Server Deployments Week 35
As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for news, updates and feedback.
Second Life Server (SLS Main) Channel – Tuesday August 27th
The Main channel received the update package which includes the “grey box” attachment fix, and which had seen previous deployment to some of the RCs. In all, the package comprises:
- A fix for the “grey box attachment issue” (non-public BUG-3547, see the details here)
- An update to for “llListen in linked objects is listening at root instead of linked object local position *after re-rezzing the linkset*”, (non-public JIRA BUG-3291)
- Code to block avatars entering a region / objects being rezzed in a region during the last 60 seconds before a restart. In addition, restart warning pop-ups will include the region name
- Fixes for further simulator crash modes.
Release Candidate Channels – Wednesday August 28th
All three RC channel should receive the same maintenance package comprising:
- An update to region restarts initiated by region owners or estate managers which will see the region restart after the last avatar leaves, rather than waiting for the full countdown period to complete
- Preparatory work to support new estate and parcel access controls – these will require a upcoming viewer-side update in order to be visible to users
- A fix for a physics-related griefing mode
- A crash mode fix.
The release notes are here: Magnum, LeTigre, BlueSteel.
Commenting on the upcoming estate and parcel access controls at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday 27th August, Simon Linden said, “I can’t get into details on the access change but it’s not a huge one, so don’t get too excited about it. We hope to have a project viewer out in a few weeks or so that will have the new code and we can discuss it then.”
SL Viewer Updates
Release Viewer Updated
Following the Monday review meeting, CHUIStorm Release Candidate viewer was promoted to the de facto release viewer 3.6.4.280048, dated August 20th) on the 26/27th August. This viewer includes the latest CHUI updates from the Lab and a number of Snowstorm code contributions from third-party developers, including:
- STORM-1892 – Add Apply button to the edit content permission floater
- STORM-1910 – Count of the number of groups a person has joined, and number of remaining group slots
- STORM-1911 – Go-to line function for the internal LSL script editor
- STORM-1918 – Part of the group notice attachment box does not allow dropping of assets
- STORM-1952 – Clicking “Eject” needs a confirmation before execution when ejecting members from a group
The full list of updates are available in the release notes.
The move currently leaves two RC viewers in the release channel: the Cocoa updates for Mac builds, and the next round of updates for Materials Processing, which include goodies such as correct ALM rendering underwater.
Commenting on the removal of the Google Breakpad RC viewer from the list, Oz Linden confirmed that it had been removed as it had done its job, allowing the new reporting mechanism to be tested. As the viewer contains no user-facing changes or anything outside of the Breakpad updates, it has been withdrawn, and the new stats reporting code will be integrated into the viewer code base without requiring a dedicated release.
The mesh deformer project viewer has also been removed from the viewer test builds wiki page. There is not anything untoward about this; prior to the SSA deployment the viewer was already significantly behind the times in terms of merges. As SSA has now been deployed, and the view lacks SSA support, it is currently pointless having it as a publicly available download option.
Group Ban List
Baker Linden supplied a brief update to his work on creating a function to allow group owners to ban people (e.g. known troublemakers) from joining their open-enrollment groups. Speaking at the Simulator User Group meeting, he said:
I’ve still been hooking up the viewer to the server, and can now add people to the ban list. I’m currently working on getting the ban list, which will allow me to get deleting from the ban list working. After that, it’s code cleanup, reviews, and adding server-side verification checks!
To which Andrew Linden added, possibly wryly, “Baker banned me from some groups on the beta grid. I can attest that there is progress there”!
The question was again asked if the capability will allow for banning someone for a set period of time – such as for a week. Baker confirmed that while the ability to do so won’t be in the first release, there is a code stub included which will allow him to add the ability in the future. This is likely to be the case with the ability for a group moderator to add a reason for banning someone from the group if they so wish.
Anti-griefing
As he has now moved away from Interest List work for the time being, Andrew Linden is looking into griefing vectors and ways and means of circumventing them, particularly on mainland. Some of the areas he’s looking at and mulling over in terms of possible actions are:
- Allowing estate owners to admin parcel properties (ban lists, object options, etc), without having to take ownership of the parcel
- Altering the “allow public to build on this land” flag to default to FALSE rather than TRUE when a parcel transitions to a new owner – this is seen as a means of preventing griefers from buildings and hiding hide malicious objects in unattended parcels which can then be used to grief the region / people in the region.
- Nerf the use of recursive rezzing to prevent griefers getting around autoreturn by creating an object which rezzes a copy of itself, then gives a copy to the rezzed object. The original is then autoreturned, but the copy carries on before creating a copy of itself, and so on.
Andrew is particularly concerned that the third proposal might be damaging to content which may legitimately self-replicate itself (such as items placed by the parcel owner or members of the group the land has been deeded to). In order to prevent this, he plans to apply the nerfing only to objects to which the auto return would otherwise apply.
At the moment these ideas are still musings – although Andrew admitted the code for nerfing recursive rezzing has already been written – and he’ll be having further discussions at the Lab as well as looking at various alternatives / additions (one he mentioned himself was to perhaps have two auto return functions – one for objects whose owners in the region, and one for those lacking owners).
One of the problems here is that in planning to create any additional restrictions on land use, etc., is that people can always raise apparently legitimate reasons why things shouldn’t be done, or offer up ways and means of how changes can be circumvented. However, the fact remains that griefing – particularly on mainland – is once again a growing issue (as those of us have experienced only too well at recent in-world LL meetings). Therefore, change is needed. The skill in the work will be how that change is managed.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 