Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Yay! Torley. There is a new wiki page up telling you how to see the DoF effect. You will need a pretty hot graphics card. My nVidia 8800 GTS will do it.
Rather than tell you more about DoF, visit the wiki page for videos by residents and the Torley tutorial.
Depth of Field Wiki page.
I write about the changes in Second Life that interest me and/or that I think will be of general interest. Most of the recent changes have been boring bug fixes and tedious changes to the SLV2 user interface. Things like making this or that button transparent when the panel loses focus. Mostly stuff everyone wants done, but doesn’t really want to read about or at least, I don’t. But there are a bunch of those tedious changes, which I’m skipping, and few interesting ones I’ve touched on here.
Throttling has been added to mesh to prevent using mesh animations. You may or may not know that sculpties are animated by changing the sculpty map a prim uses. It took no time at all for that idea to come those using meshes as a similar process is used. However, there is a drastic difference in the load mesh animation throws on the viewer and server. Throttling mesh changes will prevent the use of mesh swapping for animation and lagging the region.
Viewer Changes
The mesh upload interface has been revised in the Mesh Project Viewer and the upload reworked. One can get the latest Second Life Mesh Project Viewer and check it out. I think the layout is much nicer. (Also this link should always point you to the latest Mesh Viewer.)
This version is likely the user interface that we will have at Mesh rollout.
Lots of people want working fingers, which requires the addition of more bones to the avie. No word if that is going to happen. I personally have my doubts, but may be down the road.
Currently the only usable skeleton in SL is the avie’s. But, having other skeletons that could be animated would make things like dragons, horses, and dogs much easier to animate. Whatever, they will not be part of the initial rollout of mesh. However Prep Linden is working with them.
There is soooo much misinformation out about Display Names. I think it also reveals how few Second Life residents actually know how to research anything about SL. That they are willing to post their imaginings, without any checking, in forums and blogs is even more … choose your own adjective here. Sheeesh…
Jessica Lyons wrote a post on the Phoenix Viewer web site/blog that does a good job of getting the facts stated clearly. She provides good information on how to use them in world and for logging into the web sites and grid. She covers how to use older series 1 viewers with the new Display Names. She also points out the eventual coming end to Phoenix Viewers as they move to their series 2 viewer Firestorm Viewer.
See: Display Names and new SL Account names explained…
Also if you use the URL http://www.phoenixviewer.com you may find the URL http://phoenixviewer.blogspot.com/ much nicer to use. The first URL cannot be added to an RSS subscription. The second one can.
Happy Thanksgiving! 🙂
The minutes from Mesh Office Hours Meeting are out. This time they were placed on the blogrum as well as the Wiki. See Mesh Office Hours 10-25-2010 for the full transcript. I’ve covered the parts I think are interesting.
The newer SLV2’s, since the Display name versions, use a new chat/IM log format. The previous logs have been plan text files. The LLSD type files are basically a type of XML file. There are advantages and disadvantages to changing the format. Whether or not it is a good thing for you, the change is here.