Second Life 1.9.0 release Wednesday March 15, 2006

In our continuing effort to improve the Second Life experience, we are planning an update to Second Life 1.9.0 on Wednesday, March 15, 2006. The grid will be down from 6am to 12pm PT/SLT for the update. A new viewer will be required to use 1.9.0.

All adult residents born before February 1, 2006 can get a sneak-peak of the new version here:

http://secondlife.com/community/preview.php

Full release notes will be available early next week for your viewing pleasure. Below is a list of new features in the upcoming version:

* FollowCam functionality allows scripts to control the camera
** Scripts on attachments and vehicles can now control camera behavior through a call to llSetCameraParams(), once they have acquired the PERMISSION_CONTROL_CAMERA permission
** The script will control the user's camera as long as the resident doesn't override it (use Alt-zoom or enter mouselook, for example) and the object remains attached or the avatar continues to sit on it:
*** When multiple scripts attempt to control the camera, the last script to set the CAMERA_ACTIVE flag will have control
*** Older scripts will regain control as soon as the newer one is deactivated
** The new FollowCam scripts enable a huge variety of vehicle-following behaviors:
*** For instance, a loose camera setting allows sudden changes in vehicle acceleration to happen without causing dizzying jolts in the camera
*** By turning off the "behindness" feature, the camera will be simply dragged along, but it will not try to stay exactly behind the vehicle
*** Other parameters, like pitch (the angle at which it "looks down" at the vehicle), distance, and others, allow you to customize the cinematics of vehicular fun

* Improved tools for estate owners (and estate managers)
** Estate tools are a set of tools for people who own private islands.
** On the mainland they can be used by anyone to see the "rules" for a region
*** Choose World -> Region/Estate... to see settings such as whether terraform is allowed, or what the raise/lower land limits are
** They allow private island owners to set more options on a per-region basis
** New per-region tools include blocking flying, forcing damage on, setting "object bonus" to allow more prims per parcel (although still capped at 15,000 per region), setting PG/mature, teleporting home all users in a region, setting fixed sun position
** Region performance debugging tools include disabling all scripts, disabling physics, and getting lists of objects that are potentially slowing down physics ("top colliders" or scripting ("top scripts"
** Estate owners can download a region's "RAW" terrain file, modify it, and upload it to make changes in the land
** Estate owners can "bake" the current terrain, setting it as the default for the "revert" tool and the middle for terraform raise/lower limits
** Users and groups can be added to allowed/group/ban lists for one estate, or all estates you own
** Estate managers
*** You can delegate responsibility for all the above tools (except RAW files and bake terrain) to other residents

* Improved communication between regions
** A new method simulators running each region to interact with one another has been implemented.
** This new method allows for communication between regions, rather than requiring data go through a central server
** The internal path for almost all data that must go from one sim to another far away sim (where 'far away' is defined as not touching) has been changed for the following functions:
*** Teleports (via map, home, login, offer teleport)
*** IM (resident to resident, object to resident)
*** Inventory Transfers (resident to resident, object to resident)
*** Friends online/offline notifications
*** Finder information (people finder has been touched barely)
*** The exception to this new scheme is group chat

* You can now attach objects (via rez-from-inventory and attach-from-world) to attachment points that already have an attached object
** You will see a confirmation dialog with a "don't ask me again" checkbox to confirm replacing the existing item
** If you check "don't ask me again", you can get the dialog box back by going to Preferences/Popups, selecting the "Automatically replace existing attachments" popup, and clicking on "Enable this Popup"
** The inventory item for the attached object displays the name of the attachment point...for example, (worn on skull)
** This allows you to search your inventory both for attached objects ("worn" and objects attached to a specific point ("hand"
** Attach and detach menus show the name of the object attached to each point (once the corresponding inventory item has been downloaded)

* All "Abandoned" land now reverts to Governor Linden ownership
** In the past, land smaller than 512 sq. m. would revert to Public Land upon abandonment

* Planar texture mapping
** Provides an alternate texture mapping for primitives

Changes to behavior for Script Permissions:

Permissions that are of the type granted automatically when attaching or sitting on an object will now be revoked when you dismount or detach that object, respectively. Specifically, the following permissions are affected, even when explicitly granted through via the permissions dialog:

PERMISSION_TAKE_CONTROLS
PERMISSION_ATTACH
PERMISSION_TRIGGER_ANIMATION
PERMISSION_TRACK_CAMERA
PERMISSION_CONTROL_CAMERA

SL will clean up camera control and triggered animations automatically, so it is not necessary for scripts to do this. We made this change to better handle poorly behaved scripts that do not stop animating, grabbing controls, etc. when the resident is no longer interacting with them. This does mean that existing scripts which try to clean up after themselves will generate script warnings, as they will no longer have the necessary permissions.

By default, script errors and warnings will no longer show up as chat. Instead, an icon will appear above the particular scripted object. You may click on that icon to see the errors for that script, or select Tools>Show Script Warning/Error Window to see the script error window.

"Blue box" script errors now appear just like other script errors.

To revert to showing script errors as chat, select "Show script errors and warnings as regular chat" in the Preferences>Chat window.

Scripts can chat directly to this output window by using the DEBUG_CHANNEL constant as follows:

llSay(DEBUG_CHANNEL, "Hello Avatar";

Due to tons of feedback from content creators, we have altered the script permissions behavior in 1.9.0 that was previously described here.

The automatic revoking of permissions upon detachment will apply ONLY to the PERMISSIONS_CONTROL_CAMERA script option, and not to other permissions schemes as previously designed.

We will work to make a new implementation of this scheme which will not affect existing content in a future version.