WolfBaginski Bearsfoot

And there was I thinking that the whole point of UDP was that there were no ACKs or resends... From my somewhat naive PoV, that looks as though somebody was trying to be too clever

My Viewer logs when I pass from one server version to another, and Le Tigre _> MC seems to be associated with failed region crossing. I'm not 100% sure, it might be the region crossing before the failure and I ought to have been logging to the second, but it's often enough to make me suspicious. Generally, the code is working well. It's not even a failure every time. But I am not seeing the other RCs appearing so often.

I have been looking at the specifications for the Materials System. SL Wiki Page on Materials Some recent fiddling I was doing with texturing a prim-object lokks as though it won't be treated in quite the same way. At the moment I can take a texture map and combine it with the color setting. If the texture is a light, fairly neutral, tone th color setting can set the colour, while the grey-scale features of the texture will show through. (A thought: does this require Basic Shaders to be used, the old-style shading system? Checks: not that I can see.) From the descriptions, it looks as though the old Color value will be ignored if there is a texture map (diffuse texture), although some similar effects might be possible using the new textures. I undertstand that the Materials system will not apply to the textures on an AV, skin or clothing, and so this old trick might still work there. It's an easy way of tweaking an object, and I have no idea how often it has been used in the past, Materials, a s a whole, looks to be a good deal, but this is a possible annoyance.

Thanks. There have been times when the RC set-up has seemed ill-suited to testing region-crossing effects. Having unform code for that will make me feel a lot more comfortable.

It's not a week-specific bug, but some networking hardware is known to struggle with SL. Essentially, the way the communication between your computer and Second Life happens, it can overload some models of router with an unusually large number of HTTP sessions. As I understand the problem, the Lindens made some poor choices, and so a single SL instance, one AV in world, can look rather like a whole busy office, in the nature of the internet traffic. The Lindens are working on it, but I don't know the current status. Not fixed yet, AFAIK, Anyway, because of that, telling us your model of router hardware--that's the box between your computer and the internet--can be enough to explain things.I don't know of any easy fix, but some TPVs do have options buried in Preferences and the Advanced menu which might ease that problem. I'm inclined to think that the Lindens were having a brain-holiday on the day they set up the web servers we use for the HTTP traffic. Supplying large numbers of files to cusiomers is a problem faced by a lot of web sites, and the solutions are well understood. There are other aspects of Second Life that are unusual, but switching to HTTP texture delivery was switching from the unusual to the commonplace.

Foolishlu, perhaps, I am assuming that with threaded region-crossing in the Main Channel, the code is also in all the RC versions. Yes or no?

I can't give any info that would help pin things down to particular servers, I didn't take notes, but movement and sim scrossing have certainly been jerky. Rubber-banding, unexpected changes of heading on sim crossing, and a couple of minutes of completely crazy movement on one sim crossing before things stabilised. Also, object rezzing was sometimes extremely slow, the road not being visible, though apparently enough was there for the Physics Engine. That was particularly obvious for the bridges at Kaminari and Clarksburg and the road between those locations. That wild sim-crossing included a vehicle moving several hundred metres sideways and continuously pitching, while the camera position remained stable relative to the vehicle centre. As near as I could tell from the minimap. the lateral displacement was parallel to the region boundary being crossed. The vehicle was always close to the visible terrain surface. It lasted long enough that any recovery at all seemed remarkable. Best guess at location is Sven-Grishin, but that could easily be a couple of regions wrong, north or south. Some of the effect could be down to the Viewer and whatever sort of interpolation is supposed to smooth out glitches. I could see the pitching being the consequence of some bump in the road surface, but the lateral displacement suggests some specific bad data getting into the system. I'm not sure why I hung on as long as I did: it was the sort of sim-crossing behaviour which prompts despair and log-outs.

It's getting into the territory of legal liability if somebody were to get access to a user's account and take stuff. A court might have to decide on what the T&C clauses really mean. and there is a growing history of unauthorised access cases being a matter for US Federal law. I'm glad I send my money to LL via Paypal. That's another layer of protection for my payment details, and the way Paypal is set up it is subject to EU laws on computer crime and financial services. From what I recall, access to the Dasgboard and Marketplacxe doesn't reveal critical details and maybe I worry too much, but they have enough detail on record to allow a lot of harm if it leaks out, and slipshod handling og logins is hardly a good sign.

Respirator. Check! Body armor. Check! Earplugs. Check! (Switches off and moves to a different IP address, just in case.)

There is a song called It is not at all funny. And, in my experience, they never did tell anyone.

Not Coleridge, Shelley.

I met a traveller from an antique sim Who said: Two vast and trunkless prims of wood Stand in the desart. Near them, twisted prim, And look, a shattered sculptie lies, whose flood Of strained pixels, smeared so long and slim, Tell that its sculptor well those passions could Write unread, onl faces of these Linden things, From hand that made them and the mind that led: And in the comments hid these words appear: "My name is Maestro Linden, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I saw some script problems in a Magnum sim Friday afternon, SLT. Scripted vehicles passing through a Magnum region would lose all control, moving at a constant speed in a straight line, though experiencing collisions with the ground, so that they didn't drop below ground level. There was no apparent queuing of commands to be executed in the next region. HUD instruments didn't respond to changes in altitude, either absolute or Above Ground Level, and particle clouds generated close to the ground did not appear. I experienced this in Hanguel, one of four regions compriising the InfoHub on the Southern Continent (If I have the name wrong, it was definitely one of those four regions). The problems were different if I rezzed the helicopter in a neighbouring region that was also on the Magnum RC. Some scripted elements of the helicopter still did not function.

I'm wondering why people aren't able to use recent viewers. I have a rather low-powered laptop, only a couple of gig of RAM, that runs current viewers fine. Set the graphics low-quality, and screen space can be tight, but things will run. What sort of systems are they that don't work. I hear the claim, but I don't see specifics anywhere. And is it really a lot of people? Is there a problem, or is it just a rumour with long legs?

Maestro, I really hope you just forgot to "close" the Status announcement for the roll-out.

I can see the Interest List work helping a little with sim crossings from the bandwidth reduction that might happen, but I'm not sure it will be a big change for a moving point of view. But once it goes grid-wide, I'd expect it to ease the load on the servers storing and sending the data, and that would help. The Viewer I use does some automatic Draw Distance stepping on teleport, which is a crude way of getting the same sort of effect. I suppose I should turn it off, if I really want to see what the Interest List work does.

I was wondering why there didn't seem to be any improvement in sim crossing...

I think Yordie is referring to the situation when a sim doesn't appear to exist on the mini-map, as you close on the border. What I too often see is that Sim A is visible, and I'm about to cross into Sim B, also visible, but the next sim in the chain, Sim C, never appears in the mini-map. It seems very likely, from my experience, that it's the A-B crossing that is the root of all that happens thereafter, but if my draw distince is set to reveal Sim C before I leave Sim A, and it doesn't appear, it is pretty well certain that the A-B crossing is going to fail. I tested this with aircraft at altitude so that most of the slow-to-download scenery is out of draw distance. Like Yordie, I have also seen a deterioration in sim-crossing performance, particularly since Pathfinding was rleased grid-wide. I've seen it claimed that the roll-out of Pathfinding messed up any relationship between physical server location and grid location, which slowed the necessary network traffic, but I cannot rule out other elements of the problem being Pathfinding related. The Lindens, of course, don't talk much. It's very easy to think that the Viewer code has accumulated a huge amount of crud over the years, patches upon patches, just as any other software does. The Viewer got a clean start with Viewer 2, but little snippets I hear suggests that the Server has never had that, One account I was reading over Christmas suggested that no real-world programming project is well enough designed to satisfy a Computer Science Professor. Too much of the final product is hasty patching. I'm sceptical about the prospects for improvement, without some major changes in how things are done. Clean start code? Does Linden Labs still have the resources to do that? Can it afford not to do that?

That web page I linked to includes the serial numbers, and I cannot reconcile that with the claim that serial numbers were sent direct to customers.. I don't know what to make of it. If it's not what it looks like—not even a need to login to the site—what on earth are they doing? And: <i>1 -- If you've just installed the software, the Activation dialog box appears automatically.</i> It didn't for me. It looks like they haven't really bothered to make a restriction to existing customers clear, and the versions available don't have the Activation element, for good reason. I expect you can already get the bittorrents.

All I can say is that they chose a strange way of setting things up, with a very well-hidden explanation of what they were doing. Have they been taking lessons from Linden Labs?

Adobe have released some older software versions for free. It includes Photoshop. They're mostly CS2 versions, which is about ten years old. http://www.adobe.com/downloads/cs2_downloads/index.html Not much good for the Mac users, as the Mac versions are PowerPC only. Might also be tricky for Windows, since the software is described as for Win XP, but a friend tells me that he has this version of Photoshop running on Windows 8 after changing the default install folders These are all the CS2 versions (maybe Acrobat is more recent) with serial numbers. I expect Adobe are having to shift a lot of data...

While it may not be a critical bug if you're doing good security, there's a bug on nVidia drivers that lets people get privileged access. The hacker needs to be on the "local domain", according to the report I saw, There's a new nVidia driver out with a bugfix. Go to http://www.nvidia.com/ and click on the Drivers tab. It's a big download, and the site is being a bit sluggish So I'll not give a direct link, as there are versions for different languages, and I don't want you wasting time on the wrong language.

I wrote one of those reviews. I tried to be fair. Second Life can be horribly frustrating for new residents, but it's worth making the effort.

I'm impressed by your work, and just bought a watch from you, but I must admit that all the animated doohickies seem a bit superfluous on a wristwatch in SL. That thieving scumbag doesn't need the scripts to have something that would be worth selling.

There's several other items on Amazon Why on earth are the free viewer downloads only available to the USA? It looks as though, except for the hoverboard, the vehicles are from the Premium Freebies. Amazon lists them as available since the 10th December 2012, and we only hear about it now? I am not surprised about the free L$1000 getting abused.