How do *you* define stability?

In my last piece, I questioned who, exactly, is minding the store. While my question was primarily aimed at SL Marketplace, which continues to acquire JIRAs and unanswered pleas for help, it also applied more widely to the grid in general.

Recently, LL introduced a slew of ideas in order to “enhance” our SL pleasure and promise “greater” stability. All of these initiatives were launched under Philip Rosedale’s brief “return” as the CEO. Outside of Snowstorm, which is enjoying moderate success, few seem to have actually worked.

The new policy of small fixes rolled out weekly? Nope. Not from where I’m standing at least. Rather the reverse. Now, as well as putting up with the weekly irritation of Second Life’s weekend performance gradually degrading between Friday and Sunday, I’m now finding my Tuesdays and Wednesdays routinely buggered up by rolling restarts for Magum, le Tigre, Blue Cheese, White Knuckles – or whatever the heck the latest codename for a “fix” is called – to the point where no matter where I am or what I’m doing, I’m experiencing inventory errors, failed teleports and other issues.

Similarly, even the big roll-outs continue to irritate, with teleports continuing to fail some 24 hours after the “all clear” has been given. We’re also again hearing about things like the Mono freeze-up still being “fixed”. Excuse me, wasn’t this sorted out a few months ago, among some fanfare, and wasn’t there a posting about it having been sorted?

So why is it, in the last week or so, many people are reporting the sim they are on routinely freezing up again when someone teleports in? Has a new “fix” now broken something again? Wasn’t the new strategy supposed to stop this?

Mark Kingdon was guilty of several faults during his tenure at LL as CEO – but once thing he did stand watch over was a drive to improve performance and stability.

So what on Earth is going on now?

Yet more on Mesh

Various questions have been floating around, re: Mesh. In the hopes of providing clarification, here’s a couple of points of clarification:

TPV users will not be able to see Mesh objects.

  • Users of 1.23.5 / snowglobe-based viewers will likely not be able to view Mesh objects.
  • Users of Viewer 2.x-based TPVs will be able to view Mesh objects correctly.

TPV users will not be able to upload Mesh imports

  • Users of 1.23.5 / snowglobe-based viewers will not be able to upload Mesh objects
  • Users of Viewer 2.x-based TPVs might be able to upload Mesh objects, depending on whether Linden Lab agrees to release a “wrapper” that will make this possible.

It’s by no means certain that the second point above actually happen; Linden Lab appears keen to ring-fence the ability to upload Mesh within Viewer 2.x. However, those TPV developers developing Viewers based on the 2.x have requested a means by which they can provide the means for users to upload Mesh objects, and Linden Lab have apparently agreed to look into the matter and see what can be done, without necessarily lifting the fence on the code completely.

One thing that is clear is that if the ring fence remains firm, those wishing to see – as well as upload – Mesh objects will, at some point, find it necessary to make the move to a Viewer based on the Viewer 2.x code. Both the Imprudence and the Phoenix teams are already moving in this direction – with Jessica Lyon of the Phoenix team going so far as to state that the upcoming release of Phoenix will likely be the last major release to that particular code base, with future releases being restricted to bug fixes and the like, while the focus within the Phoenix team shifts more to the Firestorm (Viewer 2.x-based) Viewer project.