arabellajones

Linden Lab seems totally unable to support a viewer running on Linux, using systems such as Vivox for SLvoice which are not available for Linux, and then running in-world meetings with residents which depend on using voice. That must really hurt for people who are deaf. It seems not impossible that the Lab's servers are really running under Windows 10. There are several published work-arounds, but current error messages I get suggest that the Vivox servers are in an overloaded, unreliable, mess. This is consistent with current reports I am seeing from users of other Vivox-using software. My net-level tools are showing that www.bhr.vivox.com is visible, is not blocked by anything here, but I try to avoid fiddling with Firewall settings: too many Silicon Valley pundits think RTFM is a sufficient response when the manuals are ill-written trash produced by people for whom COBOL is their birth-language.

Wakey, wakey!

I did a bit of a recce along the "big river" through the Chalet homes, and things are happening. I did see something that hinted at a possible airstrip near the north end, and things have been happening at the Yeeowler region at the south end of Satori. I can rant at great length about the road net, boat routes, and air vehicles, for the Satori continent. It's not just not expecting a connection. After all, who would? It's stunts like the roads and the lake around Davros. Sometimes the Lindens have done incredibly stupid things and never fixed them.

Likewise Blackthorn Ravine (Linden Homes region), last restart June 8th. Putting in a support request for a restart now (I know it's before the office opens.)

If it was a roll-back because of a bug, I'll give it a sort of OK. My home region isn't RC Channel. but it has 15-day uptime. No sign of problems, but it all sets me wondering.

So I had to look up Prototaxites. To get the 8m height, the trunk has to be about 1m across. And the general shape was more like the Saguaro, neither anything like the giant mushrooms scattered across SL18B.

As a theme, this doesn't really work for me. It doesn't help to be living in a country where it's possible to walk past real medieval buildings every day. The building have a fake medieval feel, much like the Chalet homes are fake Alpine, and maybe still very American as a result. It's not bad, but it leads to what would be the bigger problem for me. Essentially, the scenery dial gets turned up to 11 (and you can see where the scenery items came from for SL18B as a whole) and it lurches into being silly. I just can't believe in giant mushrooms, they'd collapse under their own weight, and that's only the most obvious flaw. And something else to think about for a fantasy theme. Where are the stables? There are fantasy offshoots, such as steampunk, which can escape that, but where do you keep the horses (or equivalents such as camels) that everyone depends on? Not everyone has their own horse (it's the same as the Wild West) but where is the equivalent of the hitching rail? So, nice work, but this theme doesn't work for me. It has the feel of a fake Elderglen thrown up be a property developer.

One extra note: The system by which new Linden Home regions does seem to have changed a bit. There are SSPE regions in blocks elsewhere on the Grid. Instead of a block of regions being deployed in its final position, worked-on for a long time, and renamed as the last step before being brought into use, there now seem to be placeholder not-region markers on maps, and regions can be quickly and reliably moved from working areas to final location.

A bit of an update, I was doing some railway stuff in Bellisseria over the weekend. While it's SLRR track standards, land permissions are awkward. You need an avatar on every component of a train. There are a very few trains which are made of articulated linksets. Most use the SLRR system of follower scripts to make up a train from separate vehicles. Rez zones are few and far between. Where a line ends there is usually something, such as Bridle Path which is the end of the line towards the Stilt regions. The next rail-specific rez zone is at Hawkesblood, which is a very long gap. Just east of Hawkesblood a spur diverges south through a chain of SSPE regions to SSPE1457 where there is a station and rez zone at the end of that line. It's some way north of Randelsham Forest that another spur diverges, west and the north, limited usable track, until it hits the unresolved edge at SSPE1217 We have unresolved region edges from Snert to Lost Caves. I can see the "big river", through the Chalet and Stilt regions, connecting across that gap to provide a waterway, rather than the current narrow sim-edge routes down the east side. Look at all the connected waters on the north-east parts of Bellisseria. We've had mention of the airstrip on the big river. There's a road tunnel south across the big river nearby. Starting in Hydrant, there are the first signs of more SLRR under construction, with map-visible green parkers in place, and a rail tunnel. I think it could connect to the rest of the Bellisseria lines, with a lot of new regions required, but will that happen? The rail and big river combination could justify a Linden-developed port facility in the vicinity of Buffalo Springs. I can rant a bit about the transport links at the south end of Satori. I don't know what the Lindens were drinking when they pulled that stunt with the roads, the bridges, and the lake, but it ought to be illegal.

One day, somebody will discover the signpost. Sorry, but I am a bit grumpy. Many of the exhibit sites are difficult to identify. And my experience of the pod tours was mixed, maybe not entirely the fault of Moles and exhibit builders, but but by the time enough had loaded to see what a place was, it always seemed to be a long way behind the pod. On what info I have about my connection, it wasn't maxed out. And I hear plenty of horror stories about internet connections in the USA. OK, I don't recognise many of the performer and DJ names, but the Lindens seem to have provided zero information in their event calendars. I have to go digging through the in-game Search, and then get directed to some external web page. I'll admit I am old enough that my musical tastes may be from long before SL was dreamt of, because that's when I grew up, but whatever my tastes, it seems broken that Linden Lab and SL18B organisers have done so little promotion. I feels as though I am doing their work. It's a similar problem with the Shop and Hop. There's just a huge list of landmarks and store names. With so many different mesh bodies in use, each needing specific, matching, clothes, even the many multi-body packs available don't really compensate. And there's a lot of other goods to sell, but how to find them? I tried the Marketplace site. Not every Shop and Hop merchant I tried searching for is there. Timezone differences are their own problem, but at least I am awake at times when these events are quiet. But it means that so much depends on what's visible, scenery and not other residents using chat.

I've lived though family deaths. This is all pretty minor, but I found things like not forgetting these small routine tasks to be rather comforting. I was still part of a social world.

And we have another here-we-go-again moment. There are restarts on Tuesday morning, according to the status page. About 40 minutes to the start, as I type. It's not really a surprise, there was the RC Channel rollout last week, and I expect people have been distracted, but distractions are why you use things such as checklists. I may be a bit cranky about poor communication by tech companies. It's not just Linden Lab (and I expect I have my own quirks, even if they're essentially differences in how we use language going back to us having different teachers). I have enough mushrooms in the refrigerator. I don't need any more, really, and they don't keep in this hot weather.

They stopped updating that stat sometime in 2020. I know of some very old, unused, accounts that have come back. The players are somewhat bewildered by the changes, not just all the new tech such as Mesh, but the whole UI thing. They're old enough accounts that they may only have seen the Viewer 1 UI. I also know of a bot farm which seems to have vanished recently, a skybox which contained a large group of perpetually logged-in accounts. It was mainland, with a Linden road passing through, and those region crossings were bad. There does seem to be a limit on how many accounts can use the same email address.

How come they suddenly look almost competent? It's good to get this, but after the last few weeks, I can't but wonder if I can trust this.

Linden Lab could be in breach of Data protection laws in Europe over this. But it gets complicated. Not that the release notes are really worth the hassle.

One thing I noticed; my home region had its first restart for 21 days. I suspect the region traffic and new-building levels are low enough that the various things that a restart/reboot fixes don't show. Inara Pey's Modemworld blog reported the Simulator User Group meeting where the already complete roll-out finally got mentioned by a Linden. They expected a general Wednesday RC rollout with the magic "internal configuration changes", but no server version was identified. I have been reminded that there are various sort of rot which can be described as undocumented internal changes, until the tree falls down, which is rather obvious. The SL18B regions are being prepared. The clock is ticking. This is the first SLB of the cloud era, and my enthusiasm is muted.

The routine status warning did appear on the Status page but with nothing since then, there's no guarantee of anything. But it's been long enough that restarts can be expected without any new code.

There's a couple of details you missed. Built-in browser or default system browser? And, for the default system browser, what it is? And if you're using the default system browser, have you checked the system-level setting? I have known it change. I also routinely open my browsers from desktop links and use in-browser bookmarks, so I wouldn't notice something like that. Since it's not a single site that excludes a lot of problems. But if it were I would wonder about tools that block adverts and trackers. That doesn't usually lead to total failure of a site. And it sounds to have lasted long enough not to be close to you, such as your ISP or connection. Like many other things, there's a chain you can work through. For sound, are other sound sources playing. Is the speaker powered up? There are several places on my system where the volume can be turned down to zero. So that sort of step-by-step checking can be very useful

No sign of the routine Status warning, and the Lindens are gone for the weekend. Looking at my calendar and counting days, restarts, without new server versions, are very likely next week It feels strange to seem to know more about what is going on than the Lindens do.

The restarts are running, and I see Tuliptree, Neumogen, and Obscure are all affected, and all on the SLRR, so that's three places you can check to see if there are effects. Voss and Grishin in the Snowlands. I suspect it's a subset of the RC Channels, but since they never tell us, scared faults might get reported to them, I figure you have to rely on a grump, vulpine, PITA such as myself.

Today (I run on UTC) there will be restarts. The notice is sitting in Status and Inara Pey has reported that the plan got mentioned at the Simulator User Group meeting. It may be only some RC Channel regions, but these days they never tell us which. I am not confident they will stick to the announced time slot. Customers, paying or not, are being treated like mushrooms. We're being kept in the dark and fed on bull*****.

I can see why, for helping new users, Linden Lab would want to open web pages. I know how some groups in SL have tutorial web pages. I have my DNS running through an ad-blocker. Some domain names return an NX response. This isn't like the ad blocker in some web browsers. There are blocklists out there which block more obviously malicious sites, such as malware and phishing If the tech had been around, it could have blocked Redzone. I have never hit any problems with the CDN. I do know of a couple of in-world shops which have put offer-links in their groups which have used dodgy servers. Try not to be stupid, OK

Today I saw an experienced SL user referring to using prims, because mesh apparently needed Blender, which was frightening. I would argue that Blender, and similar paid-for programs, are not necessary for non-rigged meshes, the sorts of things that prims were used for. There are things which you need to take into account to make a good mesh, but for the basics, what do you need? 1: The object shape, the part we usually think of as mesh. 2: The physics shape, making this right lets you walk through a doorway. 3: LOD models. These can be generated in the import process, which may be good enough. For some things a very simple mesh may be enough for the lowest LOD. Maybe an inside wall for a house. Who is ever going to see it, through other walls, at the lowest LOD? It's still needed, but it needs to have the same number of texture faces. 4: UV mapping: how the usually non-flat surface of the model is split up and fitted onto 1 or more flat textures. Compare how a spherical prim is UV mapped to what the flexibility of mesh can give you, something like a Goode Homolosine projection. I don't think the standard spherical prim uses a Mercator projection but the difference is getting a bit picky. There's a huge amount of stretching at the poles. This may be the most complicated part of making a mesh. But, when it is done well, it can let you use bump maps for detail. None of this needs Blender-level tools.

I concur that the Ruth 2 mesh body is the best chance to see Standard Sizes and Mesh working, it's very close to the original avatar, but can give you full materials and BOM. It's not perfect, but close enough to be useful. There are several free or near-free versions on the Marketplace. Some of the names used by merchants can be horribly misleading. "Fitmesh" for mesh bodies other than the classic type, and mesh body brands such as Legacy. It makes searches difficult.

There is some Second Life content, and system behaviour, which is of doubtful legality in other countries, and vice versa. A giant economy-size can of worms is in the post.