Beeswing, Banana Island, May 2014

Sever Deployments – Week 32 Recap

There was no Main (SLS) channel deployment on Tuesday August 5th

On Wednesday August 6th, all three RC channels received the same maintenance update, which addresses some miscellaneous bugs, and fixes the JSON issue “Valid JSON numbers like 0e0 no longer valid after 14.06.26.291532″ (BUG-6657) and includes changes from the current Main channel release.

The “fix” for the JSON issue was to in fact roll back the fix for an earlier JSON issue (BUG-6466) which appears to have triggered the more recent issue. A fix for both problems is now currently in the works.

SL Viewer

The Library Refresh viewer was updated on August 6th to version 3.7.14.292638 on August 6th. This viewer contains an update to a large set of libraries used by the viewer to provide security, stability and consistency improvements to this and future viewers (download and release notes)

As anticipated, the Zipper Viewer, intended to improve the viewer’s installation speed, has been removed from the viewer release channel. The reason for this is an incompatibility between the archive format used to zip the viewer skins for faster installation and older operating system versions.

Other Items

Maestro Linden is back from his 3-week vacation and revealed he and Caleb Linden have been working on ‘infrastructure’ updates recently, for some of the central services, which has mostly involved making sure they still work properly after a big OS update which is in the works.

HUDs Detaching / Reattaching Following Teleport

There has been a report that HUDs are acting oddly following a teleport, apparently detaching and then reattaching, but showing as “worn on invalid Attachment Point” until clicked upon. The issue seems to be primarily experienced by people using viewers with the AIS v3 updates, but it may also occur on other viewers.

These issues are somewhat similar (in part to problems previously reported with avatar attachments failing to behave as expected when using the inventory WEAR command ((see BUG-6487 and my notes here). The Lab is going to take a poke at things.

Soul Seize

There have been further reports of the “soul seize” griefing tools doing the rounds. These are objects (both in-world and possibly HUDs worn by others disguised as greeters) which offer to animate your avatar (e.g. hug you or allow you to sit), but which are intended to take control of animating your avatar.

This issue has been around a considerable time (see JIRA VWR-13228). However, a year ago in Agust 2013, the Lab deployed a partial fix for the problem. This was change to the Stop Animating Me option in the viewer (found under the Me / Avatar menu in v3 viewers), to cause it to send a message to the simulator so it revokes all animation permissions for all objects in the region.

The solution isn’t perfect – it doesn’t work where animation has been initiated by a HUD, and at the time the update was made, concerns were raised that griefer might work around it. Whether these latest reports refer to a new flavour of the tool which does get around Stop Animating Me update is unclear.