This viewer is not yet the main viewer for Second Life™, but it did get an update Tuesday 1/14. This is the Interesting RC Viewer. It is known for faster scene rendering. You can download it here: Second Life RC & Project Viewers. If you are doing photography, this version could save your sanity. Even shopping things are rendering fast. I haven’t got to use it much. But, it seems great, better than previous version.
A couple of years ago we were sorting out just which files we could get that had a model of the Second Life™ avatar with a default shape. We were going to need that for use with the Mesh Deformer. A good ‘default shape’ file will still be needed on the OpenSim grids. I wrote a long article on which files were which and did a lot of testing of the files to find the differences and decide which file to base my work on. I am sort of in the same place now with Fitted mesh.
I’ll say that OFFICIALLY there are no files for Fitted Mesh… yet. The reason for that is Fitted Mesh is still in development. So, there is no FINAL version of the avatar. But, we do have two files that can be used by experimenters. I’ll explain what we have have now.
Linden Fitted Mesh Avatar
The Wiki has a ZIP file that has a number of files in various formats. The files appear to have been last updated 12/16/20134/2014. They are provided in a ZIP file and include the file I show below. The Mac folder has the same files with slightly different file names.
You can see there are Blender, Collada (dae), FBX, and Maya (ma). The last two are AutoDesk file formats. For compatibility consider:
Autodesk FBX technology helps to enable the interchange of 3D data between the following Autodesk products: Autodesk® 3ds Max®, Autodesk® Maya®, Autodesk® Softimage®, Autodesk® MotionBuilder®, Autodesk® Mudbox®, Autodesk® Smoke® and Autodesk® Flame® software. Consult the compatibility charts below to learn about the level of support for these applications.
This week there are no updates rolling out to the servers. At this point all we know is Maestro Linden has said they want to allow the existing packages to run for another week. We may learn more at today’s (1/14) Server & Scripting meeting.
There are a couple of speculations that it is from a problem with region crossings or the rash of unscheduled inventory maintenance events we have been seeing. The maintenance passes are happening several times per week. SL has been working pretty well for me, so I have no guesses at this point. I do continue to see people in Answers complaining of being logged out. I’ve run into that problem too. But, only once.
Religious Places in SL
We have an interesting new page in the Second Life Wiki: Religious Places. It seems to be the result of effort from Anaimfinity Resident. Anaimfinity notes the page should be complete this month. If you know of place that is not on the list, you can add it.
Mimes
Strawberry Singh has her Monday Mimes going again. This week’s is about practical jokes. I’m admitting nothing… it wasn’t me.
The last Q&A, Jan 11, was recorded by Chakat Northspring and placed on YouTube. It runs about 2 hours. I’ve covered the parts I found interesting. The video is not edited, that would be a big job, so it is hard for me to sit through. Too much dead air. I am happy Chakat recorded it, as these meetings are not announced until shortly before they start, making it hard to know about them and get there. This seems to be the Firestorm team’s way of avoiding an over loaded region for the meeting.
[youtube Hk74R3Dsh_Q]
Firestorm Support
Ed Merryman at Saturday’s Firestorm Questions and Answer secession spoke about their support volunteers. They are not paid. Therefore, they are not assigned shifts. But, they will be trying to provide one-on-one support to those needing help.
When is the next Firestorm release? According to Ed Merryman: when it is ready.
The next Firestorm release is waiting on Linden code for the new Inventory API’s. These are changes that improve inventory loading speed and reliability. They are changes that are targeted at fixing the last of the avatar bake fail problems.
Fitted
If you use Firestorm, or any Second Life capable viewer not yet updated for Fitted Mesh (meaning most viewers), and come across someone wearing Fitted Mesh, depending on how it was made, you may see parts of the item stretching off toward the southwest corner of the region.
Fitted Mesh in older viewers – image by Inara Pey
It is thought there is a fix for the problem prior to the roll out of Fitted Mesh. The problem is caused because the avatar used by Fitted Mesh viewers is different than for non-Fitted Mesh viewers. There are additional bones in the skeleton. If your viewer doesn’t know about those bones, it does not know what to do with clothes that use the new bones. The result is vertices in the clothes are moved toward the 0,0,0 coordinate of the region (the southwest corner).
Many of us are unhappy with the change in Linden Lab’s® Terms of Service (TOS) for Second Life™ and other Linden services. For those that want to know what steps they can take, join the United Content Creators of SL’s (UCCSL) in world group.
The UCCSL recently sent another letter to the Lab and sent out a note card to residents with the steps an SL resident can take to help effect a change in the TOS. I have posted a copy of the text:
