, please consider checking your viewer logs for any messages which appear to be associated with the problem, and raising a JIRA on the matter, appending said log entries.

Feature Request: Available Attachment Slots

Many games in Second Life use llAttachToAvatarTemp() to attach multiple components to an avatar in order to play the game. However, while the simulator tracks the number of attachments used by an avatar, there is currently no way of knowing beforehand whether there are sufficient slots remaining with an avatar for all the necessary attachments to be made. This means the where there are insufficient available slots, a game will repeatedly try (and fail) to attach the remaining items, with no feedback.

Feature request BUG-6377 is a request for this issue to be addressed, although it hasn’t seen much traction since first submitted. Commenting on the matter when raised at the SBUG meeting, Maestro Linden said:

That one seems pretty easy, actually. The sim is already counting your worn attachments so that it can block you from wearing too many. I suppose you’d want an argument for which agent It could be implemented as yet another flag for llGetObjectDetails, which already supports avatar-only parameters like OBJECT_RENDER_WEIGHT .

Given such a function would only return the number of available slots per avatar, rather than the details of attachments used on those slots (which some viewers provide anyway, with the exception of the details on any HUDs and avatar is wearing), the functionality is seen as benign, so the idea might start to get traction.

Lab Feels The Pineapple Express

As many will doubtless be aware, the US West Coast was inundated with rain on Thursday, December 11th courtesy of the so-called “Pineapple Express“. This bought with it flooding and power outages in the San Francisco and Bay Area, before the storm moved on southwards to threaten and impact Los Angeles and San Diego.

For some (all?) at the Lab, it meant work was transferred to a temporary office in San Francisco, with Maestro Linden logging-in to the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting from there on Thursday, presumably due to the power outages, or possibly because of the flood warnings issued along the Embarcadero waterfront area during the worst of the storm.