Reader Submitted: An Open Letter From An ABC Horse Owner

 

To Sentire Bravin,

 

I am sorry that Awesomebreed didn't pay you for your code in the last year.   You were paid prior that though so removing all your code even from pets and shutting down the pasture screws over customers who have been here for years more than it screws awesomebreed person who clearly doesn't care.  I wish that person had never apparently bought ABC from I can't recall his name when they broke up.   

 

Many of us have spent 1000's over the years and many hours breeding horses.   Screwing over 100's of customers because the owner is a jerk, is not fair.  Please out of decency leave us functioning pets and allow us to remove pets from pasture, please.
 

Kitacelia

Grand Theft Auto Online Player Gets $10,000 For Fixing Long Loading Time

 

Grand Theft Auto Online, like the previous games in the series, has proven a popular game since it's release in 2013. But there was a problem. The game has a long loading time. One 2020 Reddit poll of 271 players had almost half taking three to six minutes and some were needing over fifteen. Finally, one player calling himself T0ast decided to look into the problem. He found the cause was badly optimized code and bottlenecking from the came loading from just one CPU. After some fixes, he found he loading time was reduced by almost 70 percent. He uploaded the fixed code, though pointed out it was more of a "proof of concept" than a solution, and called on the game's producers at Rockstar to fix the code, "the problems shouldn’t take more than a day for a single dev to solve."

Word soon spread about T0ast's fix, and eventually Rockstar took a look, and concluded, "After a thorough investigation, we can confirm that player t0st did, in fact, reveal an aspect of the game code related to load times for the PC version of GTA Online that could be improved. As a result of these investigations, we have made some changes that will be implemented in a forthcoming title update."

T0ast would state he was awarded $10,000 USD from Rockstar, sayng amounts of this size were usually given out for helping with security and privacy issues, but were making an exception with him, "Thanks to R* for taking the time to look into this and the generous bounty!"

Source: PC Gamer 

Hat Tip: Spooked Dreamscape, Khyra Ares

Bixyl Shuftan

Linden Lab Announces Improvements on Sim Crossings

One of the pet peeves a number of residents have is sim crossings, or "region crossings" as Linden Lab calls them. Sometimes there's a short pause. Occasionally there's a longer pause. And sometimes there's the "walk of lag" that results in you going walking on and on until you either "rubberband" back to the sim crossing, or the viewer crashes and you get knocked offline.

Last year, crashing after teleporting and sim crossing was getting to be worse of a problem. Though after a while, things began to improve. So how are things now? Yesterday on the "Tools and Technology" Linden blog, April Linden, announced that the programing on how sim crossings/teleports was changed and the results were that they were easier and less glitchy than ever.

The process of crossing from one region to another when you’re riding in a vehicle is pretty involved. The region you’re leaving needs to be able to tell the region where you’re arriving  everything it knows about the vehicle, and has to do it really quickly. That includes all of the scripts in the vehicle, everything that’s attached to it, the direction and how fast it’s going, and lots of other stuff. 

To make this happen quickly, early on in Second Life’s history we made some assumptions about our network, including things like how big a packet can be. Those assumptions generally worked okay on our own network, but not outside it. 

When you crossed from one region to another, the regions were putting a lot of information into large packets and sending them across our network. This was usually okay because our network was purposefully built to run Second Life. Then, as soon we tried to do this on someone else’s network (in the cloud), things didn’t work quite right. The problem was most noticeable when crossing from a region in our data center to one in the cloud. 

The first thing our engineering teams tried was breaking those large packets up into smaller ones, but that actually made the problem worse. Rather than send one big packet and wait for the other side to say it received the data, with smaller packets, it had to repeat that bunch of times for each packet. (Send, get an acknowledgement, send another piece, get an acknowledgement, etc.) It was still mostly okay across our network, but way worse when a region in our network was talking to one in the cloud. We now knew this code would never work well, so we needed a different approach. 

Next, our engineering team decided to use another way to send the data across the network, using the same protocol and method we use for other types of data. Most importantly, it is faster and more reliable. That did the trick! We’re still collecting statistics on the impact this change has, but things are looking very positive. 

Once this new code was written, the performance when going  from region to region got a lot better, and it worked between our data center and the cloud! The improvement was so dramatic that we decided to not make our Residents wait for uplifted simulators, and rolled the changes out right away. That code is what rolled out to the grid this week.

"It’s really exciting that the cloud migration is helping us find really old bugs and make Second Life better as we go," the "gridbun" would conclude.



Luca decided to test things out for herself. This video she did shows her testing several vehicles. Although some took longer than others, she concluded all showed some improvement, a few making the crossing in less than a second.

Have you found sim crossing and teleports easier? What about vehicle crossings? Please leave comments below.

Source: Linden blog, Luca 
Hat tip: Cynthia Farshore, Liffento 

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye on the Blog: "Sneak Peek at Pathfinding"

In the Official Second Life Blog earlier this week, Linden Labs offered a "sneak peek" of their experiments with "Pathfinding."


Pathfinding is a new set of LSL calls and Viewer tools that allow for smoother and smarter movement for non-player characters and objects in Second Life. These new tools will allow Residents to create objects that move around corners, climb inclines and cross region boundaries. Newly created functions such as “pursue,” “patrol,” “wander,” “evade,” and go to a specified point — all of which are particularly useful for pet, NPC and enemy behavior — will allow for non player movements and behaviors never before possible in Second Life.

Pathfinding is efficient because it allows creators to place a much larger number of moving objects in a particular area without affecting server performance. Because the algorithmic complexity is on the server side, Residents can easily script with short and intuitive LSL functions that make creating a pet that follows you around as simple as rezzing a box.

As part of the pathfinding project, Linden Lab will also introduce new Viewer-side tools that will allow Residents to more efficiently create, visualize, test and debug Pathfinding-enabled characters. These tools are not required to create pathfinding behaviors but are particularly useful to builders and experience creators in second life.

Additional pathfinding tools, and the ability to generate your own pathing data, will be put in Beta in the coming weeks. Linden Lab will begin releasing these tools to all Residents in the next several months. You can try out the new LSL functionality in select regions for which we have prepared pathfinding data.

Sneak Preview: Pathfinding in Second Life .

A video done by Lorca and Stinson Linden showed some details of Pathfinding. In the film, Lorca razzed a cube, inserted a bit of pathfinding code, and the prim proceeded to follow him around. That is until he put an obstacle between it and himself on a path up in the air. The Pathfinding-enabled cube promptly changed course and took an alternate route to get to him. Stinson Linden talked some about how Pathfinding works. Which routes a Pathfinding-enabled object travels depends on the "navigation mesh." How wide or the size of steps in a stairway alters the mesh, and determines whether or not Pathfinding takes that route to get to someone or an object, or not. Controls can put "holes" in the navigation mesh, making areas inaccessible to Pathfinder objects, or mark some objects as "dynamic obstacles."

Among the comments after the video was one referencing the changing path after the obstacle was placed in the Pathfinding object's way, "this is a gaming technique not even the most popular MMORPGs seem to know how to get right, and you guys managed to pull it off flawlessly. In games like WoW if you shoot a mob from a rooftop, it walks up the wall after you, rather then trying to find a logical path."

To check the Linden Blog entry, Click Here.

For more on Pathfinding in the Second Life Wiki, Click Here.

Bixyl Shuftan

Cartoon of the Day

By Bixyl Shuftan