Second Life

Things about SL

New #SL Mesh Import Information

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It seems Magus Freston has created a viewer patch for a problem with importing animations and weight painting rigged mesh data. He explains over on SLUniverse.

A limitation of the attachment points in the LL character is that many of them have names with spaces, like “Left Pec”. Collada 1.4 doesn’t handle bone names with spaces as space is used to delimit bone names. So the idea is to replace the spaces with an underscore for the collada file so you get “Left_Pec”, which of course SL doesn’t recognize. The patch just translates “Left_Pec” back to “Left Pec” at import time.

Links to the patch and instructions for testing the patch are included in the post.

Darien Caldwell compiled a test viewer for Magus. To which Magus responded:

With Darien’s help in compiling a patched viewer we’ve been able to confirm that the patch works

This means all bones including all attachment points can be weighted to mesh and animated.

The viewer can be downloaded here: Patch Test Viewer. There is no install program. So, if you are not into manual installs in Windows this is not for you.

If you want to be brave and try it, use the link in my left column to get a copy of the Developer viewer. Install that. Download the Test viewer. It comes in a ZIP file. Use whatever to unzip the file into its own folder. It does not automatically create a folder on being unzipped. I had to specify one.

To run the viewer, look in the folder you specified for the unzip. You will find a file named LindenDeveloper.exe. Double click it to start the viewer. The viewer will open and you are good to go.

If you find a bug or have a problem with imports because of bone names, let Magus know. He will want specific information, so provide the details. Use the thread at SLUniverse.

Metareality Week 41

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Another summary of a Metareality podcast. This week the title is: Build a Bridge, which is a sin from Patterns, Linde Lab’s new game.

Metareality Podcasts

The summary is more of an index than I usually make. This is a fun podcast to listen to.

01:15 – Damien Fate – clowning around intro.

02:00 – Minecraft – Is Minecraft or SL better? A huge number of people like Minecraft better.

03:00 – Drax survey of 10 year old Minecraft users.

04:47 – Gianna does have some people from Minecraft now willing to come on the show.

06:00 – Karl didn’t get any art work for Disgruntled Frogs… its back to joke status. Send him some art work and turn it around.

07:15 – Gianna is not confirmed as the most hated person in SL for recommending a polygon limit on avatars.

08:00 – Cloud Party – Max Graf mostly making clothes for Cloud Party. Standard and Hi-Def clothes are part of the polygon limits in CP.

09:00 – Drax on immediate interest for retaining users.

11:00 – Karl on hi-poly mesh and lag complaints.

12:00 – Damien on poly limits.

13:00 – Easy is not always best. Deformer people complaining about automatic weight painting not solving all their problems.

16:45 – Second Life™ an unlimited environment.

17:15 – Patterns

18:00 – Nacho Guy – Doritos Guy – Young kids didn’t see the little guy as a problem. Many SL peeps want to change Doritos Guy and don’t like him.

22:00 – Patterns Drax, Damien using some of the same ideas from Patterns starting out process in SL for new users.

24:00 – Cloud Part tutorial and Patterns intro not the same. Patterns better.

26:00 – Drax asking Damian how he explains SL and his take on the SL stigma. (27:30 answer start)

29:00 – Drax about WoW and SL.

30:00 – Gianna embarrassed about Second Life.

31:00 – Back to Patterns: Seems cool but not currently something to play all the time.

35:00 – Minecraft people were complaining about the Patterns textures.

38:00 – Discussion about Patterns Shape Forge.

41:00 – Long term prospects for Patterns.

42:00 – Lots of people cannot find Patterns on Steam. One has to buy it on the Linden site then go to Steam.

42:30 – Buzz on Patterns.

46:00 – Patterns electricity source? I think a scripting thing… very nerdy.

48:30 – Putting excitement/enthusiasm back in Linden Lab’s products.

49:00 – Pathfinding

50:30 – Communications problems

53:00 – What You Might Look Like Playing Videogames Very Soon

55:00 – Back to excitement discussion.

01:00:00 – Comparing Vale and Linden Lab styles.

01:03:00 – Dan Pink – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

01:04:30 – Plea to a “copybotting” Second Life resident

01:06:00 – Drax on IP Property… Karl on theft… Gianna on two types of copybot; for resale and for personal use…

01:10:00 – Supreme Court to Revisit ‘First-Sale’ Copyright Doctrine

01:11:00 – Facebook’s First Ad Campaign – Parody of bad marketing… Nothing tech in the whole promotion.

01:17:50 – Coke’s New Campaign – Dancing for free Cokes. You have to see this.

1:20:00 – Burger King Campaign for free burger for Unfriending someone on Facebook… you have to hear the audio…

01:22:00 – Send Karl frog art.

01:23:20 – Damien Fate’s stuff and Botanical. Damien’s Halloween Goodies and see Damien’s FATEisland.

01:25:20 – Drax encourages you to visit: Cica Ghost’s Black And White World.

01:27:00 – Visit PODCAST AWARDS and nominate Metareality in the tech category.

#SL Mesh Deformer Update Week 41

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The Mesh Deformer is in testing. Oz Linden still needs more test clothes to test with. While the first part of the Deformer is complete, a second part is just getting started.

The Deformer as is works. I think pretty well. That ‘deforming’ part is being tested. But, a part that was added to the Deformer is the base shapes feature. Currently we can select two base shapes for the Deformer to start its calculations from. But, we could have more base shapes because choice is really what Karl added in.

Possible Prototype for Deformer Upload

The only shapes that exist right now are the default female and male. Where are we going to get more? By making and uploading them. But, we can’t do that right now. That upload thing is the part that is in development now.

Darien Caldwell is currently working on that project. The repository branch https://bitbucket.org/oz_linden/viewer-storm-1716 is what Darin is forking for a starting point.

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#SL News 2 Week 41

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Viewer 3.4.x Problem

Oz Linden has given us some news on the crashing problem they have had with the Beta and Development viewer. The Lindens believe the current Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) has the memory leak, or whatever, fixed. The crash rate is back to low rates.

For the techies, the problem had to do with how the cURL wrapper was threaded. The cURL thing has to do with computer network communication over networks. It is a programming library that makes it easier for programmers to implement communication protocols like HTTP and HTTPS. It helps with encrypting communications.

Wind Vectors Displayed – Red Lines

One more round of testing in the Beta viewer is in progress. Once completed the basic fix and changes will move to the main release viewer, likely next week (42).

It takes a couple of days of testing to collect enough data to make a determination on whether a fix is working or not. The current Beta Viewer was compiled on Saturday and released on Monday. If you have Auto-Update on, you got it before it was on the web site.

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#SL Testers Needed Oct 11

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Oskar Linden posted in the SL Forum requesting help testing some network changes. I suspect this is related to the Sudden Lag I’ve been writing about. See: Networking Optimization Pile On Test – October 11th

Linden Lab has made some changes to the way regions handle network traffic. We need your help to test. This will help us insure that regions are communicating appropriately over the network. Mainly we are concerned with agents entering via direct login, teleport, and region crossing. As well as other functions such as IMs, Voice, and Group chat.

Tomorrow, October 11th, at 4PM Pacific time (right after the server beta user group) we will conduct these tests with as many people as we have. Testing will take place on ADITI and require out of world communication we will be coordinating via IRC. This will require an IRC client connected to EFNET in the channel #sltest. If you don’t know how to do that you have until tomorrow afternoon to figure it out. 🙂

The details on the tests are here:

 – https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Networking_Optimization_Pile_On_Tests

I hope you can come and help us test these new changes.

__Oskar

The test procedure is described in the SL Wiki. See: Networking Optimization Pile On Tests.

These tests will be on the ADITI grid.

#SL News 1 Week 41

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There was a roll to the main channel this week. It seems to have gone well. At least all the regions get a restart after 3 weeks or so. The package was the one running on the Blue Steel RC Channel. It is a minor update and should have no visible effect on the simulator behavior. This is a release needed to enable a coming release.

Server & Scripting UG Oct 2012

Magnum

Will get a new package. It will be the main channel code plus the changes to allow better use of the new hardware. Not knowing exactly what hardware the Lab is upgrading to… its hard to speculate on what the change may be. Presumably, if they are running Intel, they may be adding more threading features for the iCore series chips. If they run AMD, I have no clue.

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