#SL News Week 22

We have a bit more news on this week’s roll outs to the Release Channels. Actually some BIG news.

More information below the fold.

Blue Steel

This channel will be updated Thursday instead of Wednesday. The package will contain an avatar render change. The avatars in the Library will now have pre-baked textures.

You probably know that the viewer downloads all the textures worn by an avatar and bakes them intop a composite texture. So, skin, tattoos, alpha layers, undershirt, and shirt layers are baked into a composite. That is uploaded to SL and is the image others download. Even you download a copy, which is why you see your avatar start blurry then render crisp, which is the end of the bake, then go blurry and then hopefully crisp again.

Now the standard avatars in the Library will have a copy of the composite stored server side. We will see that composite rather than numerous individually baked textures.

Le Tigre

The Lindens only say this is an infrastructure change… I suspect it is a security upgrade with some exploits fixed.

Magnum

Experience Tools

This release gets the long awaited Experience Tools. These are the new features the Lindens used when building the Linden Realms regions.

There is a blog post about them here: Advanced Experience Tools Preview. The page includes this 3 minute video.

Obviously the big new feature is the Advanced Creator Tools Notification Group. (Or in-world: ACTUG) This group still shows as owned by Charlar Linden. So, not as sharp a presentation as one might expect. There was no notice published in the in-world group. AND… if you are not int he Closed Beta… you can’t chat in that group. So…

I see the most chat in the Second Life Beta group. This morning it was mostly rude peeps snipping at each other.

Whatever… The main features are:

Teleport Attachments

This will allow creators to make portals like the portals that take people to Linden Realms and that teleport people to a ‘Start Over’ location as happens when a Rock Monster gets you.

Temporary Attachment

The video explains the point of this feature. It was used to create the things you use in Linden Realms without creating an inventory item. Some call this feature Temporary Inventory Items. It will no doubt revolutionize how we handle demo items in stores.

This feature is very much like the scripting function llAttach(). But, it does not create an inventory item.

Experience Permissions

Some have called this feature forced attachment.  The Lab describes it as:

The Experience Permissions system is an expanded and simplified version of our current permissions system. Once a user grants permission to an experience, any object associated with that experience has the permission to control that user.

More importantly, these permissions span multiple regions, scripts, and objects. This will allow you to create cross-Second Life experiences with one simple request.

Professional Creators Program

The announcement says they will be creating a new program that people can qualify for. We won’t see it until they roll out the Advanced Creator Tools. So, are you wondering how to use these new tools… they didn’t say.

llTeleportAgent()

This feature is in the Wiki.  See llTeleportAgent(). That page links to a number of related functions;

As best I can tell there is no wiki page for Advanced Creation Tools.

Summary

I have not had time to see what the full story is. It looks like the CLOSED Beta is still closed. They have just announced this because of the roll out to the Release Channel. Without permissions needed to use this functions, only those in the Closed Beta, if them, can test these functions.

I’m sure many will use this amateur release as another example of the Lindens lack of communication skills…

I started a discussion here: Advanced Creator Tools

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