Pathfinding/Alpha release notes

Pathfinding in Second Life

Welcome to the home page for the open alpha testing for Linden Lab's Pathfinding project! Thank you for your interest in pathfinding and for taking the time to help us test.

Restrictions

The initial release of the pathfinding LSL is available only on the Aditi test grid on the following regions:

Important: Remove all HUDs and scripted attachments before entering the pathfinding areas. There are currently several attachment-related bugs.

How to report bugs and suggest features

Use JIRA to report bugs and suggest features in the PATHBUG JIRA project: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/PATHBUG

Note: Viewer tools are planned for a future Viewer release.

Testing tips

The pathfinding project is still in alpha stage and subject to change. We are making the LSL calls public early to get feedback and pinpoint as many issues as possible before release. Expect some bugs and instability. The most helpful feedback at this stage are bug reports and specific suggestions regarding the API for the existing pathfinding functions.

Because we want to get these features to Residents as soon as possible, it is not in scope to make major functionality changes before the product release (for example, adding volumetric pathfinding or the ability to pursue multiple avatars at once). That said, we may continue to add more pathfinding features in the future and welcome both near-term and long-term suggestions for improvement.

Also:

Be respectful of other residents while testing.
Have fun!

Pathfinding-enabled objects

Pathfinding-enabled objects will not work (and may cause errors) if taken outside of the pathfinding test regions.

We have set all objects to be returned after an hour to help maintain a cleaner testing environment for all.

Please do not rez more than 10 pathfinding enabled objects at a time, due to the heavy cost of scripts on a debug server build. Once pathfinding is released, you can expect to have a reasonably large number of pathfinding objects without impacting server performance (we've tested several hundred pathfinding enabled characters within a region with no noticeable slow down).

Performance

To collect more valuable testing data, the pathfinding-enabled regions are running a debug server build. This will substantially impact server performance. If you experience significant lag / FPS problems, try a different pathfinding test regions.

Viewer tools

The Viewer pathfinding tools will greatly aid in visualizing the nav-mesh and debugging issues with pathfinding-enabled characters. A project viewer with these tools will be available soon.

Because the Viewer tools are not yet available, Resident testers will not be able to regenerate the region nav-mesh for the time being. This means that if you place a staircase in world, for example, characters will view it as an obstacle rather than a pathable object.