Last Christmas someone bought me “TISWAS – The Album” which rather than being snippets from the series, is a treble CD of songs by artists from around that era, so currentlly I’m rocking out to Tom Robinson and 2-4-6-8 Motorway! With some Boomtown Rats, Tenpole Tudor, The Stranglers and Skids to look forward to, this post may take a while to get done! Anyway, on with the post!
I’ve complained, more than once, that Linden Lab don’t talk to us, like lovers do. Therefore I have to go looking for the goodies in the official forums myself, because there is bloody good information in there. There are bug fixes, new scripting functions, new inventory developments, lots of newness!
Let’s start by looking at Oskar Linden’s bag of goodies in the server deployment posts, this week for example there are some nice developments, which you can read here. One of the highlights (for me anwyay) is:
Implemented llSetKeyframedMotion (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/LlSetKeyframedMotion), I’ve had a little play with this, it has potential for being quite funky for lifts (Elevators if you must), vehicles, sliding doors etc, it seems to work quite well from my basic testing.
Then in the works we see improvements to social features, currently in the works on the magnum channel, which is neither a big chocolate Ice Lolly or a guy with a big moustache:
“This project updates the mutelist to be part of the People API instead of simulator side. We changed simulator behavior to send create/delete events in the mute-list to the People API. Social features on my.secondlife.com including web profiles will fully respect the mutelist i.e. no one should see messages etc from someone they have blocked.
This feature is disabled until full release to all channels.”
Ok so we have to wait for that one, but it’s something useful looking, there are a number of bug fixes on the Le Tigre channel, which eventually come to the main channel after testing.
Next I take a peek into Kelly Linden’s goodie bag and see a new feature in the works which can be tested now on the right channel, Upcoming LSL feature: llTransferLindenDollars and transction_result, the forum post can be read here.
“An upcoming server maintenance project is going to include some new functionality for LSL. This functionality is designed to allow scripts which pay out L$ to determine the success of that transfer.
key llTransferLindenDollars(key id, integer amount)
Attempts to transfer amount of L$ from the owner of the object to id.
Requires PERMISSION_DEBIT.
Returns a key used in a matching transaction_result event for the success or failure of the transfer.
transaction_result(key transaction_id, integer success, string data)
LSL event triggered from an llTransfer* call (currently only llTransferLindenDollars).
transaction_id matches the return value of the llTransfer call. If the transaction was successful the id will match the transaction id shown in the transaction history on secondlife.com.
success is TRUE if the transfer succeeded otherwise FALSE.
data will contain a CSV of destination id and amount transferred on success and an error tag on failure.
Error Tags:
This is not an exhaustive list and it is possible these will change over time.
LINDENDOLLAR_ENTITYDOESNOTEXIST – The destination UUID is not a valid agent.
LINDENDOLLAR_INSUFFICIENTFUNDS – The source agent does not have enough L$ for the transfer
INVALID_AGENT – Destination agent is not a valid UUID
INVALID_AMOUNT – Amount is <= 0
THROTTLED – The scripted L$ throttle was hit for this object owner.
MISSING_PERMISSION_DEBIT – The script does not have debit permission
GROUP_OWNED – The object is group owned and can’t give money
TRANSFERS_DISABLED – L$ transfers are disabled in the region
SERVICE_ERROR – Received a non-200 http result from L$ API.
If you would like to try this feature out it is currently active on the channel DRTSIM-111 on regions Bethel, Fortuna and Sandbox Wanderton on Aditi.”
I’m not sure at this point how useful this will be, I’m more looking forward to llManageEstateAccess but I’m sure some people will be able to think of extremely useful projects for the above new function, possibly to do with refunds and split commission sharing.
Finally, there’s a new Inventory system in the works which can be tested now on Aditi, you can read about that here. This is another part of Oskar Linden’s goodie bag:
“We have made several changes to the inventory system that we expect to improve performance and reliability that we are currently testing on ADITI. We would appreciate it if you would come try it out and give us your feedback.
All of the information that you need is in this wiki page:
– https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/InventoryBetaTest
We have 4 regions on ADITI for testing. I hope you can get a chance to give the changes a try. We will push this code to an RC channel next week unless we find a showstopper. Please take a minute to check things out.
Thanks!
__Oskar”
So plenty in the works, although over the next few weeks things will slow down as we hit the holiday season and the Yanks go and have Turkey way too close to Christmas for some Thanksgiving business when they celebrate people from Plymouth coincidentally arriving at a place called Plymouth, or something like that!
Whereas I’d love to see information posted on the blogs and given top billing, I can appreciate that some people will think this is all extremely boring. However, Linden Lab have often been accused of not fixing bugs, not addressing stability and picking whatever fun projects they fancy, however the reality is somewhat different and the information is there, if you look for it!
Ah now time for some Blondie!