Second Life and Virtual Worlds
Things about SL
This is kind of neat, so I’m posting it as a separate article.
The roll out tomorrow on the Magnum channel will have a server change that increases the size of animation assets (the file size) from 64kb to 120kb. This will allow an increase in the complication and length of animations.
Until the corresponding change arrives on the viewer we cannot take advantage of the change. But, this is a significant change in the animation side of the Second Life world.
Some people have run into a problem uploading mesh. There is a JIRA filed on the problem: SH-3055 –[PUBLIC] Cannot upload any model (*.dae) file; “xxx failed to upload, see the log file for details”.
There is a fix making its way through QA. See the preliminary build in Simon’s repository: 266471. I understand this version has a fix by Runitai Linden. Some other issues in that build have kept it from merging with the Development or Beta braches. Until the other problems are resolved this fix is a bit jammed up.
If you are having mesh upload problem, try the viewer and provide feedback on the JIRA. I can’t tell which JIRA’s are open to basic JIRA users. But, I think this one is open to general users. If not, email Alexa Linden and mention SH-3055.
You probably know viewers can update quickly. The viewer provided above (266471) is linked to via a static link. The newest version from that repo is here: Latest Simon II. I haven’t read the branch notes so I’m not sure the new versions are better for mesh upload. As the Lindens are likely to experiment with adding and removing fixes to find problems you just can’t know without reading the notes. Even then it may be impossible to tell exactly what is going on as these notes are often likely meant only for those making them. But, it may be worth a try.
This week is short on news. A couple of user group meetings were canceled. A couple of Lindens are on vacation too. So, there isn’t much coming out of Linden Lab™ this week. It is the holiday season.
Tuesday there was no package roll out. It seems a number of regions were restarted. I suspect because of the server side memory leak. It seems to be related to rebuilds of the Pathfinding Navmesh. So, any building that affects the Navmesh, like making an obstacle Static and clicking the Rebuild button, is going to push the server closer to a crash.
On Wednesday the Lindens did roll a maintenance package to all three Release Candidate channels. The same package rolled to all three channels. I has the bug fixes built after last week’s testing. Unfortunately there is a new one: Email messages sent by scripted objects are not triggering emails when the owner-recipient is offline. That is a pretty big problem. Maestro Linden has confirmed this is a problem.
Jeremy Linden has been working on the Second Life(TM) wiki, the Best Practices for building, mesh, animation, and more. Check out the main page: Good Building Practices.
This page covers all the aspects of building or making just about anything in Second Life. If you are building with mesh, check this out. It covers several aspects of reducing Land Impact costs.
I would say the place is being spruced up for the coming entry into Steam. Whatever, it is nice to the wiki updating.
Medhue Simoni has put up a video tutorial on using Slat to make Second Life™ animations. He announced it in the SL forum: SLat Tutorial for Animations – 15 minutes. If you are into animation or have been thinking about it, check it out.
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You can find SLat on Medhue’s site: Medhue Animations – Freebies – Download SLat
It has been almost two months since we heard anything out of Metareality, Gianna Borgnine. No podcasts and no Plurks. So, what’s up?
Draxtor™ Despres just yesterday sent me a notice that Flufee episode 17 was out. If you have been reading you saw me post it here. Whatever, he is on the Metareality podcast shows. So, I asked him, what’s up?
He says Gianna is ‘splendid’ just busy. The broadcast team is working on lots of intense projects. I think that is going around. I’ve got two big tutorials in the works. Darrius just got his Virtual Land Marks our the door. Geenz is busy with the materials system. So, it figures Gianna and her Sand Castles studio would have things in the works. And we all know Karl has to do that Angry Frogs thing and Christmas is getting close.
No ETA for a return of the podcasts.