Second Life: SL Main Viewer Update 2017 w16 – New Features

4/14 the main viewer updated to version 5.0.4.325124. If you have automatic update on, you likely already have the update installed. This version was the RC maintenance version. Release Notes

Garden escape...

This version will now remember if you want to Fully Render a specific avatar that exceeds your ACI setting. You can set an avatar to render as; Default, Always, or Never.

In Preferences->Graphics there is a setting to always render friends regardless of ACI setting. Plus, an EXCEPTIONS button so you can edit who you render or don’t. You can also add people using the + in the upper right. That opens a ‘chooser’ where you can search for a name, or another tab lets you pick from friends, and another tab to pick from nearby avatars.

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Second Life News 2017 w16

Server

The main channel got an update Tuesday. This is the one with; several internal fixes and two new internal logging modes, another adjustment to fix issues with offline IM and Group Notice delivery reliability, and fixes an issue where large numbers of objects could be returned after a rolling restart.

Graveyard of the Butterflies - Monument
Graveyard of the Butterflies – Monument

The RC channels are getting two new packages. One is the one with increased population limits. That goes on Blue Steel and Le Tigre. The other has not been announced (TBD). It will be on Magnum.

At the Server-Scripting UG they claim the TBD is a top-secret project. You’ll have to decide if they are messing with us or being serious. Both are possible.

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Second Life: Will We Bake Our Mesh Body Avatars?

The idea of baking mesh avatars has been a subject coming up in the Content Creators UG over the last couple of weeks. The idea is to change how mesh avatars work. If you don’t understand how a Classic body layers work now, this may be confusing. I’ll try to sort it.

Mechanical beauty
Mechanical beauty

Starting back a couple of years, the Lindens added Server Side Appearance baking (SSA). The Classic avatar is made of three separate parts; head, upper body, and lower body. The parts allow layering of textures placed on the Classic body. Sort of like sticking decals one a top another. 

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AvaStar-Blender: Switching from IK to FK and Back

Medhue streamed a tutorial this weekend. He was showing how to switch between IK and FK animating. In September 2014 I was facing that problem and posted a tutorial titled: Blender-AvaStar Animation IK/FK Tip because I couldn’t find any tutorials saying how to change between the two animating styles.

I think the video is a way better tutorial on switching between the two styles than my old ‘text’ tutorial.

 

Second Life and NVIDA Update Problem – Fix

It seems people updating to the current NVIDIA driver are having problems logging in. They crash on viewer launch.

As of April 6, there is an NVIDIA driver version 381.65. This is the one people have a problem with. The previous version 378.92, the one I am running, does not have the problem. So, some people are rolling back to 378.92.

Whirly Fizzle has posted in the SL Forum that the problem has been tracked to NVIDIA’s Shadowplay/Share feature. Turn it off and things work.

We are early in this problem fix cycle. So, we may learn more soon.

Second Life and Sansar in the News

The Irish Times has an article by Marie Boran, Virtual reality is giving Second Life a second lease of life. (4/13) Marie was a participant in Second Life™ in 2010. In the first few words she reports the Trump-Swastikas at a Bernie Sanders meetup. That mention should clue people to the possibility of the reporting being shallow. I’ll try to push the Sansar news deeper and provide some perspective on Second Life..

The Blarneystone in Dublin, SL – 2017

Marie moves on to point out that while there is an ‘underbelly’ to SL, that is often reported on, there is also a surprising number of ‘ordinary’ folks in SL. The real world is pretty much that way… so…

Next Marie says her 2010 outfit and skin had expired… I went back and tried some of my 2008 outfits, well, we didn’t have “Outfits” in 2008. So, I had to find some stuff from then and make an outfit to see if things still worked. They did. I looked horrible. We can’t be sure what happened to Marie. I’ll take this as being another nail in ‘shallow’. But…

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