Morph Targets and the Mesh Deformer seem to be main topics of interest for this meeting. Neither were on the agenda. We have gone a couple of weeks with no news on the Deformer. Maybe we will hear something from Karl via Metareality’s podcast Thursday.
While Morph Targets and Redpoly’s Collision Bone process are of interest, I don’t see where there is any news about either this week. People have shown up at the Nyx’s Content Creation group and Geenz’s Content Improvement groups asking, but there is no new information. People tend to take that as no progress. It may not mean that, but those doing work on the projects are not being communicative.
Missing Transcripts
If you have been using the wiki, you may have noticed that a problem caused the Lab to restore the wiki from a backup. Several hours of editing were lost. In that loss are some meeting transcripts. The Content Improvement Group has replaced their lost transcripts. So, if you were wondering…
MAINTENANCE – On 2012-7-25 at 17:45 PST we rolled the wiki back 26 hours to the state as of 2012-7-24 15:30 PST. We apologize for any inconvenience.
JIRA Items
The first part of the meeting is about JIRA’s that people have problems with, related to content creation. It does not seem to be a popular meeting topic.
Build Panel
Several people are interested in getting a better build panel, something that is easier to use and possibly easier to use. A beginner mode and advanced mode have been proposed. The discussion took up more than half the meeting. If you are into interface design, I suppose it was worthwhile. I personally think interface design is a specialized task best handled by those that have studied it. You can get the details in the transcript.
The way interfaces work now, people build them into specialized viewers, or at least they used to. Now viewer developers seem to try to put everything into and to be everything in one viewer. Imprudence used to be the favored builder’s viewer in both SL and OpenSim. Emerald/Phoenix adopted many of the features from Imprudence, which have now been moved into Firestorm.
Kirsten’s Viewer was the machinamists’ and photographers’ viewer. Now its hard to say which is the best.
At one point the idea was to make Linden Lab’s™ SL Viewer modular enough that plug-ins could be part of the viewer design. That seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle. It was to be modular enough that the render engine and the user interface could be separate and easily switched. That too seems to have gotten lost.
Without some overall plan for viewer development we seem to be drifting without direction. I think only the Lab can change that.
Summary
For me this meeting was tedious, I’m not into interface design. I’m more about how to build something than which button is where. So, while the ‘where’ is important, it’s boring. So, my attention was quickly split between the meeting and other tasks.
Most of the people there were clothing and content designers. A couple of bloggers and viewer developers were there. Discussion was pretty good, so I hope it moved something.
It’s worth mentioning that morph targets is now in the process of being proposed. The current proposal draft can be found on the wiki here:
https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Morph_Target_Community_Proposal
A modular design for the viewer is something I raised with Rod back in early 2010, and he was receptive to the idea. When Jeff Petersen (Bagman Linden) joined LL, the topic came up again and Rod indicated to me that it was something Jeff was very keen on.
However, when I raised the subject with Esbee, Gez and Durian at SLCC 2011, it was pretty much indicated that any attempt to make the viewer modular would require a massive overhaul of the code, which was not something that was viewed as being doable in the near-term. Since then, I’ve not seen or heard anything on the subject from any quarter at all.