Poll
JuicyBomb has a poll running on whether you wear a mesh body; never, some of the time, always. Check it out and vote: POLL: MESH BODY.
I’m thinking about getting one. I have the Slink demo. My thinking is there are not enough clothes yet. So, may be latter.
Dolphin Viewer
There is a beta release of the Dolphin Viewer out. The viewer still does not catch up with the SL Viewer, notably lacking the SL Share features. But, how often do you use that feature?
See the announcement: Finally! The first public beta of the new Dolphin Viewer 3!
Lindens
This picture turned up on Twitter.
Strawberry Singh has an article that links to some Second Life Facebook pages I hadn’t seen. See: A Second Life on Facebook.
TOS
The Lab did make a change to the TOS agreement. Unfortunately the change doesn’t really solve the problem. So, various texture and model suppliers still prohibit the use of their content in SL.
The Drax Radio Hour went into the copyright issues again. Basically the take away from there is too many people do not understand copyright and the TOS, so they do not understand what they are giving up. The result is the TOS change in August had little impact on the Lab or Second Life.
I don’t expect to see another change, at least anytime soon. Sad.
There is ongoing discussion in the legal field that ‘informed consent’, which is what the Linden TOS is, is not working and eventually be deemed illegal and insufficient. See Tech Crunch’s How Informed Consent Has Failed.
Fitting Mesh
Iris Ophelia has an article in New World Notes pointing to an article by Alaska Metropolitan on getting your mesh parts to FIT: Getting the most out of your mesh attachments: viewer settings & tips.
Sadly the first advice listed is to turn the Debug Setting RenderVolumeLODFactor to 4. Alaska provides no information on the down side of doing that, it hits your render speed and throws load on the servers. Since the article is about getting a good ‘mesh attachment’ fit, making this change for the duration of your fitting effort might… might… be an idea. But, for everyday use this value should be near the default value of 1.0 (default per the Second Life Debug Settings page). Something between 1 and 2 isn’t much of a hit. – If you really have to turn it up, turn down your draw distance.
For someone zooming the camera in to tweak the fit and color of an attachment, the RenderVolumeLODFactor change should not be necessary. Alsaka’s idea is that someone with a slow Internet/SL connection would benefit from the change. I think it is likely to make things worse.
Then there is bandwidth. Alaska suggests a ‘reasonable setting’. I suppose fashionistas know that ‘reasonable’ is 80% of you max download speed up to 1,500 kbps…
Next there is that old… OLD… advice to clear the cache… We never clear cache unless we know we have a corrupt texture or mesh file. If your mesh attachment did not download correctly it is probably all spiky like Guy Fieri’s hair (Diners, Drive Ins, and Dives – Food Network). Now that the viewer uses HTTP for textures and mesh download a corrupt texture or bad mesh download is a rarity. In some network setups it is common for a texture not to completely download, leaving it a low resolution image. Given time (like 5 minutes), the texture will almost always complete downloading.
Most importantly, if someone has a slow or dirty connection to SL, clearing the cache will almost always make things worse.
If you are having trouble matching skin color… find the Windlight setting CalWL. You can get it and see a good tutorial on how to match skin color at: GOS Boutique. This tutorial has the key bit of information everyone needs to know to solve color matching issues. Once color is matched in a CalWL environment the colors generally look good in all the other environments. Plus you can see detail very well to see how your attachment fits.
College of Scripting, Music, & Science
It has been a while since I have been down to the college. The college is an in-world Linden Scripting Language reference and training area. I am not sure when, but at some point the college was redone. I have yet to decide if the new build is better or worse. I used to know where things were… sort of. Now I have to cam around to find things.
But, the college has been updated.
Call of Duty
I have no idea how many people in SL play with Call of Duty. But, there are new trailers out for the coming November release of the latest episode of this series: Advanced Warfare. It is worth a look at the trailers to see where the state of the art is. In August there will be additional trailers showing the multi-player aspect of the game.
See: Reveal trailers
I am curious how much of this render power will make it into SL2. The avatar that is Kevin Spacey is impressive. Will we have this realistic an avatar in SL2?
Regarding the CoD trailer: This shows that “State of the Art” is much more than pixels and polygons. The “character” may look really good and detailed but the lack of any decend facial animation and the bad body animation completely takes me out of the immersion and is like a bright red sign saying “I AM ARTIFICIAL”. Game characters need Motion- and FacialCapture these days or they will look as lifeless as this one.