Nalates Urriah

Darien’s Thinking on Avatar 2.0

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There is an interesting post on SLUinverse about Avatar 2.0 by Darien Caldwell. See: A Modest Proposal: Moving toward Avatar 2.0.

Darien’s idea of making a new avatar compatible with the current avatar’s UVMaps is a deal breaker for me. That just drags those problems along. Fixing the UVMaps and attempting to use older clothing made for the previous UVMap is going to be a problem causing even more distortion.

Darien does key in on the layering problem. We can layer system clothes. We cannot layer textures on objects, like mesh avatar bodies. Adding that capability would likely be a complex change to the system. Whether it is or not, it would allow the use of even more textures. With the texture load increase coming from Materials use, that could be a serious lag producer.

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IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Published

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The UN’s IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) has released their fifth Assessment Report (AR5). This release will be getting coverage from the mainstream media. But, one of the points they will not mention is the mandate of the IPCC. Its sole purpose is to study the affect of human activity on climate. Sounds good, but people fail to understand or have explained to them that it does not include study of other possible causes of climate change. The billions of dollars poured into the IPCC only go to those willing to study man-made affects on climate.

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Fixing Blender 2013-40

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Second Life™ users have an interest in Blender. Since a new round of discussion is starting on regard to the Blender user interface, now is a good time for us to get involved. Of course we want to avoid coming across to the Blender community as total ignoramuses and losing credibility… if we have any. So…

Andrew Price has a video up discussing the important points of User Interface design. Whether you are going to make suggestions for Blender or the Second Life UI this is an import video to watch.

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The survey he recommends you take is here: Blender User Interface Survey. This is a two-question survey. Please watch the video BEFORE taking the survey.

The follow on second half is not yet out.

ToS Meeting Today

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Inara Pey has an article up about a meeting this Sunday to discuss the change in the Second Life/Linden Lab Terms of Service. That meeting is today, Sunday, at noon SL Time (PDT). See: ToS Changes: in-world meeting.

The meeting will be at: East, West, North Galleries Ampi-Theatre. Region: Georgiana 159/189/1800. This is a main land region from the looks of it.

I couldn’t figure out who is sponsoring the meeting. So, I went there to see what the deal is. On TP’ing in you get this note card:

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Second Life TPVDM News 2013-39

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This is the news from the Third Party Viewer Developers Meeting. There is always lots of interesting new information that comes out in these meetings. The first thing Oz Linden went over were the RC Viewers currently out.

RC SL Share

Merov Linden talked about SL Share. Oz Linden translated for him as Merov’s voice was distorted beyond understanding.

I gathered that the SL Share feature is mostly implemented server side. The Facebook login tokens are not kept in the viewer. So, third party developers would not see the Facebook information… But… one does type an ID and password for the account into the viewer to set up the connection. So, is that safe?

I’ll have to look and see how this is actually working. For now I think it may be similar to how SL Search works, where a web page is opened as a panel in the viewer. While you are appearing to type in the viewer, you are typing into a web page. I suspect SL Share is something similar with the account connection setup.

Once the connection is established, future posts from the viewer are passed to the SL server, which has the tokens, for it to pass the post along to Facebook. So, the viewer would never actually be connecting to Facebook. 

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Bits and Pieces 2013-39

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ToS

Ciaran Laval has an article up on the new Linden Lab™ ToS: New TOS Needs To Be Rectified.

Oculus

Jo Yardley notes The Verge has another article up on Second Life™. The Verge article is: Second Life updates graphics, promises Oculus Rift support ‘soon’. This one is by a different author and about the Oculus Rift. I think this author, Adi Robertson, watched the video. I doubt Ali has been in SL.

Jo in her article, The Oculus Buzz caused by Linden Lab, is discussing the reputation of Second Life. She has some good ideas. We know several Lindens, including Rod, read her blog. So, may be some of those ideas will get picked up or at least shape some of the Lab’s PR work.

Jo believes, and I think with good reason, that the Oculus will bring a second renaissance to SL. Of course the ToS change may offset that… I do believe we will see an up tic in the number of people entering Second Life. I can’t decide if I believe the Rift will change the retention rate. I flip-flop on that point.

And check out the first comment after her article…

If you take a look at Polygon’s article, Virtual world Second Life gets graphics and features overhaul, you might get the idea the Lab sent out a press release.

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