Perspective
We don’t often get any insight into what Lindens are thinking about going on’s in the Lab. Today one gave us a glimpse.
I’ll wrap up and say that there’s a lot of good talking [in the Lab] going on about what works in SL, what doesn’t, what we’ve tried before and all that … as you know some changes take a lot of time and work, others can be done quickly. But overall I’m more optimistic than I was 6 months ago, and I like that.
Better Building
Ciaran has an article up promoting Penny Patton’s ideas about building things to scale in Second Life™. See: Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton.
Ciaran is focusing on a June 2013 article that Penny wrote: Building a Better Second Life. I covered it at the time it was published: Best Building Practices in Second Life.
If you haven’t read any of these articles, please do before you start building your dream home.
To see what a difference ‘to scale’ building makes visit Penny’s M&C fantasy region or Jo Yardley’s 1920’s Berlin. Both stick to scale and make smart use of textures. I suggest you change your camera defaults before visiting. I use the new type of camera settings as my camera’s defaults. See: Second Life Camera Position Tips (2011).
Daniel Voyager is talking about an Android app from In-Worldz. See: Trying out the In-Worldz Info app. It appears this is not a viewer. Seems it is more of a social media app for In-Worlds related things. Rumor is something is coming for Second Life.
Camera Perspective
Honour McMillan has been writing about correcting perspective in Second Life photos. She uses GIMP. It has some tools for correcting perspective. Photoshop has a load of such tools that are simply amazing.
Another photographer, Quadrapop Tree, clued her into the Ctrl-8, 9 ,0 camera controls. These can be used when taking a picture to correct much of the perspective problems created by the camera. As Honour suggests, try pressing Ctrl-0 2 or 3 time and then zoom the camera out. Ctrl-9 returns the camera to its default location.
You can get the opposite effect by pressing Ctrl-8 and adjusting your zoom. Its starts to move you into a ‘fish-eye’ type of image.
There are 60+ camera setting controls in the Debug Settings. I think Ctrl-8 & 9 are adjusting the value of: CameraAngle or may be: CameraFocalLength in Debug Settings. Other settings can be used to create other effects in your images, like adjusting fog. Plus, you can change some of the behavior of your camera, like whether or not it tracks the last object you focused on.
Servers
Simon Linden described today’s server update (Tuesday) going to the main channel as, “We updated the main channel today with a minor change in the system image, there really wasn’t anything visible or that should have affected the world at all.” This package ran on Blue Steel and Le Tigre last week.
RC Channels
The channels Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get another maintenance project with a few bug fixes.
Magnum will continue to r un the same package as last week, the AISv3 update. To test the changes you must run the Sunshine Project Viewer. This is the update striving to fix the last of the bake fail issues.
Viewers
Some RC Viewer updates are promoting to the main viewer. I saw an update Friday. The three RC Viewers and 3 Project viewers have been updated . The Outbox RC Viewer (3.7.3.287344) is likely to be the next RC to get promoted to the main viewer. Probably this week.
I’ve thought this version was mostly about issues on the Linux side of things. But, there are fixes for problems apparently happening in Windows too.
We are going to get a new RC Viewer probably this week too. This will be a viewer Oz Linden describes as, “…it looks like we’ll have a viewer with support for getting LSL hints from the server very soon.” Those LSL Hints (Linden Scripting Language) are the code highlighting and tool tips you see in the viewer’s LSL editor.
The highlighting and tips have been built into the viewer. So, changes to LSL don’t make it into the viewer for some time. Now the viewer will download the information from the region server. We will not have to wait for viewer updates. As soon as the server is updated and the code live, our viewers will pick it up.
This has been in the works for some time, months. It is nice to see it coming out. It is a feature made possible by work Ima Mechanique has done. Please throw Lindens at Ima… OK that didn’t come out well. Express you thanks, is what I meant.
Oz says as this project proceeded they make lots of improvements to the information provided by highlighting and tips system.
Key Frame Motion Item Return
There is a scripting feature vehicles use: llSetKeyframedMotion. One of the problems is these scripts stall on region restart and vehicles get returned because they stay too long on a parcel and hit the object return time out.
You may or may not be able to see these. The change in JIRA permissions has not yet arrived. But, I keep hearing ‘soon.’ I expect to see it happen this week.
- BUG-1624 – llSetKeyframedMotion rotation behaving badly after being used in an object rezzed from inventory.
- SVC-7556 – Objects with llSetKeyframedMotion() stop running after region restarts.
- SVC-7787 – Objects using llSetKeyframedMotion() can defeat a parcel’s autoreturn if they travel to and from another parcel.
Simon Linden says, “That is how parcel timing is designed … it measures the current time in the parcel, so if you leave and come back, it’s reset. So there’s a loophole there, yes … and I don’t think we’ve come up with a good alternative.”
Group Ban
Baker Linden was not around for this meeting. So we have no new information on the status of Group Bans. Maybe we will hear something latter in the week.
A minor correction, cntl-0 etc. are controlling the camera’s field of view (debug setting CameraAngle, also in preferences under move and view as View angle).
As a general rule you should not be messing with this setting other than for artistic reasons (e.g. fish eye lens). That, however, does not mean the default value is the correct one for your set up. The field of view (FOV) should be set so that it matches the amount of FOV your monitor takes up in your eyes to minimize eye strain, look more immersive, etc. etc. And thus the correct setting is unique to each person based on the size of their monitor and how far away they sit from it.
This now explains why Honour McMillan was having problems. She doesn’t have her FOV set correctly. In fact most people in sl probably don’t.