Server Deployments Update
The RC channel deployments went head as scheduled, and included the promised fix for offline IMs from scripted objects failing to reach people’s e-mail (BUG-1002). A further issue (BUG-1027) with group owners receiving garbled messages on ejecting group members was reported over the weekend of the 9/10th December, and this also received a fix which formed a part of the deployments.
As reported in part 1, Magnum received code to double the server-side memory allocation from 60KB to 120KB. Animations within SL have two core limits: loop time (30 seconds) and memory allocation (60KB). Apparently, some complex animations which ran within the 30-second time frame have been hitting the memory allocation limit. This initial change should help to ease that issue when encountered. A future change on the viewer-side of things should eventually increase the animation run-time as well, allowing for animations longer than 30 seconds to be uploaded and used.
Server Deployments Week 51
Given Magnum has all the same changes as both BlueSteel and Le Tigre, plus the additional stability improvements and memory leak fixes, it now looks likely that this code will be promoted to the Main Channel on week 51 (week commencing Monday 17th December). No news was provided during the Server Beta meeting on any proposed RC releases during week 51.
Again, as a reminder, there will be no server code releases during weeks 52 (commencing Monday 24th December) and week 1, 2013 (commencing Monday 31st December). There will also be no further Server Beta meetings until Thursday January 3rd, 2013.
Viewer Updates
Linden Lab continue to work on the beta and development viewers in order to clear the backlog of releases resulting from the memory leak / crash issues. Currently, they are “almost” at the end of catching-up on the release schedule. Some of the focus at present is on the Mac side of things, with Oz Linden reporting that there should be “A bunch of changes for the Mac build and the Mac implementation coming into viewer development” over the next few days.
The beta viewer has seen a further 3.4.3 code release (3.4.3.268139 on December 14th). This should mark the last of the 3.4.3 code releases for the beta viewer prior to that code moving to the release viewer, possibly in week 51. After this, the beta viewer will move to the 3.4.4 code base, which will include the changes for the Mac side of things as well. This should then see the viewer branches all more-or-less back to a normal pace of development and update, with fresh releases on the order of every three weeks or so, including more HTTP service updates and improvements.
Tcmalloc has been set off to one side in order to clear the backlog, but “has not been forgotten”. Currently it is still enabled in the beta release, but appears to be disabled in upcoming viewer development versions.
Avatar Baking
The biggest news of the week came with the announcement that for Avatar Baking, the countdown has commenced. This is going to take the next few months to implement, and requires both changes on the server-side of things and significant changes to the viewer. An update had actually been promised at the Content Creation User Group on Monday 17th December, but given the large impact the changes have on viewers, Nyx Linden rightly announced the news relating to the project at the TPV Developer meeting on Friday 14th December.
Threaded Region Crossings
The work on multi-threaded region crossings is still with the LL QA team. In the meantime, further regions have been added to the simulator version (server code DRTSIM-184) running the new code. Four of the latter are GC Test 9, GC Test 10, GC Test 15 and GC Test 16, which form a block of four regions which may assist with testing the capability (remember these SLurls are all to Aditi!). Caleb Linden has been testing the capability and reports that he has encountered some issues himself, with crashes during “automated horde testing” and with repeated crossing with heavy scripts. He’s interested in hearing constructive feedback from anyone willing to carry out informal tests on the code.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 
Wait … What’s that about ‘Mac’ do you know any more what they plan for mac viewer? OpenGL 3.2 support? 64bit support?. Or is it just gatekeeper support?
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Gatekeeper, certainly, plus improved 10.8 support; beyond that it’s a bit in the dark for me, but I’ll ask Oz this week.
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I am glad to hear someone remembers there are Mac users out here. However, I am waiting for the time when LL remembers there are content creators out here, specifically mesh creators, for whom the ability to copy and paste Size, Position, and Rotation is now essential. I may crash regularly on Firestorm but it is preferable to giving up these functions. Why? Because when I was making sculpts, I could rez a sculpted prim inworld, then tweak in Blender and just drop the updated sculpt map in the sculpted prim to update it in place. But to update a mesh component in place I have to rez a new mesh, resize it, rotate it, and position it. It is not so important if I am making something out of one mesh, but I make complex scripted items that require multiple mesh components, and I want to be able to click a few buttons to update a mesh with a new tweaked one.
I am not sure if the LL viewer has Align/ Align Textures yet but that has saved me many hours of tedious work. I could not think of using a viewer without these.
Also, as a merchant I do everything possible to streamline customer service to make it as rapid and efficient as possible, which includes an autoresponse that provides links to answers to common questions and other helpful information pages that often provide immediate answers even when I am offline. I can’t use a viewer without auto response.
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I mean even when I am AFK not offline (though I use vacation settings for that).
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