Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life is Looking Good

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Flickr has different Second Life related groups. There are some awesome pictures there. The good stuff is easiest to find in the groups. One group, MOST EXCELLENT Second Life, requires an image have 30 Favs before it can be added to the group. Most have 30 or more Favs.

You’ll find many of the images have rights reserved. But, the Flickr license allows Flickr to use them. It appears they have classed SHARE as Flickr use for promoting Flickr. Click the images here and the click takes you to Flickr. One must change settings to specifically stop that sharing. Some people do. Others leave it open. Those below are ones from the later group.

**Stellagraphics**

The definition of natural is Second Nature
The definition of natural is Second Nature by **Stellagraphics**, on Flickr

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Slink Updated Update

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Today I got a new update to my recent update. This brings my Slink Hands to version 2.1. When you wear the hands you get an update shipped to you. It lands in the OBJECTS folder. You need to unpack it.

♫
♫ by Lana Quicksand, on Flickr

The hands, Utilities HUD v2, and the OmniHUD v6.1 update. I think the alpha layer remained the same. I can’t see a difference. I have noticed that the hands don’t fit the same as the previous version, at least with my shape. I’ll have to tweak my shape again. Or it may be SL acting up again. I’ll give it a day, may be two, before I start changing my shape. 

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Second Life Bits 2015 Week 11

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Servers

I’ve been missing User Group meetings. Yesterday I was finding a work-around for a business class HP Laserjet Multifunction Printer that kept forgetting where to send document scans. I decided HP has totally destroyed their driver & software download site. Frustrating. It used to be simple.

Daisa Daisa - Color Bust
Daisa Daisa – Color Bust by Nylon Pinkney, on Flickr

But, even if I had been at the meeting, there isn’t much news. As there was no package for the RC server channels last week there is no main channel roll out this week. 

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Black Dragon Viewer

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A new release of this experimental viewer is out: 2.4.1.9 – Feature Update.

dragon in the sky
dragon in the sky by Mikil Tiki, on Flickr

This version has the Volumetric Lighting. It also has a change to how video memory is used. Both of these changes are something people have been interested in for a long time. The memory change could reduce texture thrashing(repeated render sharp, blurry, sharp…). It may be a big aid to those with newer video cards and lots of video ram.

Niran warns at the beginning of his announcement that you need to pay attention to your video memory allocation settings to avoid excessive texture thrashing These are in-viewer settings so I suspect you can live with the defaults Niran has set.

The announcement: Black Dragon Update 2.4.1.9 “Feature Update”

Inara goes into detail about the viewer: Black Dragon 2.4.1.9: “volumetric lighting” and more. She has images of the new controls in Preferences and a video showing Volumetric Lighting.

Viewer: Second Life 3.7.26 (299443)

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My viewer updated last Thursday (3/5). I’m now running on the RC Tools Update Viewer version. This is the newer Login Viewer compiled with the new build tools.

Playing w/Pencil Sketching
Playing w/Pencil Sketching

The memory leak I’ve been dealing with in the previous version seemed worse in this version. I was lasting about 15 minutes then my viewer was stuttering, jerking and thrashing textures. I was thinking I would probably have to move off it and get another RC viewer or maybe even a Project viewer.

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The Loki Avatars

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Body snatchers unit. New mesh bodies are here. Loki Eliot has made new mesh bodies. For now they are free. There are also clothes packs to go with the avatars. These are ‘packs’ not clothes. The point being is they are for designers wanting to make clothes for the Loki avatars.

Loki Avatars
Loki Avatars

These apparently are not Fitted Mesh avatars. Loki says he is still working to figure out Fitted Mesh. That is no easy task. I’ve been through it. There is a lot to learn. The SL Classic Avatar uses morphing for size changing. Plus the scaling of shapes coming out of SL via XML files and later uploaded into SL have scaling issues. (See: Exporting Second Life Shapes) Anyone trying to figure things out has to discover these hidden problems.

I gave up and bought AvaStar, being a Blender user. Maya users can now buy MayaStar. Most of the esoteric  SL problems are solved in those two tools.

See Exploring the future of my Avatars Shape – part 5 – Loki Avatars for more details.