arabellajones

I have RL friends who can do programming. They're pretty good. But LL may only have a budget for 30s of their time.

We have several legacy map tiles showing in the new "chalet" district, That's the new-build linking Satori and Bellisseria. If you use the viewer map, "Yeeowler" region is at the southern tip of Satori, and the chain of no-maptile regions runs off to the West. They are named. They have remarkably well-developed visible landscape and Parcel Boundaries show on the Firestorm minimap. "Buffalo Springs" is a false maptile, It has a part of the wide E-W water channel which runs through the new section. The other two I know of are "Duncan's Brea" and "Geppetto". Maptiles reappear at "Something Fishy" which is the other end of the water channel, on the edge of the "Stilt" themed district. Some of the no-maptile regions already have residents. You'd expect those places to have working maptiles. The gaps between the "Stilt" regions and the rest of Bellisseria anr still no-maptile. Some have had scenery for a long time, and I would expect the railroad terminal to have better than a placeholder-name. The false maptiles have me thinking that the fix to the map is not as near as we were beginning to hope. This is the scenery in Fiddlesticks. I'm in the helicopter. I think some scenery elements are still incomplete.

I managed to make a flight with an aircraft from Satori ti Bay City, but the current map functionality and the region crossings are both barely adequate. For the new "Chalet" regions there is a broad water channel, not currently showing on map tiles, so you can fly on VFR. Routing over the "Stilt" regions also has a lot of open water. From then on, a medium altitude route works. I reached the west coast of Bellisseria just to the south of the Galaxy cruise ship, north to Sansara, and then was flying on familiar ground over the various seas/lakes to Bay City. Current map functionality is OK, but aircraft are too fast-moving. And with no map tiles for so many regions on this route, it's difficult. The Chalet regions channel was mostly visible in Firestorm as having no parcel divisions on the minimap. There just isn't any way to plan.

I run Linux with a GTX 960, 4GB RAM, using the current direct-from-nVidia driver NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-460.56.run (You have to stop the X-server and run that file from the console to install. I had a fun couple of days last week, and had to learn entirely too much about setting up screen resolution from the command line, but installing that driver came after that stage.) My CPU reports as a Xeon W5580, which is old, but respectable at 3.2 GHz. I set Firestorm to limit at 30fps, and while it struggles a little with EEP, compared to Windlight, it's OK. Benchmark scores put it close to the level of a 1050 card, and I am not sure you will see much advantage. I can be grumpy at tedious length about LL, proper threading of viewer code, and their geriatric devotion to OpenGL. Apart from the video card, my box is high-end tech from 2009, and LL still haven't caught up.

There have been times when I have wondered in Linden Lab have ever taken into account even ordinary eyesight problems. The extra zoom level does make a difference, but I have a suspicion that viewers, in general, are still designed for a maximum screen resolution of 1024x768. Even an ordinary TV can deliver better resolution, and the way things work out I struggle to cope with the size of text which viewers use. The boosted zoom level does show oddities such as gaps in Linden Roads at region boundaries, but I suspect going through a web browser, and avoiding that viewer weakness, is at least as significant a factor.

It's the weekend... It looks like being a busy one.

"Fiddlesticks" is one of the regions under-construction to extend Bellisseria to Satori. We saw the same pattern of named-but-unmapped regions for the Stilt regions while they were emerging.

Viewers are starting to show apparently current map tiles, though zooming is erratic and some regions are showing name, but no map-tile data. A large block of region names is now visible for the last block needed to connect Bellissera to Satori, and proper names such as "Fiddlesticks" rather than placeholders such as "SSPE1110". I am assuming the map tiles are unlikely to show before the basic landscape is set, and the short gaps echo what was done with the Stilt regions Cool VL Viewer seems OK for zooming Firestorm is still erratic. I am wondering if there is some cache-like element in the system, and I use Firestorm often enough that I am still using older data.

Update on Worldmap Status. Firestorm is showing new tiles, but the zoom is erratic. Cool VL Viewer doesn't have the zoom problem. Many regions have full scenery, but only show as region titles on the map. Apart from the usual deliberate gaps, the regions connecting Bellisseria and have been named and show as region titles. Try a search on "Fiddlesticks" Regions such as "SSPE1110" still show as complete blanks even though they look very complete, even a railroad station at the end of the line, complete with rez zone. I really hope that there isn't some deeply hidden code difference between Firestorm and other viewers which explains the difference on Zoom behaviour. It may just be a side effect of some sort of caching.

I don't know for sure if the region I just checked is still RC, though it was, but it does look as if they are rolling back to the current MC version. So two things: 1: There's not likely to be an MC rollout next week. 2: Unless you keep notes, or have a gadget which logs restarts, there's no way of knowing which sims will restart when, next week. Which makes Tuesdays and Wednesdays suck for planning events. Can I trust the timings reported on the Status page? RC and MC rollouts seem to run for as much as 12 hours, and despite the roughly 3:1 difference in region numbers, RC rollouts can take longer than MC.

I reckon there are technical barriers. Modern "games" use different APIs for graphics, and make good use of multiple thread. Second Life is stuck with OpenGL and comes from an era when performance increases came from processor clock speed, not multiple cores/threads. Oh, and I care about performance. I pay attention to things such as LOD when I create meshes. But processor clock speeds haven't changed much in the last ten years. The hot desktop machines have gone from 4 cores to 16 cores. Until Linden Lab fixes that problem, how can they hope to make the visuals better?

I think I mentioned it somewhere else. Cool VL Viewer is providing a zoomable world map function. Some totally new map tiles are not visible (North-east corner of Bellisseria) or not fully up to date, but I have seen recent changes showing on the map. Is it worth using? I just checked, it's detecting a new block, south of Second Norway, but no tiles loading. Other places, definitely new tile data. If the map data is updated on a cycle that might explain it, but when was the new Second Norway block turned on? One of the recent changes appears to be a major airfield at the Gaeta end of the Corsica-Gaeta channel (Some of the Wiki pages are getting horribly out of date.) (Later the same day.) Firestorm is now showing new map tiles, although the map zoom is still erratic.

Now what? I am also seeing signs of texture baking being broken, and I am in an MC region.

Long description deleted I think I shall go and sob helplessly in this corner. So many vehicles have no-modify scripts. I have to wait for the vehicle creator to sort this out. As far as I can tell, the Lindens have managed to break 18 years of vehicle scripting, and they can't even fix their own sample scripts.

My understanding is that vehicle and passengers have always been transferred as distinct operations, but the order they arrived in was reliable. Under the new system, an avatar can arrive before the vehicle, and there's nothing to sit on. I am not sure that a script can do the necessary checks to work around that. I did look at things, but it's way beyond my pay-grade. I sometimes wonder if this sort of problem has its root in the farming out of the original Viewer 2 project. It's been a long time, and even if that had been Linden-written, maybe the people who would have understood the Viewer/Server processes would be long gone from the lab. But there are some very old assumptions that have been revealed.

As far as the World Map is concerned, I have found that Cool VL Viewer appears to be working, though I am not 100% sure about the newest sections of Bellisseria. There are regions labelled but not visible on the map. It may be an under-construction problem rather than a map problem. But at least you can zoom out and still see the landscape. I am not sure if the map tiles are current, but something has changed. One or two versions ago I was seeing the basic ground/water, but no prims or mesh. So no roads. I think the map tiles are near-current now. Firestorm hasn't changed map handling. If LL get the system working and Firestorm doesn't use it properly, it's going to be frustrating. It was just luck that I did a sanity-check on my Linux box with Cool VL Viewer.

Yes, that's quite likely.

It gets a bit tedious, nobody bothering to announce plans until the last minute, even when they have been in the status page all weekend. These things may be automatic, but I figured "Why not tell people?", and took a screenshot. No guarantees, plans could be changed, but I feel like sending Linden Lab a bill.

The border-crossing issue is tricky. The NCI group has a balloon flight from Kuula, running through protected/public parcels, which has developed a bad failure on a crossing from Dedi region to Kalli region. Dedi region is 556847, the new server on the RC channel. Kalli is 556255 so Main channel. When we made a test flight the balloon stopped moving after making the crossing, close to the northern end of the boundary. Kalli has a 20m protected/public strip along the east and north sides. There's just so many reasons why things might go wrong. I find myself wondering if the vaguely described monitoring tools the Lindens have installed will do anything useful. But the crossing worked, so why would anything be recorded?

I can certainly think of ways in which the number of scripts running can be misleading, buried in the details of what a script does. Some old train scripts, still essentially standard, haven't been updated for a long time. I know there are "Puppeteer" scrips, moving prims in a linkset, which use obsolete command with built-in waits. It could have been the measurement, it could have been the reporting of the measurement, or it could have been both. It's not been easy find places to test.

You may already have heard, but a Firestorm update came out on Monday. Since a lot of people use Firestorm, the download process may be a bit sluggish. There's some new bits and pieces, but the main element is to get close to the current SL Viewer. It's at parity with the SL Default viewer that was released on February 1st. There's been one SL Default release since. I installed it, and it's been stable. There's been a couple of viewer releases, recently, which got a fairly rapid withdrawal/replacement. There's an argument for getting the download and waiting until Friday to install it. The Firestorm people have been doing QA testing for a while, but things can get missed. There's so much variation in graphics hardware and drivers, for one thing. One thing I noticed: I had my cache settings changed back to the default. No big deal, but I keep my cache on an SSD, and the speed difference was obvious.

Stations, passing loops, they're places where a rez-zone makes sense, but not every one on the Heterocera main line has a rez-zone. Region crossing does seem to be getting better, more reliable, but is the recent improvement misleading, comparing that distant past to now? Either way, no rez-zone for the railway in Rendlesham Forest just doesn't make sense. If you can't have a rez-zone there, the whole railway seems ridiculous. And all the Bellisseria regions seem to be set up with parcels fixed from the start. I know, all you need is the right permissions for the parcel...

That could be excessive. It's not true of Heterocera.

The very long rail link across Eastern Bellisseria has become a little more usable. The switch just to the east of Hawkesblood is now operational and it is possible to get a rail vehicle to Randelsham Forest without any trickery, even a bit beyond. Signals and passing loops are still currently incomplete. There are no rez zones beyond Hawkesblood station on the line. Region crossings were good when I tried the run, but there doesn't seem much point in not having a rez zone sited for rail users in Randelsham Forest. The Map Problem isn't helping with any exploration. I can see why rez zones are rare around Bellisseria, but the regions such as Randelsham Forest aren't devoted to providing prim count to the Linden Homes. The only choices seems to be to use a water rez-zone (there are a couple I know of), board the rail vehicle, and edit it to the rail line.

Little bit of news on the railway. The last rez zone is still in Hawkesblood, but the switch just to the east is now operational, with one line running south to the coast and the other east and north to Randlesham Forest continuing as far as SSPE1193 There are several unfinished passing loops on the stretch, but no RR rez zones, not even in Randlesham Forest. This seems way too long a run without a rez zone. All the usual awkwardnesses apply, but you can get a rail vehicle to Randlesham Forest without any cheating. We're still some way from completion, signals and passing loops. The old SLRR code is not going to be able to run trains on Bellessaria without serious modification, just single vehicles, but there are getting to be a few alternatives.