Monthly Archives: October 2014

Blender Tricks & Developer Notes

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5 Little Known Tricks in Blender’s Outliner

This is an interesting tutorial on using the Blender outliner. See 5 Tricks for the original post.

Blender Developer Notes

Blender developers meet to discuss which directions to take Blender and which features to prioritize and schedule for release with the next version. For us we get a glimpse of what may be coming to make our modeling lives easier.

See the latest notes here: Developer Meeting Notes: October 12, 2014.

We do learn there may be a Blender 2.72a release this week to fix a couple of bugs that made it through all the testing.

In a couple of weeks we will learn what they have decided to include for release 2.73. One possibility is Stereo 3D… I wonder if that means Oculus type 3D… wouldn’t that be a rush?

There are side projects that apparently are not part of the main development thread. That lets them stay outside the scheduling, I suppose. They are added when they are done. One of those is refactoring Materials Nodes for better multi-threaded operation. That should speed up our bake times for complex items.

Second Life Photography

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One of the features added to Second Life some time ago is projectors, lights that shine on things. Bryn Oh used a headlamp thing for use by those visiting his latest exhibit, which is a projector. But, we see little use of projectors as lights in SL. Or maybe we just don’t notice them.

There is the problem of many people probably not having Sun/Moon + Projectors enabled in their graphics preferences for performance reasons. That is a problem for those building places. They want the majority of visitors to see their creation as built. So, they often skip using Projectors for lighting. But, for photography performance is generally not a primary issue and what the camera sees is up to the photographer. Everyone will see the photograph as captured as in general everyone’s computer settings are similar. So, there is no reason not to use Sun/Moon + Projectors. We just want to light our scene to create the image we want.

In RL photography lighting is a big part of it. For portrait photography it is somewhere between a science and an art. Lighting is used in capturing most all commercial images too.

The first I’ve heard of people using lights in SL photography is in the article Bloody Gorgeous in the PrimDolls blog. Notice the link there to Deoridhe’s Flickr images: Bloody Gorgeous.

AvaStar Transfer Registration Ending

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If you have not yet registered your purchase on the Machinimatrix.org web site, it is time to do so. You need to register to be able to keep a permanent download link and to get your updates. At some point the transfer from the old download to the new registration process will stop working. Gaia is telling that ‘end’ will be SOON.

Also, Gaia has announced a support section of the site where users can provide assistance. See: Just Ask. You need to be registered to use this feature.

Bits of Second Life 2014-41 #3

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Patterns

Linden Lab has announced they are going to stop development of Patterns, their version of Minecraft, but prettier.

Patterns™ Splash

Patterns™ Splash

Those that purchased it can still play it. But, the server side functions will no longer work (sharing worlds).

So… was it just not providing the rate of return needed… or did the Lab want the Pattern’s developers for development work on SL2?

(Reference)

Second Life and Oculus DK2

Jo Yardley saw Ebbe Altberg/Linden in 1920’s Berlin. He was testing out the Linden Lab Viewer for Second Life with Oculus Rift DK2 support. She also caught his Tweet about having the viewer out next week. I assume he means ‘out’ as in a new RC Viewer update.

If it is as an RC Viewer then I expect it will have the new CDN and HTTP Pipeline features included. But, that is just my guess. The CDN and Pipeline features are probably 2 or more weeks from making it out to the main SL Viewer. But, they would be a BIG plus for an Oculus RC Viewer.  Continue reading →

Second Life News 2014-41 #3

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Viewers

The main viewer is 3.7.17-294959

Server Scripting 2014-41

Server Scripting 2014-41

RC Viewers

A Maintenance Viewer version 3.7.17.294943, which is on the Alternate Second Life Viewers page. You can read its release notes here: 3.7.17 Release Notes. Fixes and improvements are:

  • Voice – These updates fix a number of problems. Oz is encouraging dev’s to get the updates for voice into their next releases.
  • privacy
  • rendering
  • texture animation
  • avatar distortion (Avatar distorted when changing outfits)
  • inventory management
  • sounds
  • mouselook in Mac
  • scripting crashfix
  • multiple UI fixes in script editor, Pay flow, chat, stats floater, edit menu etc.

Login Viewer version 3.7.17.294959 – Release Notes – This is the viewer with the new login screen.  Continue reading →

Second Life Market Place CHANGING

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Last Friday was the Third Party Developers User Group meeting. We often have a wealth of news coming from this UG meeting. This week we learn of a Market Place (MP) project that has been in progress via closed alpha/beta since January 2014. We don’t get much news about the Market Place and commerce.

Viewer Managed Market Place

Brooke Linden spoke at this meeting about how the market place will be changing. The Lab is going to move us from the current Direct Delivery system to Viewer Managed Market Place. I expect for customers little if anything will change. But, for merchants this will be a big change and involve migrating the current Market Place to a new backend system.

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 - Halloween Nears

Server-Scripting UG 2014-41 – Halloween Nears

I did not hear anything about changes in how the Market Place will look to customers or how it will operate from the customers’ side of things.

The problems the Lab is seeing with Direct Delivery, a feature that starts in the SL Market Place and ends in the viewer in-world, is merchants are having problems managing their Market Place (MP) inventory. Also, the Market Place engineers have not been able to fully complete Direct Delivery. Magic Boxes are still used for selling items the merchant does not have COPY rights to.  Continue reading →

Second Life news 2014-41 #2

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Viewers

EXCITING NEWS! The HTTP Pipelining Viewer will be going to RC Viewer status as soon as it completes the Lab’s internal QA. Expect it SOON, but not this week. And expect some impressive changes. Monty Linden is calling this viewer the Drano Viewer.

Whirly Fizzle is in Europe and ran some tests. She cleared cache (between each test), and then logged in. With the standard non-pipelining viewer the 105k item inventory took some time to load.

Second Life 3.7.16 (294015) Sep 10 2014 11:08:26 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 16 mins 28 secs
  • Session 2: 17 mins 53 secs
  • Session 3: 17 mins 18 secs
  • Session 4: 17 mins 51 secs

Then again clearing cache between each run and switching to the new pipelining viewer:

Second Life 3.7.17 (294571) Sep 26 2014 12:32:36 (Second Life Release)

  • Session 1: 2 mins 29 secs (I literally had a holy shit moment here lol = Whirly)
  • Session 2: 2 mins 17 secs
  • Session 3: 2 mins 11 secs
  • Session 4: 2 mins 27 secs

If you are measuring load time, you can get exact numbers from your viewer’s log file. Look for “LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed” in older viewers. In the pipelining viewer look for 2014-10-08T23:00:22Z INFO: idle_startup:  Inventory and 2014-10-08T23:25:38Z INFO: LLInventoryModelFetchDescendentsResponder::httpSuccess: Inventory fetch completed.  Continue reading →