Second Life project updates 32: Server, viewer, misc

PaleoQuest, July 2015 (Flickr) – blog post

Server Deployments Week 32 – Summary

On Tuesday, August 4th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package delivered to the RC channels in week #31. The focus of this release with to fix a number of Group management bugs:

• 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)

Following the deployment of the update to both the RCs last week and the Main channel this week, indications are this these bugs have been fixed.

There were no deployments to the RC channels.

Viewer Updates

Monday, August 3rd saw the Viewer-Managed Marketplace RC viewer, version 3.8.2.303891, promoted to the de facto release viewer.

As a result of this, the two remaining active RC viewers were also updated to parity with the release viewer, with the Mesh Importer viewer updating to version 3.8.3.304090 on Thursday, August 6th, and the Maintenance RC updating to version 3.8.3.304115, also on August 6th.

Other Items

Rezzing Objects On Top of Mesh

There have, over the past few months, been increasing reports of issues in attempting to rez objects on top of mesh objects (landscaping element, mesh floors, etc). These take the form of trying to rez an object from inventory, only to get one of two error messages:

• “Failed to place object at specified location. Please try again” or
• Can’t rez object at  [coordinates] because the owner of this land does not allow it. Use the land tool to see land ownership”

In addition, rezzed objects can appear to “vanish” when rezzing on some mesh surfaces because they have actually rezzed under the surface in question, etc.

The problem appears related to a combination of viewer raycasting issues and uploaded mesh objects having incomplete physics hull as a result of a fault in the mesh uploading process. As ChinRey observes, The latter issue has been known for some time, and experienced mesh designers work around it. However, it is possible that newer content creators unwittingly get caught by the problem or that there are older mesh items still in circulation that can cause problems (also see Whirly Fizzle’s observations on BUG-2019).

There are some workaround to the problem, which has been accepted by the Lab. They are not ideal or always workable:

• Try pointing your camera angle straight down at 90 degrees to the mesh surface or move your camera view further away from the mesh (Whirly Fizzle)
• If the surface is used frequently for rezzing, try placing a full transparent bank prim over it and then rez on that (Innula Zenovka)
• If you can, try editing the item in linked mode and check the physic model for the specific surface on which you are trying to rez upon.  If it is prim, try converting it – and just it – to convex hull.  Be aware this could alter the LI for the object; if you get any unexpected consequences, convert it back once more.

As an example, I used the latter for the Trompe Loeil Rustic Pavilion at my home, which was constantly giving me problems. The floor section was set to prim, and converting it to convex hull removed the issue entirely with no side effects for me. YMMV.

Slow-down in News from the Lab

There has been a slow down in activity and news from the Lab. In some quarters, this has been aligned with the idea that there is “not much going on” with Second Life and theat focus has perhaps further shifted to Sansar. In fact, work is progressing with Second Life; however, this is the summer period, when vacations are in progress, and we have recently come out of a period where the Lab has been very focused on specific work – such as ensuring the scalability of Experiences, working on simulator stability and internal fixes, which has come at the expense of “new shiny”, and thus giving the impression “not much” is going on.

This week saw the Second Life development team (and, I assume other directly involved in Second Life) get together in Boston for their regular meeting to discuss the plans for the immediate future. A consequence of this in particular is that there were no meetings on Monday (open-source developers) or Tuesday (simulator user group).

There should have been a TPVD meeting on Friday, but confused communications meant that Grumpity, Oz and I spent the time on our own alternately plotting world domination – if anyone known of any really good mesh Super Villian Sekrit Volcano Lairs, we’d like to know (joking) – and the fact that my hair is enough for me to be Jelly Babied in Grumpity’s viewer.  Guess it’s time to go find some really good, low-complexity mesh hair…