First quarter 2017 update

It's the end of March, and so far this year there have been no product updates.  That won't last though.  I've been working on updates to both the Communications Hubs and The Enforcer.

Communications Hub

The Communications Hubs have an annoying bug where sometimes, when the sim they're in is restarted, the web interface doesn't start by itself, and you have to manually restart it.  This has been difficult to debug as it's an intermittent problem, and also because it needed a sim restart to trigger it.  But I believe I have the problem fixed now, and will be releasing an update to the Hubs as soon as testing is complete.  I will likely take this opportunity to change the Hubs from being Transfer/No-Copy to Copy/No-Transfer.  Copiable objects are much safer in that if SL eats a copiable object you can just rez another one, and they're also much simpler for me - I can just ship out updates and allow self-service re-deliveries without worrying about where they're going to end up.  And in the case of the Communications Hub, you might actually want to run multiple Hubs.  This would allow you to separate your user community into disjoint subsets, which can be useful if you want to partition your Mesmerizer chat, for example.  With The Enforcer, you can always bridge multiple Hubs when you want them to act as a single community, and then remove the bridge to make them disjoint again.

I would really like to make the Mesmerizer Copy/No-Transfer too, but that's a much harder problem, as I want to retain the ability for a dominant to configure the Mesmerizer before giving it to their sub.  I have some ideas on how to support that with a copiable Mesmerizer, but it will be a little while before I can translate those ideas into product.

 

The Enforcer

I delayed the original release of The Enforcer because of a late-breaking out-of-memory problem.  While I significantly increased the available memory headroom before the release, it's still a concern.

I've been working on two different short-term approaches to improving the situation, and have a longer-term strategy for eliminating the problem.  I expect to ship an update to The Enforcer that includes the two short-term fixes soon, probably around the same time as the Communications Hub update.

 

The Mesmerizer

While my focus so far this year has been on the supporting products, the Mesmerizer itself is also due for a minor update to address a small bug and a couple of minor annoyances.  Unless any major issues surface, I will likely wait until after the Hub and The Enforcer updates are out before updating the Mesmerizer.

Final Word

I've also updated this blog so that the tables should be more readable in Chrome.  If anything looks strange regardless of browser, please send me (Nue Broome) an IM in-world letting me know.