Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life and What Fits

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A couple of days ago Jeremy Linden put a new page into the Second Life™ Knowledge Base: Buying clothing that fits your avatar. The same day a post appeared in the Second Life Blog: Help Customers Buy Clothing that Fits their Avatars. Both of these target the confusion surrounding mesh clothes and avatars.

Consider. We started out with what I call system clothes. These are the decals we place on the avatar that look like clothes. This is the shirt or pants we make when use the features in Appearance. We hang prims and sculpties on the avatar to embellish the ‘decal’ clothes. These clothes fit the avatar perfectly. Consider ‘perfectly’ to mean no skin poke through.

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The Ditko University in Second Life

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Update: Ditko University’s in-world location closed May 28, 2014.

Somewhere in the information flowing past me I came across The Ditko University and the classes they teach. Their class schedule is here: Ditko Class Schedule. This item caught my eye: Blender Avastar Animations 101 by Haven Ditko.

I’ve done animations, but my animations (about 6) were done before I got Avastar. While I did a lot of work figuring out animation retargeting last year, I was having a tough time of it. Blender had problems at the time and I am a novice when it comes to animating. So, I wanted to check out this class and make sure I have a good understanding of the basics. 

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Philip Speaks at VWBPE 2014

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This morning Daniel Voyager has a link to this video, which is about 33 minutes. Daniel also has an index to the video: VWBPE 2014: Philip Rosedale Keynotes – Live Updates. It is based on time-of-day rather than minute marks. But, you can get a sense of where in the video things are.

I didn’t hear much new information in this speech/video. Drax, or at least some Draxtor… and it sounds like a question the world famous Drax we know would ask, asks if High Fidelity (HF) will make Second Life™ obsolete. In answering Philip sounds a bit like a politician. Meaning I didn’t really hear an answer. There is no yes or no or may be or what would have been most accurate: I don’t know. He does point out that Linden Lab is an investor in HF. He expects HF technology to make it into Second Life.

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But, the question is valid. Think about it. If HF can eliminate lag then Second Life will have to eliminate lag or I believe it will die. Which would you rather use? A laggy world or a highly responsive one? We already know lag is a major objection that new users of Second Life have. 

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Second Life Avatar Shape

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Loki Eliot has an article up titled: Exploring the future of my Avatars Shape.

The article is a good account of the problems and decisions we must handle when making full avatars and clothes. It is worth the time to read.

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We have many considerations related to where the Second Life Avatar is going and how we will work with it. The Lindens see things in terms different from those we see. The Lindens are dealing with programming issues and development costs. Since they seldom make clothes and seldom are involved in fashion the priorities are lopsided toward the technical. Lindens may not change appearance/clothes for years.

Of course the majority of SL users have no idea of the technical complications. But, they are into fashion and may change their appearance several times per week, if not per day. So, the majority of users have priorities lopsided toward the aesthetic side.

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JIRA STORM-1800

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The two big JIRA items relating to the Second Life avatar are STORM-1716 and STORM-1800. 1716 was the Mesh Deformer. It is considered closed with the release of Fitted Mesh. 1800 is the item that deals with the avatar weighting and mesh layout, which many of us still consider a problem.

You can see the partial fix discussed in 1800 in the Singularity Viewer. It uses the adjusted weights recommended as an improvement to the existing avatar we see in the SL Viewer. I’ve added the weight to a couple of versions of the SL Viewer. It helps. But, the patch only affects what I see not others. You can add the fix to your viewer using the file found in the JIRA. 

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Second Life News 2014-15 #2

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Group Ban – Baker Linden is working toward getting Group Ban running grid wide in ADITI (preview/beta grid). He has a handful of small bugs to get fixed. Then he’ll figure out if he is going to be able to go to and RC Viewer or Project Viewer.

If all goes well in ADITI it will soon roll out to AGNI, the main grid, as an RC Server package. At that point people with large groups will be thrilled to get the feature.

Whirly & Jenna @ Server-Scripting UG 2014-15
Whirly & Jenna @ Server-Scripting UG 2014-15

Materials Functions for LSL – We currently cannot script material changes. People have been asking for Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions to work with materials since before materials were released.

Today in the Server Scripting User Group Simon Linden said getting those functions implemented was pretty high on their to-do list. That still gives us no idea when we might see them, but it does give us hope that it’s going to get done.

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