TSL Emporium, TSL Profiles, stats.katharineberry.co.uk and the online status system have all been shut down as of now.
TSLE balances have all been refunded, and use of the site is impossible. TSLP returns a 404, stats returns 403. The online status system returns “Offline” if you’re using the images, “The online status system is down or overloaded.” if you’re using the text, and “-2″ if you’re using the numeric output. Anyone using the forum GreaseMonkey script will see “(unknown)” for everyone.
New AjaxLife features and fixes. Yay.
New features:
- Minimap display – shows a heightmap of your surroundings, plus marks positions of everyone in the sim in the same way as LL’s minimap.
- Your position in the top-left corner – because it’s helpful to know where you are. Also, this one is better about updating if you’re involuntarily moved.
Bugfixes:
- Teleporting to a position no longer consistently fails.
Known issues
- The minimap displays you twice – once as a yellow indicator and once as a green dot.
- You rotate on the spot.
- Logging into the Havok4 beta fails unless you have recently done so using an official LL client.
- The minimap doesn’t work in Internet Explorer – and it never will, given IE doesn’t support the canvas tag.
- The minimap is completely useless at higher altitudes.
- The minimap doesn’t display the whole sim unless you teleport around it. It should display everywhere in your vicinity, however.
Also, if the minimap is causing problems for anyone, please let me know! In testing it didn’t have any performance impact, but…
UPDATE: Fixed some potential issues in IE. Also, attached a screenshot I intended to attach but forgot.
UPDATE 2: Fixed a bug causing the map to be offset by 16 pixels metres.
I am (partially) leaving SL. I have resigned as a forum moderator, and will be transferring my island shortly. In the process of doing so, all of my SL-related services (excluding AjaxLife) will shut down.
My reasons for doing so:
- A significant portion of the grid seems to hate me.
- Many of my friends have already left, making SL rather dull.
- (The main one) Linden Lab continue to neglect the Teen Grid:
- Signup is still impossible.
- Upgrading to premium is broken.
- No website update in two years.
- No MapAPI.
- (list of generic complaints that have built up over the last two years go here)
- I actually can’t afford the extra 17.5% due to VAT
I already regret resigning from the moderators. Sigh. 
Those who care will probably still be able to find me around somewhere. AjaxLife development may continue solely due to lack of anything better to do.
Published on 29th of October, 2007
in AjaxLife.
AjaxLife teleports appear to be failing, and have probably been doing so for weeks – sorry!
I found the bug, and it will be fixed in the next update, which should be today.
Here’s a second attempt at rendering a minimap using the <canvas> tag:
However, rendering this takes my computer a good 1.5 seconds, during which the browser hangs – too long to be practical in an interactive web app with impatient users. :p
This one takes under a second, and is thus more likely to make it into AjaxLife:
Both of those are, however, a significant improvement over the last attempt:
Note that this one was erroneously rotated and flipped.
Of course, the minimap built into SL is significantly better than all of the above. But hey! :p
Playing with the HTML <canvas> tag:
This is a test of rendering a sim map inside AjaxLife using JavaScript. The green markers are people – it does the same same above/below/level thing as the client. The whole thing takes a split second to render on my MacBook. I imagine it’d take longer if I included the missing points (that’s being done at a 64×64 resolution).
Not exactly great, is it? Better than nothing though – still working on it. Anyone happen to know how the client puts the sim images together? 
On an unrelated note, I’ll be returning from abroad tomorrow.
Published on 21st of October, 2007
in Life.
I’ll be back next week. May or may not have an internet connection while I’m there.
Bye!
Published on 20th of October, 2007
in Blog.
I reverted the site to the default theme, because it consistently crashed Safari 2.
I’ll be putting it back shortly after Leopard is released, assuming it has a finalised version of Safari 3.
I found it at the obvious place on their site (after a couple of guesses), and it uses the same URL structure as Google after that, making searches easy.
Having poked around with it, I have noticed the following – based on the incomplete version that I found on their site:
- It looks good
- Classifieds are integrated neatly into the system
- A good chunk of the data is hosted on Amazon S3 – profiles, events, places, top traffic sites, etc.
- The TG and MG are in separate S3 buckets
- It appears to use new secondlife:// features – specifically, secondlife://app/event/*/about, secondlife://app/classified/*, secondlife://app/agent/*/about. Visiting these with the RC client open made it crash. That said, clicking most buttons made it crash, so that’s not saying much.
- Teen Grid and Main Grid results are not separated. I assume that this will change, given the separation of their data.
- It searches wiki.secondlife.com.
- A good deal of the data isn’t on S3 yet, so many links just tell you the key couldn’t be found.
- Main Grid profiles default to visible, but Teen Grid profiles default to hidden.
- Parcels have a list of searchable objects on them along with their prices, arranged in alphabetical order. Their parcel image is also visible.
- Boolean operators such as “NOT” work as expected.
- The search does not apply to the owner of something – e.g. a search for “Alex NOT Harbinger” still returns things owned by Alex Harbinger.
- You can now grab limited resolution textures off the web at http://secondlife.com/app/image/texture-key/2 – this is used by the search to provide images.
- The popular places lists, which appear in search (but probably shouldn’t), show sandboxes that are hidden from popular places in the current system.
- Objects that aren’t for sale tend to appear in the object listings. Oops?
- Avatar names tend to be just “(waiting)”, although the profiles they link to are accurate. I have yet to find any marked as “(hippos)”, however.
Also, lots of people seem to have expensive objects called “Object” for sale. It’d be nice if those were filtered out. The information seems to be fairly up-to-date, but is definitely slower at updating than the in-world stuff.
Of course, this is presumably supposed to be unreleased, so it could all change at whatever time. Still fun to look through though. And it actually looks like it’s a significant improvement over what we have now, woo.
Just need some way of separating out the MG and TG results. I suspect that LL will achieve this by locking searches to one of the two buckets depending on which grid you use.
See screenshots…
I have made a couple of improvements to AjaxLife:
- It now runs in Internet Explorer – mostly. Due to speed issues some of the fancy UI stuff was disabled. The same effects are disabled on the Wii. Additionally the stats window refused to render in IE, so I was lazy and disabled it in IE.
- Scripts now have syntax highlighting. Woo!
Hooray for updates. Please note that loading inventory is not recommended in IE – it will tend to make it hang for a length of time proportional to the number of items in your inventory – but a folder with more than about five items will have a noticeable delay. I gave up waiting and forcibly terminated it when I opened my textures folder.
UPDATE:
Screenshot:
[Screenshot lost due to WordPress failing]
Also, note that if you click a function, event or type, a new window will open containing the relevant SL Wiki page. (note the status bar in the screenshot. Also note that it capitalises the first letter, as it should for the wiki).
Oh, and I gave the post a title. “Post #124″ just wasn’t doing it.
