Server Deployments – Week 2

There were no server deployments to either the Main (SLS) or RC channels for the week.

Upcoming Deployments

There is likely to be a server-side RC deployment in week 3 (week commencing Monday, January 12th). Details on what it will contain have yet to be finalised, however, during the Server Beta User Group (SBUG) meeting on Thursday, January 8th, Maestro Linden indicated it would contain miscellaneous fixes an improvements which will likely include:

A fix for BUG-8002

Removal support for legacy viewer-side avatar baking

Region crossing improvements.

The region crossing improvements are for avatars only (not vehicles), and are described by Simon Linden as, “all internal and pretty minor, so please don’t get hopes up for performance improvements,” and being about “clean-up and small polishing.”

A number of regions on Aditi are running the updates – DRTSIM-273 – (Ahern, Bonifacio, Morris and Rizal), and a group test was carried out during the SBUG meeting with people walking / flying and TP’ing between these regions and between them and other regions without the updates as a further check that the changes wouldn’t result in any failures / breakage. “I’m most worried about some data subtly changing or getting lost between crossings, Simon added in this regard, following the test. “but I haven’t seen anything like that.”

Details on the updates related to legacy avatar baking will be posted with the package release notes, when available.

SL Viewer

On Monday, January 5th, the HTTP pipelining RC viewer was updated to version 3.7.24.297623, bringing it up to par with the current release viewer, and therefore matching the Experience Keys RC viewer which slipped out just before Christmas.

Experience Keys / Tools

“It’s really quite close,” Oz Linden said of the Experience Keys / Tools project at the SBUG meeting. “We’re upgrading and testing some back end infrastructure to support it; when that’s ready, we’re good to go.”

As indicated in my original overview of Experience Keys / Tools, the tools come with a number of safeguards to reduce the risk of them being used for mischief. In addition, and as a further discouragement, those wishing to use the tools to build experiences will be required to pay a fee. This has now been set by the Lab, but is not at this time being made public. Expect to hear more about it when the tools are formally released.

In the meantime, you can read more on the project in these pages using the Experience Keys tag, and those wishing to try-out beta Experiences can do so via the Seamless Experiences section of the Destination Guide. You do not need to have the Experience Keys project viewer in order to do so – although it does provide you with access to more information about any Experience you try – see my project viewer overview for details (do keep in mind that both this and the project overview linked-to above are now several months old, and certain details may have changed in the interim; I’ll have a further article on Experiences when they are launched).

Group Chat

Simon Linden is continuing to work on group chat. No major news at this time, other than he’s been carrying out further digging into why some servers seem to get “stuck” every two weeks or so and require a restart. Further data was gathered during the region crossing tests mentioned above.

Other Items

Alpha Map Support for Mesh

I first reported on this matter, which forms feature request BUG-8100 – in week 52. Since then, the idea has received a lot more feedback and further thought. However, following initial triage, the JIRA was closed by Kyle Linden on Wednesday, January 7th, with the standard, “We’ve reviewed your request and determined that it is not something we can tackle at this time.”