Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
Hamlet has a great example in his article: Project Materials Beta Viewer Brings The Spectacular World of Specularity (and More) to Second Life. The video I have here I found in Hamlet’s article. It was made by Damien Fate and runs about 1 minute.
[youtube 7mFgccXdESo]
This will allow creative types to make some wonderful silk looking clothes. I’m thinking silk Cheongsams.
Lots of bits and pieces are coming out. CHUI has made it to the main viewer. That is allowing lots of things to move forward. The Materials System now has a Project Viewer (link in left column – currently alpha version per Oz Linden – if used to edit existing content it may break it). We are seeing Third Party Viewers come out with Server Side Appearance (Baking). See Kokua 3.5.1 now with CHUI and SSA. The HTTP package is moving forward and the Interest List updates are everywhere.
Honour has a post about things changing in Group Management.
Today there will be no rollout to the main channel. None of the Release Candidates made it past testing. So, those packages are getting updates Wednesday and will run for another week.
Blue Steal and Le Tigre will continue to run the package with the new scripting functions for animation overriding. There are some changes to improve how these functions work with other scripted items, such as pose balls.*
Magnum had the update to HTTP Protocols. That package gets some bug fixes and will continue to run on Magnum.
There are rumors that the new Materials System will push objects that use the new materials into the Land Impact Accounting system. Some have found that when playing with Materials the Land Impact can escalate radically on physics cost. When using Alpha Masking the new materials can drive the Land Impact WAY UP. Plus a single prim, even phantom, can cost 500+ Physics LI. The image below shows a flattened sphere that costs 560 LI.
Andrew said some things that suggest items using Materials are planned to use the Land Impact Cost Accounting system. So, I would guess part of the reason we have this Alpha version viewer is to find problems they have missed. The Land Impact one is a big one.
In Late January I posted about the Materials System and gave an example of what the Build Panel might look like. See: Second Life Materials System 2013-4.
As it turns out this example is pretty accurate. Back in August 2012 I was explaining what Normal and Specular Maps do. See: Second Life Materials System Announced.
This week we got to see the first public Project Viewer for the Materials System. I’ve added a link in the left column. It is a dynamic link so it should always point to the latest version.
The current version is: Second Life 3.5.1 (273518) Project Materials.
Download size is just under 30mb.
It installs to its own directory and has its own settings files. It does however, share chat logs and the cache. I suggest you change the cache to use a location other than the main viewer’s cache. You can go into Preferences->Advanced->Cache Location and change it. Then restart the viewer.
A wiki page went up Today (4/8) : Release Notes – Second Life Project Materials – 3.5.1.
Warning: DO NOT use this viewer to edit objects you want to keep. This version of the Project Viewer is an Alpha version. It may BREAK anything you edit with it.
You have been warned.
All of the main grid is Materials enabled. The ADITI preview grid’s recently updated regions are Materials Enabled. Older regions are not. There is no easy way to tell for sure.
The code repository is named: viewer-development-materials. This code is NOT ready to be merged to other viewer projects. Oz Linden says they have yet to stabilize the code. That means depending on the problems they find there may or may not be significant changes and re-writes.
The viewer can be downloaded from the Alternative Viewers Page.
More information to come.