Ciaran Laval

October 24, 2012

Second Life Is Brought To You By …

In the help and about section of the Second Life viewer you will find the credits, lots of names:

An Image Should Be Here — Second Life Credits

Now how you get on this list I have no idea, I once read it was from logging into the beta grid. The Lindens, well that’s obvious and the translators, who do brilliant work, that’s obvious too. However the middle section, the Opensource contributions, I don’t know how you get in there. So, for a bit of fun and frolics, I’ve sorted these lists alphabetically.

There are names of long left, but not forgotten Lindens, well except for the ones we’ve never heard of, which will be a few I’d imagine, but they all made contributions. Then there are amongst the opensource list, long left avatars too, although some super awesome avatars are in there, I’m still confused as to how they get there.

Let’s also not forget that Second Life is brought to us by basically everyone who enters the world and that many people make valuable contributions whom aren’t listed in the credits, I’m just doing this for a bit of fun. I compiled the list using copy and paste and then transposing the results, so apologies if my mousework missed some in the cut.

The lists are under the cut…. of course if you’ve came straight here from a link, there is no cut!

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October 24, 2012October 24, 2012

Magnum Gets Rolled Back

The usefulness of Linden Lab running release channels has been exemplified well this week The Magnum channel being rolled back due to problems with llSensor(), this seemed to impact breedables. Now as only magnum sims were impacted, plenty of people have been happily going around with llSensor() working perfectly fine, whereas if this code were all over the grid, we’d be seeing far bigger problems.

The issue was first highlighted by Lucia Nightfire in the technology forum thread on this week’s server deploys, Oskar and the team investigated and decided the issues were serious enough to warrant rolling back the new code and aligning magnum with the current Blue Steel code.

The release channel system is of course not everyone’s cup of tea and it does lead to issues, for example the current release channel of LeTigre has a newer version of the Havok physics engine, this has caused an issue whereby mesh objects, such as vehicles, get stuck when trying to move from a LeTigre sim to a sim on a different channel that is running an earlier version of the Havok physics engine. The mesh objects won’t cross over.

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October 23, 2012October 23, 2012

A Very Brief Look At CHUI

So after yesterday’s announcement from Linden Lab, I downloaded the Conversation Hub User Interface (CHUI) project viewer and installed it…. as you do. I took a very brief look at it, unlike Inara Pey, I don’t have the patience to do in depth meaningful viewer reviews. Actually Inara has taken a brief look at CHUI here.

However I can write a few words and show pictures, hurrah! Now the first thing I noticed upon login was that my notifications where were they usually were:

However my instant messages were not, they were under the communicate menu under conversations and I wasn’t really alerted to this. At this stage, let’s remember that this is a project viewer:

Clicking on conversations, brought up my conversations! This is how I knew I had new messages, from groups and people, names removed to protect the innocent but the conversation is innocent:

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October 23, 2012October 23, 2012

Linden Lab Go Blog Crazy And Communicate About Improving Communications!

Seriously, this is like the age old adage of waiting ages for a bus and then three come along at the same time! Linden Lab have blogged again, this time about a new project viewer with a new communications hub. This post is not statto geeky like the last one and has some very interesting features in it.

So earlier in the evening, I was talking about communications, mostly email and how we can become overwhelmed with messages. However I also questioned whether we needed to receive im’s to email for sales or when someone touches our welcome boards. There’s nothing in the Communications User Hub Interface (AKA CHUI) blog post that suggests we will be able to choose to select which messages get sent to email, but it does say:

“We are still working on making notifications more consistent and user-controllable. Depending on the type of incoming communication, you will be able to choose a notification style, such as a flashing button, a sound, or no notification at all. You’ll also be able to choose distinct notification types for friends and non-friends, as well as for those times when you’re busy and you’d prefer to be interrupted only by friends.”

Which does sound like it has potential. There are also other goodies mentioned in the blog post.

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October 22, 2012October 22, 2012

Linden Lab Report Performance Improvements

I have this issue when I login that I only have L$20 for quite some time, some days this is because I really do only have L$20, but most of the time, that’s not the issue! However I have found teleports fine lately, group profiles do load, albeit a bit slowly and I get random messages about not changing moving parts, or something like that. However things seem to generally work when I teleport and I don’t get logged out as often as I once did.

Now whether this is down to recent performance improvements, I have no idea, but in a surprise move,Linden Lab have actually decided to use their own blog for something other than the flickr pic of the day. They have blogged about recent performance improvements … it’s a bit statto and geeky but there is a nice graph.

Actually, removing my tongue from my cheek, the improvements due to “An optimization on a single query against the read pool of one of the main core database clusters” do make impressive reading.

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