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of course not everyone’s cup of tea and it does lead to issues, for example the current release channel of LeTigre has a newer version of the Havok physics engine, this has caused an issue whereby mesh objects, such as vehicles, get stuck when trying to move from a LeTigre sim to a sim on a different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.
Now some would see this as a bit of a showstopper, but without these different channels, many bugs wouldn’t be identified for quite some time, this would slow down development and progress. The key is surely how quickly Linden Lab respond to issues and what their action is, this week when it came to the llSensor() issue, Linden Lab decided it was too big a bug to leave in the wild, other weeks, they leave the bug out in the open and carry on.
There will always be people disappointed, but if you are experiencing problems, then head over to the Second Life Server forum, in the technology section and post your findings in the deployment thread. Oskar is quite active there and will welcome constructive feedback, however be warned, Oskar seems to have reached the end of his tether with off topic ranting, so please play nicely.
If you’re wondering which channel you’re on, simply go to help then about in the viewer and you’ll see something like this with the name of the channel:
