Server Deployments – Week 29

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

Main (SLS) Channel

On Tuesday July 15th, the Main channel was updated with the Experience Keys project, which had previously been running on Magnum. This roll-out coincides with the release of the Experience Keys project viewer (see below) and the release of the Lab’s first Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield. Please refer to the release notes for further information.

Release Candidate Channels

On Wednesday July 16th, the Magnum RC should be updated a new infrastructure project that adds support for the upcoming changes to the Skill Gaming policy. This would appear to be the changes required to support the new Skill Gaming region type. Release notes.

On Thursday July 17th, BlueSteel and LeTigre will both be updated with the Experience Keys project, but will otherwise remain on the same server maintenance project as week 28, which addresses a JSON-related bug, an interest list related race condition, and to improve L$ transaction logging for payments made by scripted objects. See the release notes (BlueSteel) for details, and part 2 of my projects update for week 28.

SL Viewer

As noted above, the Experience Keys project viewer, version 3.7.12.291846, was released on Monday July 14th. This provides viewer-side support for accessing and managing SL experiences using the new Experience Keys permissions capabilities.

This viewer can be used in conjunction with the Lab’s Experience Keys demonstrator game, The Cornfield, and with other experiences as they are opened to public use. Please keep in mind that the viewer may not behave correctly until after the server-side deployment of Experience Keys support has completed on Thursday July 17th.

For further details on Experience Keys, please refer to the following:

There are also some further notes from Dolphin Linden on the subject, below.

Yet More on Experience Keys

Dolphin Linden again attended the Simulator User Group meeting on Tuesday July 15th, where he answered more question on the Experience Keys project.

Lucia Nightfire offered up a couple of points of feedback which appear especially relevant to the new capabilities:

An estate / parcel setting to disable all non-experience scripts. This would be useful in game experiences, as it could prevent participants cheating by using non-game scripted objects

An estate / parcel setting to block all grid-wide experiences from running on an estate / parcel. Currently, any grid-wide experiences which come on-line have to be explicitly blocked by name, which means if an estate / parcel owner didn’t want any grid-wide experiences running on their land, they’d have to keep adding them to their block list as and when they become aware of them. A single check-box option would eliminate this.

Feature requests are to be filed on both of these points, which the Lab have agreed to look into.

Other Bits

Sim Crossing Hiccups

There have been renewed reports of region crossing issues which seem to be occurring regularly, but only between certain regions when tested. The issues mainly appear to affect vehicles and take the form of the avatar taking an exceptionally long period of time to cross between regions – with the vehicle the avatar is say upon taking up to 30 seconds longer. When this happens, the avatar appears to be visually unlinked from the vehicle, but the vehicle itself fails to get auto-returned, as the simulators appear to consider the avatar and vehicle as still being linked.

Motor Loon provided some specific details on the issue, and has indicated he will raise a bug report using the information he has, as the Lab are unaware of any specific problems which may cause this. However, while it has yet to be confirmed, it was also reported at the meeting at a similar issue on a region crossing between two regions was resolved by restarting them in a specific sequence.