Day: July 24, 2015

Second Life project updates 30/1: group issues, avatar complexity

Posted on by Inara Pey

Timeless Memories; Inara Pey, July 2015, on FlickrTimeless Memories, July 2015 (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments Week #30 – Recap

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates / news.

On Tuesday, July 21st, the Main (SLS) channel had been listed as due to receive server maintenance package previously deployed to the three RC channels (15.07.07.303297). However, post-roll, the channel had been updated to release  15.07.09.303393, although the description of the changes, internal simulator fixes, remained unchanged.

On Wednesday, July 22nd, the three RC channels all received the same new server maintenance package, again comprising internal server fixes related to Experience Keys, comprising null pointer checkers and – interestingly – a configuration option for the number of Experiences a Premium member can have.

Group Issues

Following the week’s deployment, people started reporting group-related issues, particularly:

  • BUG-9725 – Activating a group fails on first selection on Second Life Server 15.07.09.303393 & RC
  • BUG-9735 – Unable to Edit Group Parameters after being made OWNER of newly created group
  • BUG-9695 – [Project Notice] First attempt at joining a group fails (also happens with current release viewer)

BUG-9735 affects promoting a member of the group to Owner status: their role title will change, but they do not gain the Owner powers, even after a relog (if an invitation is sent to someone to join the group with Owner status, they gain the expected rights). Curiously, this bug does not reproduce on Aditi (Beta grid) on simulators running the same code release.

Note that with BUG-9695 that if a fee is charged for joining the group, the fee will be taken, even if the join fails; you’ll then be charged again on your next attempt to join (which should succeed).

The Lab is actively investigating these issues.

In addition, there have been assorted reports of dropped group chat messages and detectable group chat lag.

Avatar Complexity

There have been recent updates relating to STORM-2082, the work Oz Linden has been undertaking on Avatar Complexity (aka “Jelly Baby avatars”). This work had been held-up due to a bug which rendered all avatars affected by the setting as invisible, rather than as the expected “Jelly Babies”. However, this now appears to have been fixed.

This means that this work may well be appearing as a project viewer during week #32 (week commencing Monday, August 3rd).  Commenting on the status of the project at the Open-source Developer meeting on Monday, July 20th, Oz Linden said:

All it needs now is a little more UI – notices that show when your own Complexity has changed, and when your Complexity is too high for those around you to render … I want to wait for those UI changes to release this so that people have a way to understand why things are rendering fully or not … There will be a new setting that controls how long the message about your own cost appears; it will also govern how long the message appears when others are not rendering you.

Avatar Complexity (aka Jelly Babies): expected as a project viewer in early August
Avatar Complexity (aka Jelly Babies): expected as a project viewer in early August

Oz also indicated he’d like to experiment a little more with things. One idea under consideration is that currently, the viewer is gets all the data on high render cost avatars prior to calculating the complexity value. However, it might be possible to allow the viewer to make the calculations without having to fetch the full avatar data. A benefit of this could be to reduce the risk of worn mesh crashers impacting the viewer.