Voxels Development Update Week Ending 24 June 2022 And A Big Announcement

This week, while smashing through a number of bug fixes and enhancements, Voxels’ devs also discussed and developed plans to bring some significant performance enhancements to the platform, which we will outline below.

First, we’ll cover the progress of fixes and improvements for the week by our dedicated team of devs (working hard during the celebrations of this year’s NFT.NYC). By the way, we hope everyone who made it to Meta Underground had a great time!

Bug Fixes

We fixed a few bugs this week in our ongoing effort to help Voxels continue to the best corner of the metaverse. The buy page was not showing all the listings. We fixed that. YouTube videos sometimes disappear. So we fixed that too.

A few others fixes we addressed:

- Fixed the issue of replicating an item that is inside a group

- Fixed scripting getPlayer()

- Fixed the metadata on Ethereum collections

- Fixed creating polytext

Enhancements

We made a couple of improvements to the platform, adding a Rarible link to the buy page, and we removed the validate link in the wearable page. We also made it so users can create a snapshot from old parcel versions. And Voxels now supports the Drag and Drop of files with filenames that contain Chinese characters.

Most significantly, we made a big decision about parcel versions & history which all parcel owners and builders should read.

These changes will go into effect July 11th.

Voxels’ history data is now 32GB and 2.1 million versions big, and increasing all the time.

That history is a testament to how successful Voxels has been, how active our community of builders and parcel holders is, and how much work Voxelians are putting into their metaverse assets.

Voxels is over four years old, and we have virtually stored all the changes every builder has ever made to the parcels they have worked on. The reason we do this is to allow parcel owners to revert back to historical versions of their parcels.

This history data has begun to impact our backups, the integrity of our DB, development velocity, and failovers. To improve the Voxels experience for everyone, we have put in place some ways to minimize this buildup of history data.

Changes To Be Implemented

From Monday the 11th of July, we will regularly delete some older versions from the database. This clean up will focus on smaller changes people make to their parcels, while major changes will remain in history, so owners can continue to revert back to previous parcel versions.

We have added the ability for parcel owners to create a snapshot of their parcels, to download or upload a parcel version, and to create a Space from a version.

Voxels will remove parcel ‘noise’ from the history DB — the smaller changes people have made — and will continue to keep in its DB history:

- All manually created snapshots

- All changes for the last 14 days

- The last 10 changes made

- One change for each 12 hour period

To elaborate on the ‘one change per 12 hour period’ point, we will automatically remove a change made less than twelve hours before a subsequent change. This rule assumes that the previous change was made so soon before a new change, that you likely intended to change it during a build.

To illustrate, let’s say you have made changes to your parcel at these times:

01:00 — First change (will be removed)

02:00 — Second change (will be kept)

15:00 — Third change (will be kept)

The automatic cleanup would remove the first change because it was made less than 12 hours before the second change. The third change would be kept because it was made more than 12 hours after the second change.

In practice, if you change your parcel once a day, all changes will be kept.

We feel that this method will result in our being able to reduce the size of our DB history without impacting anyone’s major parcel changes.

How To Make Sure You Have Access To A Previous Version

To make sure you will always be able to access a version, here’s what you can do:

Option A: Create a Snapshot

You can create a snapshot of the parcel’s current content by opening up the Snapshots panel inside the game while you are standing inside your parcel. We will always keep your snapshots.

For previous versions of the parcel, you can head to your parcel version management page at `/parcels/[parcel id]/versions` and create a snapshot from a previous version by selecting ‘Set as Snapshot’ in the list of previous versions.

Option B: Download a Version

You can download versions by clicking the ‘View/Edit parcel content’ button in the parcel admin panel. This will allow you to upload it later and revert the parcel back to that version at any time.

These changes are designed to maximize Voxels’ performance for our community while still giving people the option to retain access to parcel versions they really want access to.

If you have any questions about these changes, feel free to reach out to us.

And, as always, enjoy the weekend!

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