Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Mesh – Double Materials

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With avatars we can have texture layers. A jacket is on top of shirt, which is on top of an undershirt, which is on top of the skin with a tattoo layer in there somewhere. But, we cannot do that with prims. We have one texture on one surface/face. At some point we will have normal and specular maps. Those are not really texture layers. Those are more like effects. I doubt this process will be affected by the Materials System. So, this offers some interesting possibilities.

Back in May 2012 Kitsune Shan posted this YouTube video showing textures layered over the same polygons in a mesh object.

[youtube kdYv0R6CG8s]

A couple of days ago Tommy Rampal asked in the SL forum, how did Kitsune do that? A discussion followed. See the thread: Assigning multiple materials to a polygon.

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Building w/Mesh in Second Life

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Penny Patton has a new article out on building with mesh. See: Mesh Content Creators, You’re Doing It Wrong! She is so subtle.

Penny has a region named Milk and Cream (Adult NSFW). She has been rebuilding this area and replacing sculpties and prims with mesh objects. She is finding the general FPS rate has in general increased from 15 to 30. Her prim cost (Land Impact Cost now) has been cut in half; allowing her to add more stuff. Plus mesh things can be much more detailed. When the Materials System goes live the amount of detail will increase enormously.

Penny has a thing about building to scale in Second Life. I’ve written about her articles several times. Her point is that if one builds to scale they can have more stuff in a region. Also having things properly scaled can reduce the Land Impact Cost. The LIC of mesh goes up as the scale is increased.

The main thrust of her article is about how people are scaling mesh objects up to work with the over sized avatars many SL users wear. That is significantly costing them additional tier and reducing the amount of content they can have in a region.

Check out the article and then visit Milk & Cream. See if Milk & Cream provides better performance than other areas of the same complexity.

Second Life News 2013-8 #3

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The rollouts to the Main and RC’s should happen today and tomorrow as I reported yesterday. Simon Linden expects the maintenance package on Magnum to be promoted next week. But, that is a ways off. However, rollouts will return to the normal schedule next week.

Grey Goo - Tasty Planet Game
Grey Goo – Tasty Planet Game – Read On

Maestro Linden changed the forum Deploys post to say a bug was found in the prim rez code running on Le Tigre. Also the Blue Steel performance improvements package ran into problems. Both will drop out of the RC channels and move back into QA. The crash mode code that ran on Le Tigre last week will roll to all the RC’s this week (8). 

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Second Life BUG-355 – Sudden Lag

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BUG-355 – Increased Instant Sim Lag & Avi Crashes During Major Events – sim network issue. While this is marked ‘unassigned’, it is active in the SL Forum. See the thread: Increase in Instant SIM LAG & Crashes During Larger Events – Network Source? This thread started in late September 2012 and has grown to 11 pages or 101 replies.

I’ve added a comment to BUG-355 that remains unassigned. If you own a region or are an estate manager and seeing the problem, file a JIRA and reference BUG-355. It would also help if you could attend the Server-Scripting meeting held in Denby, AGNI (main grid) on Tuesdays at noon (SLT/PST). Also, attend the Beta Server meeting in Morris, ADITI (beta grid) Thursdays at 3 PM (SLT/PST).

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Second Life News 2013-8 #2

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The rollouts have been moved back one day because of Monday being a holiday.

The main channel will get the Interest List and Materials packages on Wednesday. However, the RC channels will only get the bug fix package. The other packages are not coming out as they had bugs that were found. The RC channels will rollout on Thursday.

More later…