Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Height Offset

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Third party viewer users are accustomed to have the a feature know as avatar z-offset or height offset. This feature allowed us to precisely control our avatars vertical position. Whether walking, sitting, or ground sitting we could adjust the avatar’s vertical position in relation to the ground or a floor.

The roll out of SSA broke this feature. It appears this is the thing most often asked about in various support groups since SSA rolled out. At least it is the question I see most consistently being asked. Well, that and temporary texture upload. But, temporary texture upload has been replaced with Local Textures for some time.

Today I see the Marine Kelly has an article out about a fix for Height Offset. See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.3 with Z offset fix. Marine also explains how to use Local textures in her article. 

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Kokua Viewer 3.6.3 Released

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WARNING! If you are a Windows user, avoid grabbing a copy and just installing it. That will create problems. Read the notice on the blog. Some things have changed and this install must be done differently than in the past. See: Kokua 3.6.3. Once you have made an update to 3.6.3 the installs will work correctly… or so we think.

Kokua/Imprudence Viewers
Kokua/Imprudence Viewers

The problem comes from the Kokua Dev Team incorporating Automatic Updates. The addition required a renaming of the install folder from Kokua Viewer to just Kokua. A basic install will result in having two versions of Kokua installed. 

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Second Life’s New Bake Fail

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Update: 2013-08-26

The Sunshine Project has greatly reduced the number of bake fails users experience. The goal of SSA was to improve the reliability of avatar baking. That goal was met. Remember. It was never believed that the SSA project would solve all avatar baking problems. The process is dependent on many aspects of the viewer, your hardware, your connection to SL (which is NOT the same as your general Internet connection), the state of your inventory, the load on SL inventory systems, and much more.

Odd Bake Fail w/SSA
Odd Bake Fail w/SSA

There was never the possibility of getting all these systems to work perfectly 100% of the time. So, from time to time, we will see bake fail. Way fewer people see tenuous bake fail now.

Problems

The problem where some textures just don’t download also seems to affect the SSA bake. The SSA ovens bakes 3 textures; head, upper body, and lower body. I’ve seen a texture for my upper body refuse to download. The head and lower body rendered quickly. Five minutes later I still had a gray torso. Doing a clothing change solved the problem.

There are reports of people remaining grey even when using the newer viewers. Others usually see them normally. I suspect this happens because the user with the problem has a poor connection to Second Life™, which is very different from having a good general connection to the Internet. 

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Second Life News 2013-34 #2

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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.

Server Beta 2013-24
Server Beta 2013-24

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. 

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Another Voice on Liquid Mesh

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Second Life Liquid Mesh
Second Life Liquid Mesh

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. 

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Second Life Liquid Mesh Continued…

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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. 

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