SL projects update week 19 (2): Interest list, missing prims, griefing

Interest List Update

As noted in week 18, Andrew Linden has been working on fixing a bug related to Meeroos (but which I’ve seen affecting other animals as well).

If you turn your camera away from a crowd of Meeroos, wait several seconds, then turn back around… the Meeroos will be updated, but not quite in the right order. So sometimes you’ll see a head move to the new position, then a fraction of a second later the rest of the body.  So I have a theoretical fix that doesn’t crash the simulator (anymore)

Reporting on the situation at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday May 7th, he said, “Right before this meeting I was rounding up some meeroos to do some testing on the beta grid. The bug is theoretically fixed, but I’ve yet to actually see it work. We’ll be testing this week.” If all goes well, the fix may well be progressing towards an RC release in the near future.

“Missing Prims”

Still no major news on this issue in terms of a lasting fix becoming available. Commenting on it again during the Simulator User Group Meeting, Andrew Linden said:

We were having trouble reproducing it on one of our more recent viewers; the viewer that will eventually go along with the recent interest list fixes, is currently stalled for a mysterious crash bug.

We think the “right click to make the object show up” bug is related to loading of object cache in the viewer and that loading code has had an overhaul in this recent viewer project. So we think the bug is fixed there, but we have yet to test it a lot. Because there is a crash bug we’re still trying to track down.

The question was asked if the code could be made available to TPVs as it is, even if prone to crashing. Doing so might provide extra eyes on the problem which may both help to resolve the issue and fix the crash issue. Andrew replied to the question by saying, “Oz asked us to put that code out on a public repo, but that was before we realized we had a crash problem.” However, he agreed to take the request back to the office and see what the reaction might be.

Other Bits – Griefing Issues

There has been a long-standing issue with objects sitting on the region borders being very hard to return to their owners, and which has become something of an exploit where mainland griefing is concerned. It had been hoped that the fix for the issue would be deployed to the grid this week, However, in reviewing matters, Andrew linden regretfully reported that “It appears that ‘return of objects at region border’ bug fix is not deployed at the moment, as far as I can tell.”  There is currently no date as to when this will be deployed,

Similarly, there is still no news as to when the particle muting capability (right-click on a particle to stop your viewer generating the particle stream in your world-view) might make a viewer-side appearance.

There are reports of a new form of particularly malicious griefing involving spinning / flashing objects which appear deliberately designed to trigger epilepsy or migraine.  At the Simulator UG meeting, Simon Linden indicated that the Lab is at least aware of this form of attack.

Blocking Banned Users’ Objects from Rendering

A suggestion has been put forward at several Simulator UG meetings where griefing has been discussed that all objects on a parcel belonging to a user banned from that parcel for griefing should no longer be rendered for other users within that parcel.

This is seen as a particularly useful option at events, etc., where time would otherwise be taken up in trying to locate and return objects which may have been left behind when banning the user, and / or in telling other people in the parcel how to mute offending objects from their view.

Commenting on this as a possible server-side capability, Andrew Linden said, “More fidelity of visibility on a per-parcel level would further complicate things that are already fairly complicated. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but it would be tricky and I would worry about lag issues… server lag as it picks up more work.”

However, after a discussion on the viability of viewer-side blocking and server-side blocking, he commented, “I’m hip… if visibility of banned owners’ objects were to be done… it would probably be easiest to do it at the server.” Even so, there would still be a range of issues to deal with, were such a capability to be put into place. As it stands, it appears to be more a case of food-for-thought than a definite step to be taken.

Forced Object Return

Another griefing attack is one which sees an object deposited in a region but which doesn’t actually trigger until after the region is restarted. This means it gets included in the region back-up – and any subsequent region restart, leaving it free to annoy.

A suggestion was put forward at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday May, 2nd to force a return of all objects in a region which are not set to the required Group as a part of the region restart process. This idea gained some support at the meeting and might have resulted in a feature request being filed. However, it is not without issues of its own – such as with regions where Group object rezzing isn’t a requirement, where it could result in a lot of items which might otherwise have been “safe” returned to their owners.