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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
Here’s your chance to be in the movies. The Lab has posted a Second Life casting call for a Drax machinima (1/14/16). If you are interested in showing off what you are working on, be at Bento Island, ADITI January 19 at noon (SLT – PST). The region won’t open until noon.
They’ll change the avatar when pigs fly… WELL!?!
While you cannot enter Bento Island early, I advise you to log into ADITI, the preview grid, early. The last few weeks have proven the log in process for ADITI is slow and flawed. I have yet to see my inventory update as the planned changes are supposed to. So, I’m pretty sure the new ADITI login process is not in place.
The notice advises those with avatars to show contact Draxtor Despres inworld. Provide him pictures and as much information about your creation as possible. I suspect he is looking for color and human interest and has less of an interest in the technical. What tools you are using will probably be pertinent.
Project Bento is one of the biggest changes to the Second Life avatar ever! More than 90 new bones have been added to accommodate features like subtle facial expressions, articulating fingers, smoothly-flapping wings, waving tails, and much more that was previously impossible or required complex workarounds.
If you’re a creator who’s testing out Project Bento, or one who’s eager to give it a try – now is the perfect time! We’re looking for creators to show off some of the possibilities of Project Bento for an upcoming episode of The Drax Files. There are detailed instructions on how to get started and how to get to the beta grid (aditi) on our wiki page. (TIP:Testing on Aditi does not cost you upload fees!)
