There is a list of the continents that make up Second Life™. The list lives in the SL Wiki. I noticed the list was being updated. Check it out here: List Of Microcontinents And Sim Clusters.
It appears most of the changes are being made by Ana Imfinity (AnaImfinity.Resident).
You’ll find other parts of the wiki that deal with SL’s geometry have been getting attention too. Scroll to the bottom of the wiki page I linked to above to find; Oceans and Second Life Geography.
Yuzuru Jewell gave me a copy of his newly released program IDOBATA Pro. This is a simple, no installation program that converts text to speech using the built-in Windows speech service.(Reference) It is a standalone program so you can run it from a USB drive.
You can get the Second Life Text to Speech program here. It has a 3-day free trial period. The license can be purchased in world in Phasic Foo. The cost is L$1250.
Second Life Chat to Speech Program
IDOBATA Pro allows you to point Windows at the Viewer’s chat file. It detects changes to the file and sends new text to the speech conversion service. The result being you hear what is being typed into chat.
The program is designed for Windows 7 and 8, 32 or 64 bit versions. My thinking is that if it run on Win7 it will run on Vista, but I haven’t tried that. I am getting accustomed to Win7 and have not booted over to Vista in a couple of weeks. Continue reading
Gaia Clary has a new release of Avastar out. This trailer promoting it was released Saturday July 20th. The 1.0 release number should not be the significant problem it is with most other software. I’ve been using the release candidate builds and think the software even in pre1.0 releases is has been pretty solid.
You can get more details about Avastar 1.0 on Gaia’s site: Machinimatrix.org. There is a list of improvements (14) and highlights (13). There is a known bug that has to do with animating the aSpine bone… I’m going to have to look for this problem, as I haven’t noticed it. But, I don’t recall attempting to animate the aSpine bone.
I will have to wait until I’m home sometime Monday to get my copy of Avastar 1.0. I’m looking forward to checking it out.
I’ll also be downloading Blender 2.68, which was released Thursday July 18th. This is the version Gaia used for testing Avastar 1.0. Less testing has been done with other Blender versions. Gaia believes Avastar 1.0 should work well with Blender versions 2.64 to 2.68.
Note: This is NOT a paid promo. I purchased my own copy of Avastar (US$22).
I had never heard of realityPaint until I saw a posting in SLUniverse: 3D Painting for Second Life characters… This program is the descendent of Blacksmith3D-Suite. Both seem to be big in the Poser community.
realityPaint Site
It seems the developer of this US$99 to $199 program, depending whether you want standard or pro, is asking the Second Life™ community what they would like to see in the program for use with Second Life.
Avastar in Blender - Image by Machinimatrix
In January of this year Laurent Bechir filed a user story in the SL JIRA, STORM-1803. The JIRA item points to Machinimatrix’s post on Second Life’s animation format. The animation format controls what we can upload into SL. In a way this user story is a feature request.
Oddly it is the Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) file format used for uploading that restricts much of what we can do with animations in Second Life. Internally SL uses an .anim type file format that allows more animation controls than BVH.
Some of the things an ANIM file allows are:
The Community Tools User Group is a group about: Feedback and discussion of the Second Life wiki and community platform (SL Answers, Blogs, Forums, the Knowledge Base). The facilitator is normally Lexie Linden. However, Jeremy and Rand Linden are facilitating as Lexie is away until early November.
Community Tools Group
Jeremy says he is working on documentation for Mesh 2 and that it is nearing release. He can’t say anything about what is in the project. For Jeremy, doing documentation, a significant part of the change is from PE to Land Impact.
Most of the Lindens in User Groups/Office Hours do not have ‘Announcement Privileges.’ They have to wait to talk about things until management announces it. They often are bursting to spill the beans.
I think many Second Life residents have a bit of the explorer in them. Curiosity is an attribute of many residents. So, news of interesting places is usually welcome. And then there are clothes and shoes, which are really important. Finding good sources of information on places, clothes, and shoes can be a problem. I’ve found a couple of blogs that seem to have never-ending-streams of interesting stuff.
Second Life Places
Search remains broken. But the in-world Destinations Guide in Search gives us an ever changing list of places to visit. However, Honour’s Post Menopausal View is a blog providing a genuinely interesting flow of places to visit. Each article in the blog introduces a place with photos and a brief write up by Honour McMillan. On average she posts one new article per day.
Second Life Fashion
We have such a varied interest in fashion it is hard to recommend a fashion blog that is interesting to everyone. The Daily Look is a good recommendation for all. That includes the fashion conscious men too. Articles appearing in The Daily Look cover a wide range of tastes and styles.
The Daily Look blog is an aggregation of fashion blogs. You’ll likely find some of your favorite designers linking their blogs into The Daily Look. The number of new articles on a slow day is 50 or more. On most days there are over 100 new articles. Fortunately the articles are picture rich and text poor.
Warning… reading The Daily Look can be expensive. The blog of course is free. However, the clothes you find and want are not… well some are free. Reading the blog… well… looking at the pictures, has lead to by buying new outfits. Plus there is skin, makeup, hair, nails, stockings… ethnic styles… everything related to your look is there… and tempting. Now and then you’ll see articles on new furnishings for your home too.
If you are breaking into the fashion world, this is a good place to see the competition. Plus it is a good exhibition of fashion photography. One can easily see the strong and weak promotions.
All the items in the images are from recent posts in the two blogs.