Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Avatar UVMaps Quirks

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When the current avatar was made the Lindens were optimizing for performance. This meant they took some crafty shortcuts to save download and CPU time. One of those crafty design features creates some strange behavior with the Second Life™ avatar’s UVMap and how the viewer handles it.

Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix.org has figured out what is going on and how to compensate for it.

To understand the problem and how to work around it check out the video that Gaia made.

[youtube GRFkK6vcOEs]

The problem is complex. Solving it allows one to make better looking skins and system clothes. Understanding what is happening allows one to make better mesh clothes.

Drop by the SL Forum and thank Gaia for this video and figuring out how the UVMap is being maniplulated. Improve UVs for SL compatible meshes.

Obviously making mesh clothes is complex. As time has passed we have learned how complex it is. That makes for a very steep learning curve. Perhaps while the Lindens are talking about Liquid Mesh they could say a word or two about how to make things easier for new clothes makers.

 

RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.1

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A new release of RLViewer is out. You don’t really need it… no, I’m being nice. There is a problem with version 2.8.5.0 and version 2.5.8.1 is sort of a fix. Or you can just follow directions in the announcement post and fix your currently installed 2.8.5.0 version viewer.

See: RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.1. You need to copy 5 files from the SL Viewer install folder over to the RLV folder.

Or download the new RestrainedLove Viewer 2.8.5.1 version here.

There is also a problem with Materials in the viewer. It breaks InvisiPrims… REALLY!!! I thought that had been broken in the SL Viewers forever. Whatever, Marine Kelley has been providing support for InvisiPrims because some RLV products need them to hide parts of the avatar under script control.

It looks like Marine is not going to be able to cobble up a working fix. Marine is planning to change the products to operate a different way. So, I guess start writing off InvisiPrims permanently.

 

Firestorm Blocking Update

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Today Jessica Lyon posted on the Firestorm blog about Saturday’s 3 hour Q & A meeting. See: Q&A – Don’t be surprised… be informed.

In the comments the key question was asked. When will Phoenix blocking start? Jessica answered:

We haven’t decided yet what we will do with Phoenix. I may not have been clear at the meeting but the 3 version rule will start as of now, existing builds don’t really fall into the rule because we expect SSA will kill them off anyways. However if after SSA is fully deployed for a few weeks, we see there are still thousands on Phoenix, we ‘may’ decide to block it. I would rather avoid that if I could though.

Singularity 1.8.1 Released

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With word coming that the Phoenix and older Firestorm viewers will be blocked from the SL Grid by the Firestorm Team, it would seem Singularity is in a good position to pick up more users. So, this new release is welcome news to many.

The headline for Singularity is that it gets Media On A Prim (MOAP) with this version.  There are 20± more additions to the Singularity Viewer.

See the announcement here: 1.8.1 – Prim Media.

Second Life News 2013-33

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We have the plans for this week’s roll outs. Caleb Linden tells us that there will be no roll to the main grid. That probably means no region restart either.

Blue Steel

This channel gets a new maintenance package. The release notes are here. The fixes included are:

BUG-3547 – Sim Crossing Rezzes Objects Surrounding Individuals. The grey box attachment problem. It is described as: A grey box, untextured, rezzed around a person sitting on a vehicle (Loonetta Sailing Boat) when the boat performed a sim crossing. The box generally surrounds most of the person who was sitting in the passenger seat of the boat. It happened repeatedly. The person then loses any form of avatar control and must relog. The box appears, when edited, to be linked to the boat.

BUG-3291 – llListen in linked objects is listening at root instead of linked object local position *after re-rezzing the linkset* Note: Attachments always listen at the AV position.

Fixed a few crash modes.

New: Region should block rezzing and entering during final region restart countdown time, the 60 seconds before a shutdown.

Le Tigre

This channel also gets a new package. It is said to only include a few internal bug fixes which shouldn’t show any visible changes to the residents.

Magnum

This channel is going to keep the SSA package. It gets no changes and may not even see a restart pass.