Server Deployments week 50 – Recap

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

Tuesday December 10th, 2013 saw the main channel updated with the server maintenance project that was on the RC channels in week 49. This project includes a few miscellaneous bug fixes

Wednesday December 11th, 2013 saw the three RC channels updated with a new server maintenance project containing a single bug fix.

The RC channel bug fix is related to vehicles getting into a “bad” state where they appear sat upon / selected even if they have lost their passengers as a result of a region crossing. When in this state, they defeat the parcel / region auto return.

As the fix for this issue is currently only on the three RC channels and will not be promoted to the main channel until 2014 due to the code freeze / no change window, and because this issue may lead to vehicles accumulating in regions where there is a lot of traffic, Maestro Linden has requested that support move any main channel regions which are affected to an RC channel.

2014

These deployments were the last scheduled deployments for 2013. They also mark the last scheduled rolling restarts for the year as well, as there are no plans to restart any channels in either week 51 or week 52. The only exception to this will be if any major issue / fault occurs within the grid which necessitates a restart.

The next scheduled server-side deployments will take place in week 2 of 2014, the week commencing Monday January 6th, 2014.

Some information on updates which will be forthcoming in 2014 were given during the final Server Beta meeting of 2013. These include:

Andrew Linden’s work on “Uniform Scaling” LSL Functions for linksets (see part 1 of this week’s report). There are a couple of basic rules with the new functions: no prim in the linsket can be smaller than 1 cm or larger than 64m, and all prim centres must be within 54m of one another in order to be linkable. There will be two new functions as a part of this work: integer llScaleByFactor(float factor): uniformly scale a linkset by the specified factor (e.g. 2.0 to double the scale). Returns TRUE if successful, FALSE otherwise float llGetMaxScaleFactor(), float llGetMinScaleFactor(): return the maximum / minimum scale factors that will work in llScaleByFactor due to limits in place by prim scale and linkability distance restrictions

An update to llLoadURL, so it will have a 0.1s delay instead of 10s (although there is still a throttle in place to prevent someone from spamming somebody else in order to crash their viewer)

llGetObjectDetails() & OBJECT_STREAMING_COST will be amended to return data when targeting an agent. Currently, OBJECT_STREAMING_COST doesn’t give you much of anything when targeting an agent; once this change is in place, it will return the sum of the streaming costs of all worn attachments (excluding HUDs)

SL Viewer

The “Project Interesting” (viewer-interesting) RC viewer updated on Thursday December 12th to version 3.6.13.284757, which includes a number of fixes from the initial release:

BUG-4675 Viewer crashes while reading chat history

SH-4606 Interesting: Small objects do not load until they are very close.

SH-4627 [INTERESTING RC] “Object out of range” is not detected on teleport.

SH-4631 [INTERESTING RC] Parts of linked objects are not shown in new release Second Life 3.6.11

SH-4641 Interesting: Incorrect amount of system memory detected on Mac

This may be the last RC update for 2013, unless something like the Google Breakpad RC is slipped out for another round of testing on Friday December 13th.

STORM-68

As noted in part 2 of this week’s report, STORM-68 is a third-party contribution which will allow a builder / creator to specify the default permissions applied to a new prim object (cube, cylinder, torus, etc.) on creation. Further testing has been taking place since my last update, and a number of issues and bugs have been resolved as a result. The test plan for the changes is complete and the viewer-side changes now look ready to go to LL’s internal QA. Again, this change requires server-side updates, so it is unlikely to appear in an RC viewer until the server updates are reasonably available on the grid, although this will hopefully happen in the early part of 2014.