RL has kept me away from recent meetings I wanted to attend. The Bento meeting being the more interesting one in my mind. Fortunately Inara Pey made it to the Bento meeting. See: Project Bento User Group update 34 with audio.

Countryside 3

Word from the meeting is the recent Project Bento viewer release fixes some of the tenacious problems. It adds a Reset Skeleton and Animation selection in addition to just the Reset Skeleton into the avatar’s right-click drop down menu. This is an attempt to handle most of the problems a few older animations have when run on a Project Bento viewer without changing how Project Bento’s animations handle bone/joint position. Think compromise. 

With any luck the fixes will work well enough. But, there may be what are called ‘edge cases’ that aren’t fixed. Edge cases are those rare sort of Perfect Storm cases where things go sideways. It appears the number of problem cases is small and reduced even more by this fix, the Lab is trying to reduce the number of problem to as near zero as possible. It appears that ‘zero’ isn’t possible, so rather than cripple Bento the Lab is working on a way to click and correct problems instances.

Viagra Bug… which is kinda way funny. The Bento viewer will go through another iteration before release because of this bug. The bug causes the new groin bone to grow… Seems new things tend get excited too easily.

Time for release of the new RC and testing will take us into Thanksgiving week. So, we are unlikely to see the viewer release as the default viewer until the week after Thanksgiving (48). That puts it into the last week of November, first of December. Bento will be out soon.

Word is Firestorm is about ready to release their next update, which will have Bento capability. I’m thinking they too will wait until after Thanksgiving.

When Bento is released there will still be some minor issues and some likely unfound problems. But, Bento should be mostly usable with only rare problems. Expect the mesh body people to be quickly releasing new Bento heads and hands.

Along with the heads and hands will be new animations and AO updates. Avatars will significantly change. We will see if we get into the uncanny valley or not. I am hoping for an overall improvement.

For Builders

The Lab is considering how to get Bento best practices out to users. Expect the info buried in the main Bento thread to be collected and distilled into wiki pages. Also, builders like Medhue, Gaia, Cathy, and others are likely to provide video tutorials.

I plan to work my way through those tutorials. As I find the gotcha’s I’ll decide if a tutorial is needed for those less experienced in Second Life avatar clothes and animation building… more of a prequel. I’ve put off revising my 2012 SL Clothes Making tutorial because of time availability issues and now the coming Bento change. I would like to revise it. But, there is so much fun stuff to do… where to play first.