Changes

Project Bento AFTER the Meeting Discussion Secrets

by

I learned more about using Bento bones and animating after the meeting than I did during the meeting. The meeting lasted about 45 minutes. Discussion after the Lindens went back to work lasted over an hour. I broke my coverage into 2 videos. The meeting part is in the video here: Second Life: Project Bento 2016 Week 16. The ‘after’ meeting part is here:

I’ve trimmed the hour plus video down to 45± minutes by removing parts where there is no voice. This means you’ll notice some video jerks where I trimed out parts. You’ll have to watch the chat window too. You’ll hear some voice responses that are answers to questions and statements made in text/local chat that got trimmed out. You can see the text, you just don’t have to wait while it is typed. 

Read more

Second Life: Custom Mesh Head Animation

by

Project Bento is moving ahead. The AvaStar people are working on building tools to help people animate the new avatar. You can see a video of where they are now. YOU HAVE TO CLICK…

This isn’t something we will have access to this week or next. We may not see the final release of Project Bento for some weeks and possibly months.

We may have the AvaStar tools soon. Building the animation tool is a simpler task than building a player that works with the new skeleton and the legacy version animations.

Second Life’s End of InvisiPrims?

by

With the release if the Maintenance Viewer (4.0.2.312269) in week #11, invisiprims pretty much died their final death. Support ended for these critters in 2011. The code that renders them invisible has been in viewers up to this release. But, with this release something changed.

Dry Dock via Invisiprim - Noted by: Callum Meriman
Dry Dock via Invisiprim – Noted by: Callum Meriman

Inviziprims were prims with a special texture that caused things behind the texture to become transparent. Rendering-wise this was nightmare and problematic. The Lindens took advantage of a happenstance of the render pipeline to get them to work. I understand Crazy Mole once built a dry dock using invisiprims (the picture). Many boat builders used them to make the water inside their boats disappear.

Read more

Second Life: Fast Money

by

It is splashing across the Second Life™ blogosphere that the Lab published an announcement: Faster Credit Processing & Upcoming Changes to Fees. The Lindens think 75% of the SL users taking money out will be able to do so in 2 days, working days.

I Forget Which Side I'm On
I Forget Which Side I’m On

Fees are going up. You can read the announcement to see why, but the info is:

As of April 5, 2016, instead of charging a flat fee of $1 (USD) per transaction, we will charge a fee of 1.5% of the transaction value, with a minimum fee of $3 (USD) and a maximum of $15 (USD). Additionally, the fee for purchasing L$ on the LindeX will increase 10¢, from $0.30 (USD) to $0.40 (USD) per transaction.

This is a good thing for most of us. But, see this thread: Anyone received this email from LL?

Marketplace Beta Search: Better?

by

I am one that has bitched about ‘search’ in Second Life™ for years. The results have always been a confusing mix of items related and unrelated to the search target/term. Now the Lab is making the new search, Marketplace Beta Search, easier to find and use.

Marketplace Beta Search Link
Marketplace Beta Search Link

In November 2015 Linden Lab posted an article about the Beta Marketplace Search. See: Introducing Marketplace Search Beta. They updated it later the same month. Now they seemed to have moved to broader testing and have placed a link to the new search on the landing/home page of the current Marketplace or I’m just noticing it. 

Read more