I learned more about using Bento bones and animating after the meeting than I did during the meeting. The meeting lasted about 45 minutes. Discussion after the Lindens went back to work lasted over an hour. I broke my coverage into 2 videos. The meeting part is in the video here: Second Life: Project Bento 2016 Week 16. The ‘after’ meeting part is here:
I’ve trimmed the hour plus video down to 45± minutes by removing parts where there is no voice. This means you’ll notice some video jerks where I trimed out parts. You’ll have to watch the chat window too. You’ll hear some voice responses that are answers to questions and statements made in text/local chat that got trimmed out. You can see the text, you just don’t have to wait while it is typed. Continue reading →
In Second Life we run on OpenGL. Most Windows games run on DirectX. Microsoft has announced DirectX 12. It will essentially make NVIDIA 500 series and older cards obsolete. To use DX12 you’ll need a 600 or newer series card. This video explains what is happening. OpenGL is not left out.
It looks like ATI/AMD is making a replacement for OpenGL called Vulkan. It sounds like Vulcan is targeting more devices than DirectX 12. I expect to see Vulcan working on an Android mobile device way before DX12. I still have serious doubts we will see real time 3D render of good quality on mobile devices in the near future.
So, is the Lab planning to upgrade SL to Vulkan? I don’t know. I’ve asked. Vulkan is open source.
Word is OpenGL will still be developed. I think that odd. OpenGL is referred to in one place that came up in my research as a high level API, higher than Vulkan. The basic geek speak uses high and low to refer to how close you are to the hardware… the closer you get to the hardware the more programming you have to do. With higher level languages the more the language does for you.
Think of it this way… a low level addition command would be written as: place this value in Reg#1 and this other value in Reg2 then preform an XOR operation on then and place the result in Reg3 then move Reg3 to memory as variable X. A high level language would let you write the code as A + B = X and handle all the registers, operations and moves for you.
There are good reasons for using higher and lower level languages and API’s. But, generally we want API’s that produce more overall efficiency. From the other stuff said about Vulkan I would think it should be called a higher level API…. it does way more for the programmer. Whether it is higher or lower it is the next gen descendant of OpenGL.
For those of us playing in SL this means little today. But, suggests that play in Sansar will mean we will need a 600 series card or higher.
If you are looking for more details start at the Wikipedia: Vulkan API.
This week I made it to the whole meeting. There is a request for merchants with products using the new Bento skeleton to join the Torley in make the feature announcement. This an opportunity for those helping with the Project’s development to get recognition and early promotion of their goods. Tentatively they plan to start shooting the video in a week or two. So, be at next Thursday’s meeting.
Also, there was a good conversation after the meeting. I have it in another video, which will be up later. I learned a lot in that conversation. If you are planning on working with Bento, you’ll want to listen to it.
We always have problems. Second Life™ is far too complex a system to be perfect. Problems tend to range from unnoticed to really annoying. When you are around long enough some of the annoyances seem to come around again and again.
Get Your S__f Together…
Most problems are just the symptoms. A fever is caused by; a cold, flu, or bacterial infection. Same symptom, different causes. While it is way uncommon to see a fixed problem return it happens. The nature of software development tends to promote losing a fix now and then. The usual reason for a problem returning is a fix for something else, a change, or an addition breaks something else. Continue reading →
No roll out to the main channel this week. All three RC channels will get a new package. It will have a fix for Bug 11163 – llHTTPRequest returns 400 from some sims and not others. There are also some minor ‘improvements’, whatever those may be.
Get The Party Started
Viewers
The main release viewer is 4.0.3-312816. This is the HTTP/Co-routines viewer that rolled out not long ago. So, no change. Continue reading →
Today I was logging into ADITI, the preview grid. It has had its problems. Today was a mess. A combination of things happening on my computer and the latest Bento Project Viewer combined with ADITI problems meant I ended up spending 45 minutes getting logged in.
<3
We knew from people’s experiences last week that AGNI and ADITI inventories were getting confused. So, today I set my Project Bento viewer up to use a cache separate from the main and RC viewers. I’ll use the Bento exclusively on ADITI. The main, RC, and other project viewers I’ll only use on AGNI. Continue reading →
I must be cursed. I seem to have problems getting to the Project Bento meeting. Today it took me 45 minutes to login because of viewer updates and other computer issues. Fortunately Inara was there and will have more coverage than I do.
There were some fun avatars at the meeting. You’ll see them in the viewer.
You may need to use 3D modeling to create objects for your project but do not have the technical experience yet to do so, or find that your package of choice does not provide the feature that you need (for example, creating spheres in SketchUp is very difficult). There is an alternative, user-friendly solution though. You can create your objects in the online virtual reality world Second Life
I think that is pretty interesting…
Even more interesting is they promote the Firestorm Viewer as the viewer of choice. Their reason for recommending Firestorm is the Collada export feature found in Firestorm.
The article provides a tutorial on how to export 3D items from Second Life™ using the Firestorm viewer.
