“The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin.”
Thomas Huxley
Nalates Urriah
Firestorm Team Thank You
Jessica Lyon has posted on the Firestorm Viewer blog a thank you to the SL community. They have been raising funds mostly to pay for the Kakadu license.
Kakadu used to get lots of coverage in the SL blogosphere. Not so much anymore. Kakadu is the software Linden Lab and Firestorm developers license to handle compression and decompression of images.
You may not know that Linden Lab stores all images/textures in JPEG2000 format. The format offers the advantage of faster and smaller downloads and larger and slower downloads by having different resolution images efficiently stored in one image file. While the format is an ISO standard, the process of getting an image into and out of JPEG2000 format is proprietary. There are open source libraries developers can use to make and use JPEG2000 format files. They aren’t the same as Kakadu.
Photo No Longer Available – Flickr
I follow Dolls and Demons via Feedly. I adore the images Alles Klaar creates for her (I think her not his) blog. Today the article Escaping the Octopus has a Flickr image message rather than the intended image: This photo is no longer available. I was puzzled by its appearance as she is the owner of the blog and Flickr image. So, what happened?
Second Life: Third Party Developers’ Meeting 2-12-16
This meeting ran a little over 20 minutes. It was mostly status updates.
RC Second Life HTTP update Viewer version 4.0.2.310660 – This version has the HTTP, Co-routines, and Vivox updates. The HTTP updates were driving up the crash rate so in this version they are disabled.
MayaStar Update Week 06
Cathy Foil sent me a note explaining the Project Bento updates to MayaStar. I copied, modified, and paraphrased what she sent.
The MayaStar 4.5, I’ll call it BETA version, addition runs on PC and Mac. It works with Maya 8.0 through 2016. While most of MayaStar works with Maya LT, but Maya LT is lacking some abilities and that limits what can be done with MayaStar. Cathy asks you contact her for more information if you are working with Maya LT.
Myst Uru Guild Hall
Two or three years ago Jeff ‘Lehm’ Adams began modeling the Guild Hall from the Myst Online: Uru Live game’s concept art. I later started modeling it for my use in OpenSim. I had started building a replica of the guild hall in OpenSim before the introduction of mesh. So, it was being built with prims, which was rather limiting. Once mesh was on the horizon I lost interest in the prim build.
Jeff had RL distractions. Neither of us was doing much with the Guild Hall. Now he apparently has had some time and has moved his work into the Unreal Engine and made a standalone model available in an executable Unreal file.
You can find a copy of the Guild Hall linked to from the Myst Uru forum.
I haven’t worked on my model of the Guild for some time, years. Walking around in his model and walking in my model is very different. Seeing his nearing completion rekindles my interest. I need to get Blender’s procedural textures figured out and generate some textures.