Wanted: Questions for Thursday's Town Hall with Cory Linden

In an attempt to better organize the Linden Town Hall format, we're now taking a group of questions before hand here in the forums, for those who may not be able to attend the in-world events.

This Thursday at 3pm PST Cory Linden will hold a Town Hall, this Town Hall will be a bit different, in that Cory will be focusing on outstanding technical 'puzzles' the SL Developers have on their desks and also invite SL users to provide suggestions (per this thread) on the best technical puzzles/challenges in Second Life. So dig deep into the technical boundaries of SL and bring out the best technical puzzles/challenges you can!


Guidelines for Posting Questions/Puzzles

1. Only one question/puzzle per Resident
2. Technical-related questions/puzzles only
3. No Tech support-type questions (ie: "My computer is broken"
4. If you're interested in asking a question that is already posted - 'second' it instead of posting it again

I'll be heavily moderating this thread, so please stay on topic and post only the questions and puzzles you are interesting in knowing more about!

Thanks!

(more info on the Town Hall here)

Since slightly before the 1.6 update (i believe mid 1.5.13), a new server OS was launched, and seems to be significantly less capable of dealing with larger numbers of agents within a given sim (note thread here: /111/c3/41406/1.html). Has any actual side by side testing been done between the old and new server operating system, with identical content/user load to determine if there is an actual performance problem, specifically with the physics/time dilation skipping passes it should not be (it has the time to execute the full number of passes, yet for some reason does not, and causes time dilation)

(moved from the other topic I started.)

My questions (in order of personal priority):

- What is the status of the Linux client, does LL have need of beta testers yet, and who is doing the port? (additional question: is the person doing the port [if they have been contracted already] availible to have a linux client townhall?)

- What is the status of outbound XMLRPC? Will it be more usefull than the inbound (and take advantage of XML's key feature, and use lists instead of a fixed datatype schema), are there any plans for a inbound communication method which is direct-to-the-sim without being routed through the dataserver (such as emailing [email]uuid@simXYZ.agni.lindenlab.com[/email])?

- There is a rumour floating around that 1.7 will include the ability to script the interface, is this accurate, and how deep will this customisation go? (will it be comparable to the scripting availible in say World of Warcraft)

- What is the ETA on 2.0 and the new renderer? What features can we expect to see in upcoming releases?

-Adam

Well, my technical puzzle is the interest list and what sort of challenges do you having paring down the interest list.

For example, if I teleport somewhere.. why is it so difficult for SL client to slowly increase the cut as downloads increase/decrease. Why must I rez far away stuff before I rez nearby stuff?

Adam, come on man you have to ask about a technical puzzle!

With the growth of the world in the last year to its massive and still growing size. What is being done about the sim border issue? I am referring to the the problems it causes when an avatar crosses, esp in vehicles. It can cause SL to crash, or just cause execess lag.
I suspect the issue is caused mainly by prims crossing the border.

What would it take to ease the crossing of prims between sims since more and more avatars are becoming prim intensive?

What if any problems (besides time) is LL facing in making the world more realisticly traversable.

Is this even a problem for most users, or am I in the minority?

this would allow players to wear what they wanted, and would actually make cars worth buying, and put those baron roads to use, we might see a couple skid marks

It would also encourage exploration, and give a more realistic feel to an already exceptional "game".

Will LL's focus on bugs continue for the length of the 6.x cycle and fix long-standing issues like texture distortions (my fav to hate) and alpha sorting (far on top of near), or will those repairs be part of the new renderer? (Or will they be forever forgotten and unfixed?)

What are the issues involving alternate skeletons, additional limbs (tails, arms, ets.), new clothing types & meshes, built in client animation overrides.

Future:
Permission overhall was promised last november to happen around the 1.6 timeframe, what is the new ETA for the permissions overhall?

Will Havok2 break existing vehicals?

What chalanges need to be overcome for 1.7?

I've read that the original vision for Second Life included the possibility of a truely decentralized system, something like P2P for grids. Given recent issues with a database bottleneck blocking access to the entire grid, a decentralized system with no single bottlenecks sounds quite intruiging. It seems that if you want the grid to be able to scale up indefinitely, you need to do go in this direction. Can you discuss the current bottlenecks and the opportunities/challenges for decentralizing them?

hi i was wondering if therre any plans for voice in second life? ive tried numerous things witth my sl fiancee. and shee keeps lagging badly because of voice programs outside second life..

As an OOP fanatic, I've often longed for the ability to have objects inherit properties and behavior from prototype objects. If I were making a large build with many similar prims, it would be great to be able to modify something about all of them by just changing that thing on the prototype, such as the texture on the top face, or the amount of hollowness, or even the script. I'm thinking along the lines of Dave Ungar's SELF system. How crazy am I for asking about this? I can see so many potential benefits. Is it even remotely possible?

Edit: Whoops, one question. Well, pick your favorite from this list.

How soon will we see:

- Monocode
- Adoption of other scripting languages, as mentioned as a "want" in prior Town Halls

- Can you explain the recent changes, and changes on the table for the permissions system? The llGetKey "fix" caught some creators by surprise, since it seemed reactive - not proactive.

- Can we expect the "warping texture" issue to be addressed in the future? This is a "seconded" to an above posting.

- In that vein, can we expect any new primitive types in the forseeable future?

- What changes, besides a really nice draw distance, are planned for the new rendering engine? Can we expect any new visual forms, like better shadows or more texture layers?

- What improvements can we expect on the Content Streaming System/Asset Servers? Can we expect any changes to assuage what happened with the login problems? Any restrictions?

- I notice that this year's Game Dev contest will not be based on dwell. Does this imply any second thoughts on this metric of achievment? Are there any proposed alternatives?

- Can we please please PLEASE have meta object rendering for SL 2.0? Please?

- Can we expect any new additions to the LSL Vehicle Engine under Havok 2? This is an addendum to Strife's question.

- What's the current timeframe before we can expect "versioning" by sim, as Philip described?


Because I was sent a similar message, I'll bite.

- Is there any proposed fix for the "privacy/public transportation" conundrum in sight? Could improvements to the streaming system solve this and sim-crossing problems? The latter is an addendum to blaze's question.

----

I won't be able to attend the Town Hall in person, since I have a night class that starts at precisely the same time. With some luck, I'll be able to watch the transcript or bash my way into IRC.

Current status of parcel-based script memory allocation/performance throttling?

- why is it so hard to just move an object at constant linear speed? ie: why does all movement have to be physical???
- why cant we have hierarchically-linked rotations?
- why cant we have import/#include in scripts?
- why cant we have synchronous script RPC?
- why cant we have shell server access at Linden?
- why cant we have ftp access to our scripts?
- why cant we have cvs access to our scripts?
- why cant we have tar access to our scripts?
- why does it take 30 seconds for me to save a script in SecondLife, but only 1-2 seconds to ftp the same script to my webserver?
- why cant we have an option on private sims to raise NoOutsideScripts to infinity?
- why cant we have decent sensors? ie, why cant scripts see what an avatar would see if they were that script? For example, why cant we filter sensor output? Why cant we sense around an offset centre?
- why cant we add bvh animations to objects?

Azelda

Bump Strife's question:



what's your toughest challenge on your desk at the moment / in general?

I was reading about an idea of teleporting a cam based object as a viewer to events that where unable to handle the AV load, " Ghosting Eyes " Second View " ect


The ability to view whats going on at an event without being there ?

*

Are there any plans to develop a small IM proram outside of SL for your friends list ? (Can be used on a computer that cannot access Sl, either on a second computer or on a mobile phone.)

If LL is going to continue touting commerce as a main attraction of SL, I believe some incremental improvements are necessary to allow residents to build the next generation of tools.

Will we ever have verifiable LSL-initiated transactions? IE, return codes or events that a script receives notifying it if an item or money was successfully delivered.

Will objects ever be able to pay objects with those transactions available to LSL? I get giddy just thinking about the possibilities this would open up.

Will an LSL script ever have the ability to retrieve its owner's account balance?

Failing the last question, will it ever be possible for an object to hold an account balance of its own?

When i try to type in my profile notes section, in particular, say am attempting to type my name...it should look like "Mikal" instead it comes out like "lakiM". i have tried in game live help and was told to uninstall and reinstall. i did and the issue is still there. Why?

Mikal

I just need to know if there is something I missed in the features of SL. I put together an Item from several prims, and added a script before it was complete. Then I added more prims and forgot I already inserted the script I wanted and, added it again. Next, I added more prims for a couple of details. When I looked in the completed item's contents it appeared empty.

Now, when I pick up the object, it asked me twice if I want the object to animate my character. I want to locate and remove one of the scripts, but I can't seem to locate where the script is located in order to remove or at least disable it. Is there a feature in SL to do this? Or will there be a way in an upcoming version?

-InuYasha Meiji

A technical puzzle, hmm - how will the current architecture evolve to allow more than 40 avatars in the same sim?

I do understand that the "avatar-per-sim-ratio" is a complex number to calculate:
- sim computers get faster and faster - but they seem to get more and more things to do:
- the number of polygons on the avatar mesh will increase (as time passes, I'll expect the avatars to get more complex, ie. use Poser 3 models instead of Poser 2, slowly going all the way to Poser 5 models and beyond... ); so, any dramatic improvement of avatars quality will reduce the number of avatars being rendered
- with Havok2, the 2.0 renderer, and the Mono infrastructure for scripting, current state-of-the-art grid servers will be basically sleeping without doing anything, so you'll be prepared to raise the prim limit (or the memory constraints on scripts). However, we have been shown landscapes with zillions of prims on the 2.0 renderer. And people, if they're able to run 100 times as many scripts - they will exploit them to the uttermost limit. So in the very short term, we'll see an improvement - zillion prims instead of texture tricks, and low script lag. But in the medium-term, we'll get more and more complex scripting/prim interaction. At the end of the day, since the graphic cards on our humble client computers won't handle that complexity well, there will be limits. Avatars, of course, will still be restricted...

What it sounds like is that, even with the upcoming improvements, you'll have a "nicer-looking" SL (which is great!) but you'll still have to limit the avatar number to, say, 40-50 (and I'd love to see 40 or 50 avatars in the same sim with 10+ fps ). The only suggestion I have is that you do "tricks" to make avatars "fuzzier" when viewed from a distance (over 10 m, you cannot see details in SL anymore, like eyes or even smiles, so it's worthless to try to draw them, IMHO).

How are you proposing to raise this limit? Or are you just going to rely upon people to buy faster computers and faster graphical cards?

Thinking about Philip's dream of having 1 million residents around the end of 2007, are you expecting all of them on LL's grid(s)? [yes, I noticed that on your previous Town Hall meeting you mentioned your suggestion of co-locating on different geograpically-separate facilities]

If yes, see the already-proposed questions on how you're planning to increase redundancy and load distribution.

If no (meaning: LL will allow third-parties to interconnect their own grids to LL's main one), what are you proposing to do in this case? (ie. how will third-party authentication servers exchange authentication data with your "main servers", how will third-party asset servers talk to your own asset server cluster, and so on)

(I'll leave the "political" puzzles on that issue for Philip to answer - how will licensing agreements be done between LL and third-parties, how will IP be kept across different grids, how will ToS support third-party grids, how will tech support be coordinated, etc. etc. etc...)

Hmm, I really was setting out to follow the guidelines, but can't phrase this as a two part question no matter how I try to connect the two concepts. And my 1st question has probably been addressed before, I just haven't read an answer to it. So pick, I'm happy if either is addressed.



1. Havok 2. When it's implemented, will the prim parcel allowance/limits go up, and can you tell us roughly by how much? Also, more importantly to me and pertaining to ideas I guarantee are on more desks than just mine, will the limit of 31 prims for physical objects(especially vehicles) raise, and can you tell us roughly to what number.

2. Trees. I remember reading in a post by a Linden that you want to be able to give the residents good foliage creation, and I think you already have it. I can open up my trees.xml file and change it, and put in my own textures and make my own trees already, but of course this is local and nobody can see them. I know that you have plans to use a new system for modeling trees, but my question is, in the meanwhile.... "How much work would it take to turn on the existing edit>texture menu functionality for the games built-in trees?" Simply allow users to specify a custom texture for any tree type, don't have to "unlock" anything but that. Just turn that texture-selector on. I'd be glad to make templates.

Multipule tping .... every time i tp some wheres i always seem to get some one tping on my head or visa versa .. when i see there are 5-6 other tp staions empty at each port why is this and can there be any thing done about this ... ? dont even have time to rez my self til i have to move off off staion to rez the rest of the way ... hummm .. can this be brought up as a questions ...been here over a year ... and i i get the same tping problem time and time again ... ..

Thank you for the great questions and puzzles! If you posted more than one, I'll choose one and include later questions if time permits. See you at the Town Hall everyone - if you can't make it, check back for the transcript later today.

edited to add: Transcript posted