Nalates Urriah

Blood Letters Play – Second Life

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This is sort of a spoiler… I won’t be revealing the things one really has to figure out, no puzzle answers. But, I will be explaining the mechanics of the game and some experiences. I feel my experiences are not going to spoil the puzzles. But, they may. So, read at your risk.

Blood Letters is a hunt through various shops in SL. Many you will know. There are two items to find for each letter/clue in the hunt. The hunt has a story, which is the adult part. Thus most all of the hunt is visually safe for work.

Blood Letters 2014
Blood Letters 2014

Day 1 – Letter 1: Not quite what I expected. This is where I learned it was more ‘hunt’ than game. But, so far it is fun and safe for work, but decidedly adult. Her panties were getting wet… that qualifies as adult.

The first puzzle to solve is getting the HUD (L$400), which is way easy. Find a vendor, purchase, and wear the HUD. The rest is not so intuitive. Getting the letters is the next step. I was told we can only get one letter per day. Well, sort of true. 

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Blender 2.73 Planning

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Ton Roosendaal regularly shares his Blender developers meeting notes. Blender Nation summarizes them and links to the notes.

A feature being added back into the workflow is Mesh Transfer or Data Transfer. I’m not at all clear on what it is. The details are here. This seems like some type of attribute copy-paste… I don’t see how it will help me with my designs for SL.

Blender 2.72 - 2014-10-06
Blender 2.72 – 2014-10-06

They are planning to add support for Chinese/Asian complex characters.

A Dependency Graph is in the works. This would let you see how all the parts of a scene relate and which objects require which resources. Not something I’ll need in my simple files.

Various improvements are being made as part of the Gooseberry project. We will see viewport and asset management improvements that will likely help SL designers.

Currently Blender 2.72b is the current Blender release. The fixes and improvements list (release notes sort of) are here.

 

Second Life Bits 2014-45 #2

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CDN

The Content Delivery Network is used by all viewers. No viewer update was needed for CDN to work. It is a pure server-side thing.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014
Meauxle Bureaux 2014

Ciaran wrote about the problem he and others run into in: CDN Teething Problems & Meauxle Bureaux Should Be In Destination Guide. Some regions just refuse to render. Lots of textures fail to load. The usual leave and return tricks are not working. When these textures fail to load they FAIL to load and there seems little we can do about it.

The Lindens are aware of the problem and have posted on the SL Blog about the problem, what they think is causing it, and the hope it will pass with changes being made by both the Lab and the CDN provider. See: An Update on the [Second Life] CDN Project.

If you run into this problem, please file a JIRA report. Add your RL location (City, State, Country) and ISP name.

And like Ciaran I encourage you to check out the mole abode: Meauxle Bureaux. 

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Second Life News 2014-45 #3

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This past Friday was the Third Party Developers’ meeting. This is usually the best source for information about developments in the pipeline at the Lab. This week there is not a lot of news.

Viewers

Benchmark RC Viewer – I been talking about this one. It is the one that ends the use of a GPU table to figure out the default video settings for a new viewer install.

Maintenance RC Viewer – This one is a collection of fixes and feature improvements.

Meauxle Bureaux 2014 - Frost Mole
Meauxle Bureaux 2014 – Frost Mole

AISv3 Fixes aka Attachments RC Viewer – This is a viewer version created to fix problems with AISv3 that were holding up Firestorm Viewer development. The problems were Linden Lab problems and we could see them in the SL Viewers. But, the bugs were a reason the FS Team was not merging the code into their viewer. More on this later. The AIS fixes were moved into this RC Viewer and the code changed to solve issues and make for easier merging into third party viewers.

Oz says this set of code changes are relatively easy to merge and this is the RC Viewer now seen as most likely to promote soon.

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New AvaStar Training Course – Second Life

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Gaia Clary has announced the release of a new course about using AvaStar with the Second Life™ skeleton (armature). The class is on sale for US$12. Find the announcement here.

The announcement is confusing. There is a course you can buy now, but it is incomplete. Huh? You can buy the course (text only $6 – to be completed by end of November) and the course video separately (video only $6)? What!?! Why? We know from the previous course that the meat of the class is in the written material. Both are needed.

The announcement is short:

This course guides you through all aspects of the Second Life Skeleton. This knowledge will help you to create your own SL compatible characters, attachments and animations.:

  • SL Appearance Sliders & Anatomy of the SL Avatar
  • The SL Avatar and rigged Mesh
  • Bone Sliders and Morph Sliders
  • Sliders and Weight maps
  • Weightmaps and Animation
  • Rest Pose and SL Default Avatar
  • Working with non default Shapes

The course video contains a brief self contained introduction into all topics which are covered in much greater detail within the course lessons.