Second Life and Virtual Worlds
You may have encountered log in problems trying to get into ADITI, aka Preview or Beta Grid. Today in the Beta Server UG meeting we learned that the problem is fixed or just about is. Along with the fix are some changes. Be WARNED! Inventory is going to behave differently.
If you logged into ADITI today or changed your password, Thursday 12/17, depending on the time of day, you may experience an odd inventory update. Coyot Linden extended his apology to anyone so unconvinced.
I like looking back at the year to see what has happened and get a perspective of how Second Life™ is progressing. On a week to week basis I tend to lose perspective. Also, many of the things that have changed this year are forgotten, taken for granted. Other things I am often surprised to realize how long I have been waiting for them.
So, I publish my review in bits. I don’t have time to do the whole year in one sitting.
If you don’t know, WordPress has an Archive feature that allows one to see the articles published for any month in any year a blog was operational. Look in the column of this blog to find drop down.
This is a big deal. I’ll get into what it means and what some of the possibilities are.
For years Second Life™ users have been asking for more bones. That would let users make avatars with tails that are easily animated. Or with more than 4 arm-leg appendages. We will be able to have a centaur with 4 legs, two arms, and a tail, something that is way complicated now and pretty lame. Or a spider with 8 legs.
Today we have a post from the Lab about changes to the SL Avatar. See: Introducing Project Bento – New Bones Added to Second Life Avatar Skeleton.
What are the changes?
Ever wish you could incorporate a tail, wings, or second set of arms into your avatar? How about having animations for facial expressions and finger movements? Yes, we know that there are some incredibly creative workarounds that give you some of these, but they can’t leverage skeletal animation, so they have been very complex, often fragile, and very expensive in performance and resources both in your Viewer and the Simulator.
On my long ago first day in Second Life™ I was trying to figure out why I waddled and other females swayed when walking. It didn’t take long for me to learn about Animation Overriders, AO’s. I used ZHOA and then ZHOA II during most of my time in SL. But, there have been advances in AO tech since the ZHAO units were developed. Now we have another advance. I’ll take a look at it and whether it is worth the effort to change to a newer AKEYO NITRO AO. My review follows.
I don’t know when ZHAO first appeared. I found it 2008 when I first went looking for an AO. AO’s improved as the Linden Scripting Language improved. The Mono scripts reduced the memory load, but did little else to change how AO’s worked or their features.
This release has some fixes and changes. See: Black Dragon Viewer – Update 2.4.4.5 “Going Places”. My take is lots of things added in the last release were broken but fixed in this release.
Avatar Complexity Information is working. Every developer seems to have some problems with this feature. I think the Lab’s problems were the source. But, it seems to be getting cleaned up in general and it sounds like NiranV has it cleaned up in this release.