Second Life

Things about SL

New ADITI Fix Out

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Simon Linden tells us that some work has been done on the Preview Grid’s (ADITI’s) database. This is because we ADITI users have been having inventory problems over on the Preview Grid. This has been a hit-and-miss change your password roulette. One kept changing their password until it worked or they ran out of patience and used an alternate.

When users change passwords, there main grid inventory is copied over to the ADITI inventory servers, which are not to be confused with the asset servers. As I understand it there is only one asset system. But, the list of what you own is kept in a inventory database and there are different inventory servers for ADITI and AGNI the main grid.

Lots of people that change their password for security, a good thing to do, but do not use ADITI. That loads up the ADITI inventory servers with useless data.

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New Penny Patton Shapes Released

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I like a lot of the work that Penny does with getting regions and avatars scaled to realistic proportions. So, when I saw that she had released new shapes I wanted to check them out. She has a blog article about them here: More Vitruvian Shapes!

The picture is one she made to show the difference between the Linden Made Shapes and the to-scale-shapes she makes and recommends.

Free Second Life Shapes
New Vitruvian Shapes by Penny Patton

You can find Penny’s Market Place here. The Vitruvian Shapes discussed are here. And the cost is: L$0, which you can’t beat. 

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Second Life News 2013-9

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Server Side Avatar Baking – Nyx Linden gave us a bit of information about the results of the Thursday pile-on test at the Content & Mesh meeting today. The Linden goal was to collect data and that they did. The outcome is that when SSAB works, it works really well. But, it doesn’t always work.

Content & Mesh Meeting 2013-9
Content & Mesh Meeting 2013-9

The pile on test gave them new data on the known bugs and revealed a couple of new ones. Friday was spent analyzing the data. Now they are moving forward on fixing the problems. There will be another pile-on test, may be this week. But, we will have to wait and see how things go. 

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GIMP Normal Maps

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Materials are coming to Second Life™. Part of the feature is Normal Maps. So, if you want to take advantage of the new feature you are going to need to learn how to make Normal Maps. There is a new tutorial that teaches one how to use the free GIMP image editor to make them.

Indigo Mertel Plurked the link. If you’re Plurking, friend Indigo. The video is 23 minutes long.

[youtube 8Jdo3ZmtPWk]

vscorpianc made the tutorial. Vscorpianc has 277 videos on YouTube. It is a nice collection of GIMP and Blender tutorials.

She does an excellent job and speaks very well. None of the umm… errr… uuhh… or false starts and redo’s.

Second Life News 2013-8 #4

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There is a little blow back on this rollout, nothing too dramatic.

The server restarting warning changed a bit. If you have the normal human mind, you may not notice the difference. But, it is there. This change is only in the RC channels for now.

New Notification
New Notification

The threaded object rez project hit a last minute bug and was held back from RC. The problem was if you rezzed a copyable object from your inventory, the object would disappear from your inventory, as though it was no-copy. You can imagine the problems that would cause.

I’ll list some other problems that ‘some’ people are noting. We don’t know yet if these are real problems or if they are part of the Interest List change. The bet is good that if they are real problems they are associated with the Interest List. So, if you are seeing these problems, file JIRA’s and let the Lindens know. If you don’t notice things, those things don’t need to be fixed…

Object Area Search

It is currently thought that the Interest List upgrade has broken Area Search in third party viewers (TPV). You should probably file JIRA’s for this problem with your viewer developer.

AO’s Crashes

Some are reporting TPV AO’s are crashing viewers now that Interest List is out… I am not sure I believe the problem and cause are related. Lots of people blame whatever they have last heard changed, which is reasonable but often inaccurate. You should probably file JIRA’s for this problem with your viewer developer. 

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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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