Second Life

Things about SL

#SL Animation Changes

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Avastar in Blender - Image by Machinimatrix

In January of this year Laurent Bechir filed a user story in the SL JIRA, STORM-1803. The JIRA item points to Machinimatrix’s post on Second Life’s animation format. The animation format controls what we can upload into SL. In a way this user story is a feature request.

Oddly it is the Biovision Hierarchy (BVH) file format used for uploading that restricts much of what we can do with animations in Second Life. Internally SL uses an .anim type file format that allows more animation controls than BVH.

Some of the things an ANIM file allows are:

  • Different animation priorities per-joint
  • Keyframed animation control of eyes!
  • Variable length joint offsets per frame (allowing cartoon-like “stretchy” bones)
  • Keyframed rotation and repositioning of attachments (which meshes can weight to; to use as new child bones  )
  • Client Side scaling of attachments and default mesh
  • ANIM files are text files

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#SL Problems Today

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Seems one of the data centers went down. That took the Market Place, is rumored to have knocked 10k users offline, cutoff access to ADITI, and generally borked things.

Rod has been tweeting about it. Rod started tweeting about 11:30 AM, if my math is right, which is several hours after the problem event started. Not surprising that it takes some time for bad news to reach the top.

Several of the ripple problems have been resolved. Its unclear if the Market place slowed, was fixed, and then crashed. But, it is back up. Some say it still isn’t right. But, the Lindens are working on it. Rod was going down to the data center to see what’s up.

#SL Content/Mesh News Week 7

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In the Content and Mesh User Group some interesting things came up today.

Transparent Mesh

If a mesh object is transparent should that change its Land Impact cost? Should it even render? If it doesn’t render, doesn’t it use fewer resources? It seems the Lindens are looking at this special case and considering how to implement such a change.

Content-Mesh Meeting

Runitai says the code to NOT render 100% transparent objects is in the pipeline. The release of the code has been delayed because it broke highlight transparent. (SH-2963)

Dropping Mesh Things

If you have a mesh attachment, you cannot drop it as you would a prim or sculpty attachment. Mesh objects rigged or not, detach back into inventory.

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#SL Scripting News Week 7

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The big news this week was Tiggs’ announcement about Linden Realms’ Tools. I cover that in: #SL Linden Realm Tools. Otherwise, there was little news in the scripting area.

New Functions

For some time we have had the improved List Functions bouncing in and out of the release channels. It looks like they will make it to the main grid this week. For the past week the server maintenance package including them has been running on all 3 release channels. So, it should be well tested. Keep your fingers crossed.

These are the improvements to speed up Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions that handle lists. Look back through the articles in Scripting News for a list of them.

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#SL Linden Realm Tools

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This morning Tiggs Linden visited Kelly Linden’s Scripting User Group to talk about Linden Realm Tools and made some announcements. Charlar Linden pointed out that none of the information is cast in stone, so things may change.

Tiggs Linden and a smokey pipe

Tiggs made it clear we are only getting part of the story for now by saying there are two things Tiggs would be discussing, a third Tiggs would be hinted at, and a fourth component of which no mention would be made.

Two Tools

The first two things are new scripting functions; llTeleportAgent() and llAttachToAvatarTemp().

Tiggs is opening up llTeleportAgent() to allow the same access as llTeleportAgentHome(). This means the object running a script with this command must be owned by the parcel/land owner.

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