Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
Nothing much new from the Beta Server user group. SSA did roll out. It is working for all but a few people. There are some bake fails here and there. Most are inventory fails that seem to affect the viewer and SSA servers too.
There are likely other causes for bake fail. We will find them as time passes. But, in general most are finding the new SSA system to be way better.
Gaia Clary, author of the Avastar Blender add-on, has posted an article on Second Life™ Liquid Mesh. See: Liquid Mesh. Gaia commented on Strawberry Singh’s blog at the end of the article: Hucci Akita Boots & Questions regarding “Liquid Mesh”
Gaia provides the same take on Liquid Mesh that I do. Gaia is, however, more strongly saying creative types should be avoiding the use of the technique in products.
Gaia has a stronger belief than I do that collision bones won’t go away. I suspect there will always be some part of the avatar that is used for detecting/calculating collisions. There is no doubt collisions will always be need to be detected. That is part of how virtual work.
Neither of us has any idea how likely a change to collision detection is if the avatar changes. Nor can we anticipate what changes to Second Life performance might be an incentive to change the detection system.
Strawberry Singh published an article asking questions about Liquid Mesh. Several people are answering and some are asking more questions. See: Hucci Akita Boots & Questions regarding “Liquid Mesh”. In many cases the questions come from ambiguous terms used in the discussion.
Strawberry made a video to demonstrate what she was seeing and asking about.
[youtube -q9_ZciPBlw]
The boots are gorgeous.
They are ‘Liquid Mesh.’ The precise technical language is to say the boots are rigged to the collision bones. For most SL users that is meaningless jargon.
Over on the Insert Funny Name Here blog there is a new basic Materials Tutorial for those SL’ers building with prims. See: Grown Up. To learn how the new maps work see: Specular Maps Tutorial.
Reflecting back I find this year to be a year when I know more about what the Lindens are doing and have in the pipeline than at any time previously. Yet, we still know almost nothing about what the Lindens plan to put in the pipeline next. That is typical in the free world’s competitive business market place. But, it is certainly annoying.
Many of the things the Lindens are doing now are large projects. When Rod started with Linden Lab the plan was to start fixing and changing problems to make SL more enjoyable and useable. First the easily fixed things were fixed. In these years managed by Rod large projects are more the order of daily business. Bake fail was a problem long before Rod arrived. In 2011 the Lab started working to figure out the causes and now in August 2013 a change to reduce bake fail has just rolled out.
Hamlet has an interesting article up today: New Singularity Viewer Lets SL Creators Convert & Export Their Prim-Based Works to Unity 3D & Other Top Platforms. Hamlet explains why this is such an important aspect of Second Life™. Hamlet links to the article explaining how to do the export from SL to Unity 3D. [youtube … Read more