[sldev] Upcoming Releases

Bridie Linden bridie at lindenlab.com
Wed May 14 11:11:01 PDT 2008


Hello SLDev folks!

As you all know, things can change quickly @ the 'Lab (although I'm sure 
it some times that it doesn't feel quick enough!), we're a bit over due 
in sharing our plans for upcoming releases. We'll try to do this on a 
more regular basis in the future (feel free to poke me if I'm remiss in 
this effort!)

Viewer:
For those of you keeping score, we're on our 7th iteration of Second 
Life Viewer 1.20 Release Candidate. RC6 went out last week:
http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/05/07/new-release-candidate-viewer-120-rc6-available/

As mentioned on the blog, we tried more frequent iterations in this 
Release Candidate viewer cycle in an attempt to find and fix as many 
viewer crashes as possible and increase overall viewer stability with 
other important fixes along the way.

The good news is that we have fixed a number of hot issues, and isolated 
and fixed several nasty crash bugs. We made good progress on fixing 
video card specific crashes, but haven't squashed them all. We have been 
keeping a close watch on 1.20's crash statistics compared to the default 
download 1.19.1. (Note, for those worried about the crash reporter some 
times failing to send crash reports (VWR-7105), keep in mind that we 
catch whether or not the viewer crashed previously upon login, 
independent of the crash reporter sending details).

Although the stability of 1.20 RC6 has improved over these last few 
weeks, it's still not as solid as we would like — so although we are 
excited to make Dazzle available as part of the default download (and 
yes, we know not everyone is thrilled with the new UI appearance), we 
want to take the next few weeks to continue iterating on 1.20 to look 
into the cause of crashes and lockups.

In a nutshell, we are going to extend the Release Candidate cycle for 
Second Life 1.20 Viewer.

We will be re-branching off of the release code branch (i.e., trunk) and 
in addition to the stability work, we'll pick up some feature work and 
other fixes that were not originally planned for this release cycle. 
Although this does create the potential for a short term stability hit, 
we feel that it's worth taking the time and effort to incorporate 
additional code to help us find and fix crash issues. The additions include:

(From QAR-491)
* Thread monitoring to catch freezes

(From QAR-460)
* Improved internationalization support for Linux

(From QAR-468)
* New feature: VWR-4794: Basic voice lipsync for voice visualization

(From QAR-500)
* Fixed: VWR-4057: Multi-line chat display bug - first character in line 
missing
* Fixed: VWR-3857: Script (LSL) editor shows non Latin 1 characters as 
square boxes
* Fixed: VWR-2275: Linux 1.18.3 Won't Link
* Fixed: VWR-3813: gtk_check_version() API changed to return const gchar 
* - causes gcc ERROR

(From QAR-487)
* Updated library version for openssl

(From QAR-517)
* Fixed: VWR-1735: Directly interacting with a muted resident should 
unmute them
* Fixed: VWR-2142: Parcel voice icon doesn't reflect disabled status if 
voice isn't used
* Fixed: VWR-2272: Fly button doesn't work while sitting
* Fixed: VWR-5853: Double-Clicking on vertical edge of Inventory/Gesture 
window destroys the floating window.
* Fixed: VWR-4204: Clicking on names in Chat/Group IM history should 
open Profile page or IM
* Fixed: VWR-2448: Snapshot Preview tool should respect 'Quiet Snapshots 
to Disk'
* Fixed: Pop-up menu width should try to accomodate the longest menu 
item (within reason)
* Fixed: Can't change values with debug settings floater
* Partial Fix: Pasting multiline clipboard content into chat loses newlines
* Fixed: New users are naked until they choose a gender.
* Fixed: Focus > Zoom button can't be re-selected
* Fixed: Move "Set Window Size" options into preferences
* Fixed: Make clothing-still-downloading dialog into an ignorable alert.
* Fixed: Internationalize additional hard-coded viewer strings to a 
strings.xml file

(From QAR-565)
* Fixed: Search > Popular Places is replaced by a Search > Showcase tab 
that points to the website Showcase

(From QAR-566)
* Fixed: VWR-6186: Second Life is leaking Objective-C objects at startup
* Fixed: VWR-3598: Non-group owned objects appear to belong to the group 
of the last selected object, no matter the owner/group.
* Fixed: SVC-1241: Dead code in lscript_execute.cpp
* Fixed: VWR-463: Blank is a pre-defined texture in client, but not in LSL
* Fixed: Debug Permissions displays overlap
* Fixed: Objects with no group tagging show group tags of previously 
clicked items
* Fixed: stop bundling libexpat with the linux viewer

(From QAR-570)
* openGL monitoring via Advanced->Rendering->Debug GL option to turn on 
extra rendering error checking and help reproduce crashes

Expect 1.20 RC7 next week and at least 2 more iterations before we call 
it a final release (some time in early June).


Server:
A patch to Server 1.21.1 is going out this week to address a handful of 
issues including a fix for SVC-1428 (Malformed llInstantMessage() gets 
sent to email) as well as a few other crucial security fixes.

Server 1.22 is now slated to go out next week, but will be spending time 
in QA and on the Beta Grid (yes, Beta Grid!), Aditi, this week. Coming 
in 1.22:
* Finalize distribution of 'last location' and 'home location' from the 
central database to the partitioned agent databases to lighten the write 
load to the database"
* Additional metrics to log:
** Suspected failure points in inventory transfers initiated by LSL2 scripts
** IMs, lures and inventory transfers between regions indicating any 
failure to find the destination agent.
** Rezzing and storing avatar attachments.
** Suspected failure point in manual inventory transfers between agents 
in two different regions.
** Separate temporary failures to load assets from real inventory loss.
* Max queued size on event queue is now configurable to prevent TCP 
messages from getting dropped
** Should help reduce failed teleports


Beta Grid:
Look for a blog post from Prospero soon with more details, but we are 
returning Aditi to its Beta Grid glory! Our plan, in short, is to let 
server code 'bake' on the Beta Grid for several days before rolling to 
the main grid. Different channels on Aditi are being created to allow 
public testing of other versions of the server as well.


Thanks everyone.

--Bridie


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