The Colder Water, Daydreams, (Flickr) – blog post



Server Deployments

As always, please refer to the server deployment thread for the latest updates.

On Tuesday September 16th, the Main (SLS) channel received the server maintenance package previously deployed to the three RC channels, which includes crash fixes and a fix for a bug that prevented some people from leaving Skill Gaming regions – notably Linden staff who entered a region using their admin powers …

On Wednesday September 17th, the three RC channels should each receive a new server maintenance package, which includes some bug fixes, and tweaks some behaviours related to experience tools.

CDN Micro Channel Deployment

The CDN micro channel deployment is due this week. As noted in mt last TPV meeting report, this will see a small number of regions updated to use the CDN test configuration for texture and mesh fetching, bypassing the simulator entirely. No viewer-side update is required for this (that will come in the future), so the benefits should be felt by anyone entering those regions (assuming the region is already cached by their local CDN node).

There currently isn’t a list of regions which will be included in the micro channel, although it has been suggested that the Lab consider including the Home and Garden Expo and the Kustom 9 event regions are included, as these all have considerable mesh and texture use. Two regions that will be included in the micro channel are Hippotropolis and Hippo Hollow. The latter can be a reasonable text of texture downloads, as it has a wide variety of items sitting on it.

Group Chat

While Izzy Linden had reported something of a drop in the number of reports of requests for the back-end chat servers to be restarted at the end of week 37, reports continued through the weekend and the start of this week. The changes aimed at fixing the problem (essentially a network issue which causes the chat server to run out of ports) has been delayed, but commenting at the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday September 16th, Simon Linden said he hopes to see them deployed soon.

There is also a further update aimed at improving group chat performance that is also in the pipeline, the result of recent testing on Aditi; Simon Linden has “high hopes” for these changes once deployed.

Other Items

The Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday September 16th saw renewed discussion on a number of subjects which have been previously raised, such as improvements to scripted sounds / sound functionality (see my January 2014 and November 2013 updates) and the environment improvements project. While no conclusions were drawn on specific improvements to the sound functionality (it doesn’t appear to be on the current roadmap), Oz Linden did confirm the environment improvements are still on the roadmap, but are not currently being worked on. It’s not clear whether the SL roadmap will be made public, although it was indicated this might be the case when it was first raised a couple of months ago.