Day: May 18, 2017

Second Life Maintenance RC viewer: parcel access, trash, and more

Posted on by Inara Pey

Update, May 23rd: version 5.0.5.326444 of this viewer is now the release version of the official viewer.

On Friday, May 12th, 2017, Linden Lab issued a new Maintenance release candidate viewer – now version – 5.0.5.326444 – featuring a number of bug fixes and improvements.

In particular the viewer includes updates to reflect the revised region / parcel access controls now deployed to the main grid. It also includes improvements to inventory management and purging Trash, and a range of other improvements and updates as well as numerous bug fixes.

As per usual, this is not intended to be an in-depth review of the viewer, but rather to highlight some of the new / updated features and an overview based on the release notes.

Region / Parcel Access Controls

The new region / parcel access controls are paired with a server-side update first announced in April, and the first part of which was deployed to the LeTigre server RC  channel on Wednesday, May 17th. Until these server-side updates are deployed grid-wide, this particular set of changes in the view may not function on all regions.

In short, the new controls mean that when a region holder / manager explicitly set a region for open access by visitors (via the Region / Estate floater), parcel holders on the region will no longer be able to override the setting at the parcel level and create ban lines around their parcel. They will, however, still be able to use their parcel ban list or deploy security orbs or similar (assuming the use of the latter is allowed under any covering covenant).

This means that with this viewer, both the Estate tab in the Region / Estate floater has been updated, and the behaviour of the Access tab in the About Land floater has changed.

In the case of the Estate tab in the Region / Estate floater, the check box Allow Public Access has been removed, and a new option, Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive, has been added (see below).

With the new parcel access overrides, the old setting to Allow Public Access (top) has been replaced by a new setting, Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive (bottom), as found in the current Maintenance RC viewer

By default, Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive is checked, which means that as the updated settings are deployed server-side, parcel owners should see no difference in behaviour for their parcels unless an estate holder / manager opts to make changes at the estate level (as shown in the image above).

Should the option be unchecked, the estate holder / manager making the change will receive a model warning that they are about to make a change that could affect parcel settings in the estate.

The new modal warning estate holder / managers will see when changing the new access settings

Should they go ahead and APPLY  the change, two further things will happen:

  • Parcel owners will receive a new system notification for every parcel in the region they hold which has been affected by the change (below).
The new system notification displayed to parcel holders for every parcel in the region they hold which has been affected by a change to the region’s access settings at Estate level
  • Any previously active banlines around affected parcel will be removed, and parcel owners will no longer be able to set parcel access restrictions via About Land > Access, as the options to do so will be greyed out (as shown below).
    When the Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive option is checked, the parcel-level access options in the About Land floater will be greyed out for parcel holders, preventing them from overriding the region-level access

    If a region which previously allowed parcel holders to set their own access restrictions is set to public access (by unchecking Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive and clicking APPLY), and then is reverted again (by checking Parcel Owners Can Be More Restrictive and clicking APPLY), all parcels on the region will revert to the access settings applied to them before any changes to region access were made at the estate level.

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