The Lindens have been dropping hints that new features and wonderful things are coming. Hamlet at New World Notes (NWN) is curious about the idea in an article today. See: What’s Linden Lab Working on Beyond Its Peaceful Foyer?Unfortunately he has no hard information for what the new and wonderful coming changes may be.
Second Life Browser Based Viewer
However, his readers do have ideas and they are posting them in the comments. Of course everything written is speculation. The speculation ranges from horrible doom to creative. Some of the suggestions, I think are interesting, for what may be coming are;
The Firestorm Development Team is running a survey on which features are most popular. See their blog post: Firestorm Feature Survey. The actual poll… survey… can be found here:Firestorm Features Survey. The survey ends Tuesday, June 28 at noon.
I went down to SL8B to see what was up. There are some fun builds and interesting stuff. I think one of the amazing toys is the Roller Coaster. I suggest a high FPS viewer for the ride. You can find the SL8B Roller Coaster here.
I think most Second Life residents have some interest in graphic cards for their computer. I see and hear of people with various graphics problems in #SL. Problems are related to various cards and driver versions. There are so many variables it is hard to know which card would be a good one to upgrade to. Tuesday morning I saw that KirstenLee had published information on which cards were doing well with S21 viewer.
There are other sources of good information on video cards. Only Kirsten’s is specifically targeted at Second Life. Others are more about the geeky pure performance factors. If you are interested in knowing the muscle a card has, check these sources;
Tom’s Hardware – This site reviews computer hardware. There are sections on the individual components, like graphics cards. For those that need single slot cards (space limited) see: Single-Slot Graphics: Whose Card Is Fastest?Most high performance graphics cards plug into one slot but are so thick they use up two slots. For the best overall see: Best Graphics Cards For The Money: May 2011. Of course this article will become out dated. So, check down the left side of the home page for the latest reviews.
Gaia Clary makes sculpty and mesh tutorials. I’ve linked to several in previous articles. I think they are very well explained tutorials. Gaia has a revised tutorial out about mesh. Revised may be unfair, but I’ve seen an earlier version so… but you may find this a Finished Version of the tutorial. This is a very complete first walk through about SL Mesh. It is not about how to use Blender or 3DS.
The tutorial is made for those frailer with making sculpties in Blender, 3DS, or Maya. It is not a noob’s tutorial. I think it is worth a read by newbies. It covers all the things one is going to need to be able to do with their modeling program. It is somewhat a list of things to learn. Plus it is a good foundation for terms used with SL.
Mesh is being finalized for the main grid. So, not much new information is available. Costs are being refined, bugs are being stomped, and mesh uploads studied to better figure out what is a just cost for mesh. I’m seeing more information about mesh appearing in the forum. People are experimenting with mesh and figuring out how it works. The following is what was going on in this week’s meeting.
Some Mesh Avatars
Bones
There is a desire by many to have avatar skeletons with adjustable proportions. Being able to adjust the bones size and rotation is part of being able to make custom avatars. We have been told that bone adjustments will not be part of the first mesh release. However, some have noticed the mesh previewer is handling and revealing bone information. I’ll suggest that indicates that Linden Lab is headed in that direction. Nyx tells us that feature is definitely NOT in the plans for first release.
