Jira – Page 3 – Ciaran Laval

December 31, 2012

2013 – Hopes, Wishes And Forthcoming Improvements

Usually at this time of year, someone will post some predictions for the forthcoming year, although that seems to be light on the ground this year, it’s always a bit of fun to see those predictions and see what transpires. However predictions aren’t for me, instead I’ll post some hopes and wishes and look at what may happen.

On The Horizon

On the horizon we have some useful looking improvements coming to us from Linden Lab. Project shining leads the way and is already well under production. This includes server side baking via project sunshine, which will be a pain point for some as older viewers such as Phoenix aren’t coming along for the ride but it should mean improvements to how textures load and improved performance. This is also alongside the new http-Library project which is already being used in the beta viewer.

This comes on the back of Linden Lab improving hardware during 2012, as stated on the blog post about 2012: “in 2012 we made the single largest capital investment in new server hardware upgrades in the history of Linden Lab”

So we should see the results of these hardware and software improvements during the coming months. We should also see the emergence of the open source efforts to improve graphics rendering performance such as the use of normal and specular maps during 2013.

Then we should see more work done on the good building practices wiki pages, which is turning into a bloody good resource.

Second Life expanding to Steam is still on the horizon. Changes have been made to the beta viewer, including a create account option, so it seems to be getting closer.

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December 26, 2012December 26, 2012

2012 Reviewed – July To September

July

Nalates Urriah informed us of a new informal user group, the content creation improvement user group. The user group still appears on the wiki, but is not listed under the official user groups. The meetings were chaired by Geenz Spadz, Siddean Munro and Oz Linden. More on some of the aims of this group would come with an August announcement.

AvaCon announced that due to changes in terms and conditions from Linden Lab they had declined to organise the Second Life Community Convention. Fleep Tuque posted a personal opinion on the matter in which she suggested the organisers had been chewed out for not producing an event like Blizzcon. There were similarities to this year’s Blizzcon, that didn’t take place either!

The Linden Endownment For Arts announced that they were going to commence round three of grants. These allow arts themed ventures to use twenty regions that have been donated by Linden Lab for five to six months.

Linden Lab announced that the first set of advanced creator tools had been launched, these were Teleport Agent and Temporary Attachment.

Relay For Life’s themed lap weekend was on Saturday July 14th with a host of participants and entertainers assisting. Overall this year’s relay for life in Second Life raised USD$375,385.

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December 21, 2012December 21, 2012

Jira Changes Are Hurting Collaboration

One thing not mentioned in Linden Lab’s look back at 2012 was the change to the Jira. Now it would be easy to rant and rave about why this was a poor decision, but I’ll try to be objective and try to understand what Linden Lab are trying to achieve here.

The one issue I can see with the old way the Jira worked is the amount of noise, with the new Jira there has certainly been a reduction in noise, because except in cases such as the CHUI Project, where people can comment on other people’s Jira’s, we largely end up with Jira’s where only a select few residents, the reporter and Lindens can read and comment on.

Less people commenting will in some cases make it easier to identify the issue, but it also hits collaboration, where people with good feedback, are unable to provide it in the original report. Reading someone else’s comments, can help focus your own comments in important areas.

I recently created a Jira, it got imported to a project that I couldn’t see, so in effect, even as the reporter, I couldn’t see it. This was fixed, but then I couldn’t comment on it. The only way I could update my report was by editing my own report. Now by this stage I could see other Jira’s in this project, so I was able to reference another report, the reporter on the other report then referenced my Jira to update their own report. We had collaboartion between two reporters.

Now to be fair to Linden Lab here, they explained to me that there was an issue with editing permissions in this project, this was very politely explained to me by a Linden and I appreciate that they took the time to inform me about the issue.

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December 9, 2012December 9, 2012

CHUI – Making Good Use Of The Jira

The Communications Hub User Interface (CHUI) viewer has done something interesting with the Jira, it has made CHUI issues viewable to all, unlike the wretched new Jira in general which limits reports and requests to only the person who submitted the bug, Lindens and a select few residents.

The advantages of this are highlighted in a forum post in the official forums. Hitomi Tiponi asks where the promised survey is and gets a response from Viewer Linden (probably a cousin of Commerce Team Linden):

Hi all. We did indeed plan to release a survey, but a number of residents have submitted not just bugs, but general opinions, in JIRA. As JIRA seems to be working well for feedback, we may not release a formal survey after all.

Since releasing the project viewer, we’ve been working on a critical piece of CHUI, the notification subsystem. IN CHUI, you’ll have more flexible and more diverse options for being alerted of incoming communications. We’ve also been using the feedback we’ve received so far in our ongoing work. You can expect the next project viewer, which will include these new functions, by the end of December.

You should feel free to file JIRAs for any feedback you wish to offer. In particular, we want to know if the new functions (such as the conversation log) are usable and convenient, and improve the viewer communication experience. We also want to know if you think the reorganization of the communication functions will help new residents get up to speed more quickly. However, any and all feedback you send us is of great interest to us.

Thanks everyone.

CHUI gets good feedback in the Jira because others can read the issues.

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November 20, 2012

Even With Mesh Prim Physics Shape Can Come Out On Top

An Image Should Be Here — A New Mesh Path

So I decided it was time to engage in some building and set myself out a new Mesh path, a Mesh path is something that is very straight forward to build in a program such as Blender, it’s also very straight forward to UV Map, so if you’re thinking Mesh is just too complicated, I advise you to start with something straight forward like this. I’m not going to go through the process here, but I am going to go through why making a Mesh object have a physics shape of prim, rather than Convex Hull, can help things work nicely.

Now by default, Mesh will take on the physics shape of Convex Hull. There are many good reason for this, which I’m not going to discuss. However as we can see, my Mesh path is currently Convex Hull:

However there’s a problem, when I walk along my new funky Mesh path, I sink into the ground at the edges. At one end of my path are some steps, I actually end up falling down behind them, on the main path, you just sink slightly at the edges. Am I doing something wrong? Maybe, but after delving into the murky world of the official forums, being pointed at the Jira and getting some assistance from the ever helpful Drongle McMahon, I decided to change the physics shape to Prim and suddenly, it all works as expected!

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