Server Deployments week 46 recap

As always, please refer to the week’s forum deployment thread for the latest news and updates.

Main channel: Tuesday November 12th: no deployment

BlueSteel and LeTigre: received a maintenance package comprising further infrastructure changes for the yet-to-be-announced Experience Keys (experience tools) project

Magnum received a server maintenance project comprising a number of fixes and changes to script behaviours to prevent Estate managers and region owners from being teleported by llTeleportAgentHome() and so they are no longer affected by scripts which use ESTATE_ACCESS_BANNED_AGENT_ADD

Two further notable bug fixes with the Magnum release were “Sim crossing on vehicle fails when parcel at opposite sim border is full.” (BUG-4152) and a bug where a high draw distance set in the viewer would see the viewer to sometimes fail to connect to the requisite number of regions around it. According to Maestro Linden, this bug affects viewer using the current release viewer code (or earlier), but not the newer “Project Interesting” viewer code.

Speaking at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday November 14th, Maestro commented on the Magnum release, saying, “There were also under-the-hood changes to object inventory management, and llTakeControls() behaviour in LSL. Those shouldn’t cause any behavioural differences, but I added them to the release notes in case they did cause problems.” These are the “clean-up of ‘control grabbing’ in LSL scripts” referred to in the release notes.

Grey Goo Issues

The Magnum update also included updates to the grey goo fence, which is intended to combat griefing. The specific changes were to combat the use of large object rezzing, which can be used to crash a region. However, the tightening of the fence led to unforeseen problems, as Maestro reported:

There are reports in JIRA about building rezzer systems hitting the grey goo fence. The one case I saw was where one rezzed about a dozen large linksets rapidly, and when it hit the grey goo fence, it would ‘fail’ halfway through the rez. Anyway, Simon and I talked about how to address this; for now, I think he’s going to go with a fix where only large and physical linksets are penalised.

Another option under consideration is rather than denying the rezzing, to slow it down. It’s not clear which option will be taken forward by the Lab at this point, for now their intention is to deploy a fix to Magnum in week 47 which “unbreaks”, as Maestro put it, any affected rezzing systems on Magnum regions.

Upcoming Updates

Maestro Linden gave an overview of some of the updates which will be making their way into a server maintenance package, which include:

A fix for ‘ Vehicles containing a mesh are returned to the owner upon region crossing when destination parcel is full’, which is similar to BUG-4152, fixed in the Magnum RC deployment in week 46, but only affects meshes and involved the actual entry parcel being full

A fix for “Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event.”

A follow-up fix to “llTeleportHome() should not teleport estate managers”, mentioned above, which extends the protection to parcel owners (or a group owner if the parcel is group owned)

These may well form a small update package on their own and get deployed to one or more RC channels in week 47.

SL Viewer

The “Project Interesting” RC viewer, version 3.6.11283895,which has the viewer-side updates for the recently interest list updates was released on Thursday November 14th.

Group Ban List

Baker Linden gave a brief update on progress with his group ban work at the Server Beta meeting, and more information may be given at the upcoming TPV meeting.”It’s coming along pretty well, I’ve fixed a lot more bugs on the back-end, and I’m working on some QA-friendly things on the server code as well,” he said.

One of the problems he is having, as reported in my last group ban list update is managing banning and ejecting someone from a group, which is a two-step process when banning anyone assigned to roles in a group in addition to the “everyone” role. Baker now has a way to improve on this:

I’ve decided that if an owner grants a role the ban ability, it will implicitly give them [the role] BOTH the “Eject Ban Members” AND “Remove Roles from Members” ability. This will be the default, but there is nothing stopping the owner from removing those abilities. So basically, when you grant a role the ban ability, you are also granting that role the abilities to eject anyone as well.

To help prevent confusion over this, as it is a change from current group management behaviour, Baker plans to incorporate a notification when a group owner is granting the abilities to another role. He’s also going to ensure that the simulator is smart enough to simply strip the roles from the member and eject them automatically. For those who wish to provide a group role with the ability to ban group members, but are uncomfortable with the idea of auto-ejecting people, they can grant the ban / remove from roles / eject abilities to a role and then remove the remove from roles ability.

The ability for the server to strip roles from a group member and eject them will also be applied to the existing code for ejecting from a group, but will only work for roles which have been granted both the “remove from roles” and “eject” abilities (thus making group ejection a smoother, one-step process for such roles).

Baker also confirmed that he is going to change the ban reason field to a ban priority field. this will allow reasons for banning to be “anonymised” as he called it, while still allowing for easy sorting of lesser offenders

Other Items

Further Region Crossing Issues

A further issue relating to loss-of-control of vehicles (notably aircraft) has been reported in BUG-4339. A video of the issue has been produced (linked-to here, as it has been placed as unlisted on You Tube, with a default request to show consideration on sharing). Commenting on the problem at the Server Beta meeting on Thursday November 14th, Caleb Linden said, “I have actually tested the crazy vehicles against the new server code, and hoped that this would have fixed it, but I managed do repro the issue again. The JIRA for it is still open.”

SL / RL Teleport Issue

A request was lodged during the meeting for LL to devote more time and attention to the long-standing issue of SVC-6691. Please note that clearing RL cache or attempting a RL relog should this issue be encountered are very, very, very much not recommended!

😀