Rolling Restart Issues Trouble Second Life

By Cyfir (Cyfiremmerich)

For nearly a day, some sims seemed to be down and my viewer showed a weird error whenever I tried to teleport to them. The error read: “Teleport failed. Routed to wrong region. Please try again.” This seems to have happened to both my personal parcel on an Azure sim and my Second Life home (which I believe is part of the mainland). It also seems to have been an issue for other sims such as TWI, the Safe Waters Foundation, and possibly others. This error also caused some huds and chat groups to stop working. This does not seem like it was a typical outage although Linden Labs seems to have blamed it on the sims not coming back up after rolling restarts. At least some of the sims are now back up. Both my parcels and TWI came back online around the same time.

In addition, Matoazma Kazyanenko had some trouble with their sim; The Hidden Valley Community. “[The] sim automatically restarted three times.” She said. “One at the usual 3AM time, but then unexpectedly restarted about three hours later when I thought everything was all done for the day. So we had to flee again. Then it happened again five hours after that. So yeah, it was pretty jarring when the sim kept restarting unexpectedly. We had begun to speculate that LL had messed something up with the restarts somewhere along the way and had to roll back.”

This may be a none-issue by the time this article posts. However, I believed that this event was particularly notable because in my seven plus years on Second Life I’ve never seen an issue where so many sims just refused to come back online after the rolling restarts. It’s a reminder of how much a disruption in services can effect users. I guess we should be thankful, though, that the grid doesn’t go down nearly every month like it did in the early years of Second Life. Most users seemed to be pretty chill when dealing with the issue believing that Linden Labs was working on it and would take care of it. I guess that’s a testament to how much Second Life has gained a hold on these issues over the years.

Cyfir

Lost Second Life

By Becky Shaman/Joshua Xavier

This reporter has been featured in the last 7 articles published by Becky Shamen. He started out as an alt, but in November he split off into a seperate account and now is his own man. At the January Newser staff meeting, Josh attended in Sha's place and asked to be hired, so he could have his own Byline in the paper. At the meeting, Josh indicated that he and Sha were also working on a series of articles, a synopsis of "The Unveiling", by J.J.Dewey, which is being posted at ShaAdventures.blogspot.com , but they were also looking for new adventures in Second Life, to write about. The Editor suggested a photo exhibit, that he had heard of, might be just our cup of tea. The name of the exhibit is, "Lost Second Life." Josh, being a sorta Indiana Jones type, was on it like a mouse on cheese.

The landing, on the Mado sim, puts you in the center of a desert, said to be a post apocalypse sea floor. As the only building on the sim, you won't have any trouble finding the Anita Witt Photography Gallery. The main gallery features photos by Anita, which are all very high quality and copies are for sale. Behind the main gallery, there is a four story building, housing the "Lost Second Life" exhibit.

The photos in this exhibit are all by Photographer Ziki Questi, of sims that are no longer in Second Life. Knowing this premise, we were hoping there would be a photo from our all time favorite, the Sistine chapel, which disappeared last year. To our great delight, they not only included it, at L$100, it is the most affordable photo at the gallery.

We found the stairs difficult to navigate, but fortunately the building was missing one side and flying is permitted, making it easier to view all of the fine photographs.

As a life time artist, we can be somewhat critical of what some galleries have to offer. In the case of photographs by Anita and Ziki, we are pleased to report these are exceptionally good quality. No
doubt, some of you will find photos of sims that you have visited and now miss. Here is your chance to see them again and add reminders to the walls of your home.

Having, in the two months of our independent existence, evolved the persona of our new avatar, we were now planning to make a fresh profile pic. As we viewed each photograph, consideration was given as to how it would look as a background for a picture that fits our character. The one chosen fit both style and colors needed and now is included in the profile. From this slice of the visit, incorporated into my profile, it should be evident that we liked the exhibit. We give it two thumbs up and recommend y'all go check it out, before it goes away like the Lost Second Life it depicts.

http://slurl.com/secondlife/Mado/125/172/38

Joshua Xavier

Lindens Launch 100 Pathfinding Sims

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has gone viral on Second Life's main grid. A new technology called pathfinding embeds AI in SL servers. On over 100 sims, AI characters can navigate intelligently among avatars, terrain, walkways, and obstacles, with behaviors such as pursuit, wander, evade, patrol, and navigate to location.

Any of these behaviors can be invoked with 2 lines of Linden Scripting Language (LSL)… to automatically move mesh or classic prim objects… possibly replacing hundreds of lines of vehicle animation code. Is this just a reduction in user code or something more? Yes, much more.

Pathfinding is a new mobility ecosystem. Pathfinding can calculate all feasible pathways across land and prims (e.g. bridges), generating a navimesh (picture 1). Pathfinding characters (aka Non Player Characters or NPC) use AI searches to find navigable pathways to their target avatar, object, or location. Throw up a roadblock? No problem, they will find another way round. There is enough randomness and simulated nervousness in the solution, that NPCs have distinctively organic motions.

Yeah, but what about lag? Everyone asks. Okies. I ran stress tests with my animated NPCs on the Snack Sandbox regions. Kitty is a 4 legged animated critter that walks. Funky Munky is a humanoid NPC that strides and does a funny skit. I took baseline performance stats, then starting rezzing wandering NPCs simwide; hundreds of them.

As I watched the lag numbers; a startling result! At first, only 2 numbers trended with added NPCs, Physics Time went up and Spare Time went down. All other numbers flatlined... no effect. Just over 100 NPCs and Spare Time hit zero; the first noticeable lag. Amp that up to 200 NPCs, and yes, we are driving frame time up as well, but linearly, not aggressively. Even more surprising, virtually no NPCs crashed. After rezzing 200 kitties, I only lost 2 and the population held steady for several hours. Conclusion: multiply your Spare Time by 5 and that's how many animated NPCs you could rez on your sim without any noticeable lag.

That means, Lindens created a very reliable and efficient infrastructure, but only for NPCs. Of course, all this AI is beta test, and sim crashes happen often outside the sandbox. You know this when you can't move or chat… you've got crash! The sim does an auto-rollback, including your inventory; and sometimes you relog to a place you left hours ago! Time Warp! Coolies!

The Lindens should be congratulated for these achievements... but that's not enough. User generated NPCs should support animations, in other words, NPCs with moving limbs that walk and gesture. I used the very popular prim animation script by Ferd for my NPCs. My teaching NPCs worked for weeks… umm… until Wednesday, when Lindens rolled out a new server beta that broke all my prim animations and everyone else's. Ugh! Fix that bug!

To date, Lindens test pathfinding with the default cubes that you rez when you start building (Picture 2). This testing scales to other non-articulated NPCs such as rubber duckies, plastic bunny toys, and snails. Clever use of flexiprims gives you a few more options (Picture 3). Let's see, hmmm, NPC can only travel on land and float but not animate… maybe ghosts? daleks? spaghetti monsters?

To fill the vast depopulated regions of SL with engaging content, citizens of SL need animated NPCs… i.e. NPC people and realistic, animated NPC critters. I'm just saying... pathfinding has tremendous potential. Linden Prayers that it lives up to expectations!

Picture 4: Any, Lorca Linden, Maestro Linden, and Falcon Linden, "the genius behind pathfinding AI. Dude! ... You ROCK!" 

The Pathfinder Users Group (PUG) meets Thursdays at 4pm SL time on Aditi test grid at the PathTest megaregions (use the Map to find us!). Chat log from this meeting: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Pathfinding_in_Second_Life/2012-05-03


Any1 Gynoid

Original published on CNN 

Ready to Mezmerize! A Preview of SL8B

The place is massive!! The magic is there . The builds are magnificent. The sims are named appropriately: Stupendous, Mesmerize, Stunning, Pizzazz to name a few. Each one is filled with builds that you will absolutely love. I spent some time talking to some of the builders about their creations.

I met Master Kaos and Cherub Spectre, builders of Octoverville's display. Miss Cherub told me, “We are sponsoring the SL8B MegaHunt. Octoberville was the creators of the 1st scavenger hunt in SL, so this build is based around that and includes the SL8B MegaHunt. This sign behind me portrays how anyone can 'make it' in Second Life, as we were only a couple weeks old when we built our first Octoberville and it was featured in the Second Opinion, the LL Newsletter, which you can see the archived version on that prim back there. Torley Linden was very nice to dig that up for me.” Be sure to stop over there and visit the exhibit in Magnificent and look in all the sims for hunt items

I ran into a tiny, Morton Wheels, standing in front of his motor shop in the Impressive sim. Maymay Matova, another of the builders said this is “A place where you get an impression of biker life in Second Life. Sit beside our campfire and don´t forget to grab our free SL8B biker boots and cap! Check our landmarks to biker sims, grab your bike, ride on the streets and feel like easy rider. Isn´t this like magic? ” Morton morphed from a tiny to his biker self. You can find their pictures on the poster in the front of the exhibit in case they are not around when you visit. There will be lots of entertainment listed in the events both sl8b arranged or on the parcels.

Next I met Dagoth Graves in front of his Entertainment place. “ I will be having a few Draco live performers here doing small shows throughout the SL8 event, Bruce Scrabblebat, Jody Mubble (Y-Factor), StevenJaimz Hunniton, CelticMaidenWarrior Lancaster and a few others,” he told me. Look for his place in Impresssive.

There are so many wonderful places and freebies. I took a lovely pod tour which informed me about some of the exhibitors and what was going on in that area. Look for it. It will open on Monday as you know and I warn you to come low prim and as unscripted as you can. Have a wonderful time! I will be reporting on more goings on as the week progresses. Look for me in the sims. I will be a greeter and wearing a snail avatar and I will look for you too!

Gemma Cleanslate