Trouble With ABC Breedables

Breedable virtual pets have been a part of Second Life for most of it's history. And over time there have been a number of companies who have made them. But sometimes they run into trouble. One of the first to make it big was Ozimals. But in 2017, the company folded due to an internal dispute. Thankfully it's last act was to save the pet bunnies it's customers had. But those of another company may not be so fortunate. 

For some years, Awesome Breed Creations has been in the business of selling breedable horses and the feed for them, as well as medicine and accessories. People would breed them for desired traits, as well as auction them and hold races. But a few days ago came some trouble that may spell the end of the business. The person in charge of the scripts that brought the horses to life, Sentire Bravin, had resigned. 

I am writing to formally announce my resignation from my role as a software and content developer, effective immediately. This decision was not made lightly, and I deeply regret having to take this step.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for the staff and developers I’ve had the privilege of working alongside. Their dedication, talent, and passion for creating one of the finest breedable experiences in Second Life have been both inspiring and enriching. It has been an honor to collaborate with such a talented and exceptional team.

But, he stated he hadn't been paid in over a year. As a result, he was quitting, and had turned the scripts off.

As a result of the prolonged lack of payment, I have removed all of my code and data from ABC servers. Additionally, I have formally notified the owner of ABC to cease and desist from any unauthorized use of my code. I understand this will impact the functionality of ABC products, but this is a matter that Stephanie (the owner of ABC) must address. ...

Unfortunately, the results of the code and data removal was that the horses became frozen, the stats display above them showing red. They were now little more than props, static, not able to walk around, breed, be ridden, or anything else. Kitacelia, an ABC breeder for a number of years told me the "Pasture" where horses can be stored was inoperable and nothing could be taken back from there. The ABC website was also down. 

"I lost 1000's of dollars worth of pets," Kitacelia told me, "... not be able to turn on accessories/horns/wings on them or movement/sound ... I can't even get my remaining pets out of pasture ...  can't turn movement on or off or add accessories to the ones in inventory or inworld." Checking Penny Shuftan's horses in the Sunweaver community where the Newser office is, they were glitched as well.

Besides Sentire, there was also an announcement of two others on the team resigning, Saphear Saunders and Krystal Silverweb

After an incredible 10+ years as the artists behind Awesome Breed Creations, it’s with a heavy heart that we share the news of our departure from the development team. This decision has not been made lightly, but unfortunately, we’ve reached a point where it’s no longer financially sustainable for us to continue under the current circumstances.

Since August of this year, our development team has not been paid, and despite numerous attempts to contact Stephanie Merrienboer (the owner and CEO of ABC), we’ve been met with silence. We’ve received no explanation or reasoning as to why this has happened. We are aware that Stephanie has internet access and has been in touch with others, so there’s no reason why she couldn’t have spoken to us or even laid us off respectfully if the company was experiencing financial hardships (which, to our knowledge, it wasn’t). We’ve poured countless hours, effort, and love into ABC over the years, and we feel deeply disrespected to be treated in this manner. It isn’t right.

As a result, we’ve had to find other work and make the difficult decision to halt the development of any new horses or content for ABC.

Nikki Detritus, the Racing Commissioner, would also comment. 

I need you all to know that the RA and myself are all saddened by what has happened. I am still trying to hold out with some hope but that is hard to hold on to when you have no clue what has happened. None of us.. Not the RA, the VSRs, the auctioneers, the managers knew about this. The only ones who knew are obviously the ones not getting paid. BUT even THEY held on for so long because the loved ABC.  I know people are angry and emotions are high and rightly so.. But please lets stick together as family and treat each other nice as it is none of our faults and we are all sick over this. Jockeys and Owners.. I need you to know ONE thing..  I NEVER wanted to be the Commissioner.. I have worked as an RA member for close to 10 years now and I never wanted that position BUT I am so glad that I did take it. I learned a lot and I got to know all of you.  It was some of the BEST times of my SL life!  I care about each and everyone of you and will always cherish the memories of the great times!

While at the ABC store, I ran into a couple people, one who was quite upset, "I spent 30000 Linden ...  I had 150 horses cost me in food almost $ 150 a month. ... There are breeders who have 500 horses ... we have all been scammed!" He mentioned the Auction House had been closed for a month.

As of the writing of this article, there has been no comment from ABC's owner. What we do know is the horses are broken, and there are many upset and sad owners. 

Bixyl Shuftan

Eye On The Blog: Updating Script Performance

 
On the official blog yesterday, Linden Lab announced they had "released a change this week" with the aim of improving script performance in the Grid: Uplift.

Uplift has been an ongoing adventure for a number of engineering teams, but the goal of improving the SL experience for all residents has not changed.

Uplift brought in new hardware and the ability to reconfigure it quickly to react to changing circumstances. A few months ago, we quietly changed hardware configurations to provide better performance for the simulators, but our job was not done there.

After this upgrade our engineering teams dug deep into the simulator to modernize it and take better advantage of AWS capabilities. We referred to this as our “Tooling Update,”  which allows LSL scripts to run more efficiently. Regions with heavy script usage will likely see more scripts run and even some spare time returning to the simulator.  The release also includes a modernization of our compiler and supporting runtime.  Newer tools allows for better code generation and awareness of modern CPU designs.

But the Lab admits there have been unforseen problems that residents may experience.They stated, "with more scripts running, other areas of the simulation environment may be driven harder.  Scripts that were already approaching throttles or other limits may find a throttle engaged .... We do see the possibility of revisiting these throttling limits as a result of these improvements. They could see higher request rates as scripts perform more work."

For the blog post in full, Click Here.
 

Glitches in the Grid

If you're wondering if Second Life seems more buggy than usual, you're not alone. Over the weekend and on Monday, I've heard from a number of people about various things on the Grid going wrong. Yours truly has experienced occasional lag, and sudden viewer crashes, and I've heard a complaint or two about sim crossings. But friends have told me some of their items just haven't been working right. A contest board at a club I frequent had trouble working for the manager. One friends permapetted horse got sick from hunger, and it was supposed to be free of the need to eat the company's food. Another friend was sailing, and even away from the sim borders the boat could barely steer.

So what was going on? On Thursday September 26, Linden Lab would announce in the Grid Status Report that an attempt to allow scripts to run better ended up breaking the ability of some to work with others.

Investigating - We believe we have identified the source of the scripting problems that rolled to the main channel this week (and so are present on the entire grid now). That simulator build had improvements to script scheduling that reduced overhead, allowing more scripts to be run per frame. Unfortunately, it appears that those changes also exacerbated a previously undetected problem with scripts communicating with other scripts.

The most obvious example of the problem concerns the timing of the object_rez event delivered to a script that has requested the creation of a new object. When a script creates a new object, the script that requests the creation gets an object_rez event to indicate that the new object is ready. Normally, the scripts in the new object should be running before the parent script gets the object_rez event. Similarly, scripts get an on_rez event when the object they are in is rezzed; the order in which those on_rez events occur is not defined, but previously all scripts in the object would get those events roughly at the same time. What we've discovered is that in rare circumstances, the on_rez and object_rez events could be delivered before the all scripts in the new object had been started. When that happened, any communication between the scripts would not work as expected.

This out-of-order event delivery was previously so rare that it had never come to our attention, but the script scheduling changes had the side effect of making it more likely that some scripts would get the rez events more quickly, increasing the chance that the events are delivered before the other scripts they expect to communicate with are ready.

We are working now on a fix; we hope to have the fix deployed on a set of test regions on the beta (Aditi) grid for the weekend so that creators can test with it (watch this space). The rolls for next week will revert the main channel to a version prior to the scheduling changes, and the RC channels will get a version with the improved scheduler but modified so that the rez events are never delivered to any script until after all scripts in the rezzed object have been started.

We know that this bug has affected many of you and your enjoyment of Second Life, and are profoundly sorry that it was not found before it was so widely deployed.

 The following day, the Lab announced on the Grid Status Report that there would be rolling restarts on the Grid.

Update - We will be doing a roll to address this issue on Friday, September 27th, at approximately 10:00 PM PDT. We apologize for the disruptive weekend roll and will try to minimize impact. Thank you so much for your patience during this frustrating time.

Early Saturday morning, September 28, Linden Lab would do rolling restarts. In the forums, Mazidox Linden would say:

"Yep, we are rolling the grid right now to revert the most recent update to LSL script improvements. This should prevent further issues with objects communicating. (But if you continue seeing issues with scripts, whether it's communication or something else we want to know about them!)"

On Monday, yesterday, the Lab declared the problem over.

Resolved - The scripting errors which resulted in many scripts, huds, and other items to not function properly should now be resolved.

However, friends of mine are still complaining about problems that are mostly likely due to script errors, "There is something wrong with (Linden Script Language) and (Linden Lab) broke it," one told me. She also told me as far as she knows, the Lab is still working on further fixes. So it looks like there are still glitches on the Grid.

Bixyl Shuftan

Press Release: Skin Burn 2016 Today

All too soon, the annual OctoBurn event themed “Da Vinci’s Workshop” has come to a close, but the builds stay up until Friday night. The playa will then be cleared for the decompression event we call SKIN BURN.

The SKIN BURN is an encore Burning of the Man which will take place twice on Saturday, the 29th of October, at 12 Noon and 6:00 PM SLT (12.00 and 18.00 SLT). Check-in closes 10 minutes before the Burns begin. Spectators are asked to detach scripts, scripted items, HUDs and attachments (which include items like hair, shoulder pet, mesh clothing and other items) from their avatars. We also assist in reducing Avatar Complexity to the lowest possible level.

Please Read the Following Information...
Why do we do this? By reducing the scripts and attached items we wear on our avatars and viewer screens, and reducing our avatar complexity, we help to make lag on the sims as low as possible, and the Burn will run better for everyone who comes to watch it.

It is important to know that, while we may encourage everyone to try to wear a classic avatar with just skin and system clothing, if an avatar is normally Tiny, petite, or a wearer of a mesh body, we do not require that he/she remove that form; we will assist the avatar to achieve the lowest possible avatar complexity and “script weight” for their avatar type by asking to remove all parts that are not essential for their avatar.

EXAMPLES
A petite avatar uses certain scripts to maintain the petite form, but the hair can be removed.
A Tiny fox with a scripted tail - perhaps the tail (if modifiable) can be replaced with one that is not scripted.
A wearer of a female mesh body may be asked to remove mesh clothing, but appliers can be worn.

The playa will be closed during the Burns; spectators will need to go through a check-in area off playa to de-script and de-lag, then get a special group tag to access the playa for the event.


BURN2 is the virtual extension of the Burning Man festival and community into the world of Second Life. It spreads Burning Culture and the Burning Man Ten Principles all year round.  We are one Burning Man regional, out of more than 100 worldwide Regional groups.

We encourage you to use the following labels and hashtags when you write about the event: Burn2, #burn2 . We will promote those tags to make it easier for people to find your content.

Want more information? Connect with us through our networks::
Website: http://burn2.org
Twitter: https://twitter.com/BURN2BURNER
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/BURN2BURNERS
Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Burn2.SL/
Regional Page: http://regionals.burningman.com/regionals/cyberspace/second-life/

BURN2 Contacts:
BURN2 Communications: iSkye Silverweb communications@burn2.org
BURNING MAN Regional Contact: sl@burningman.org

Rua Whitepaw's Keyboard

Sometimes builders make things with the intention of getting a lot of attention. Other times, they don't seek attention, but it finds them anyway. The editor was recently informed about a shy neighbor of his, Rua Whitepaw, whom had been quietly building a piano keyboard that impressed her friends to the point one thought it deserved news attention. So what's so special about the keyboard?

Read about the musical instrument in Design.

Scripts and Lag

Erix Oh has proven himself as a security system designer. But when meeting up with Second Life Newser recently, something else was on his mind. It appeared to him that many residents in the Grid didn't have a clue about how scripts affected lag, and wanted to say a few words on the subject.

Read the story in our new section: Design