Category Archives: SLV2, 3, 4, 5, & 6 Series

The Linden made series of viewers

Second Life News Week #39

by

0

General News

Blender 2.80 released a few weeks back. I am waiting for AvaStar to update before seriously trying to use it. And now I see a version 2.81 is planned for release in November 2019.

Blender Nation is doing a series of articles and videos that show the planned new features in 2.81. Look for the Blender development watch.

Bea's Portrait

Bea’s Portrait

Photoshop  updated and added new features recently. See What New? There is nothing that will be earthshattering for Second Life™ designers. There are features that will make those into SL Photography happy.

What’s Next – The Lab has a blog post up on what is coming for Second Life. See What’s Next for Linden Lab? There are notable changes to Sansar. The Lab says they are ‘reimagining’ Sansar. See Your World Is Waiting: The Makers Of Second Life Reimagine Sansar As An Immersive Destination For Gaming, Commerce & Live Events. I didn’t get how this ‘reimaging’ is different from the initial ‘imagining’. Whatever… If you haven’t been in Sansar for a while, it may be time to look again.

Move to Cloud – The What Next article (above) touches on what is happening with the move to the cloud. Inventory and the maps-website have already been moved to the cloud. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #38

by

1

General News

What’s with BoM and Heads?

My experience point is with GA.EG’s Jennifer head. The rest is hearsay. So, you’ve been warned.

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

Every Time I Breathe I Take You In

There is a significant problem, IMO, taking the current Bento Mesh Heads into BoM compatibility. As the pre-BoM Bento Heads provide considerable control over makeup, at least GA.EG does, and I see no simple way to provide that control to the system layer style of makeup, I expect little change as BoM capability is added to Bento Mesh Heads.

Thus, the simple change is to add the ability to add BoM skin to a Bento-Head. GA.EG does that with an applier. A new head could be made that has BoM built-in. But, would it still provide a choice of applier or BoM skin? The applier does. A new head would have to add scripting to provide the choice. I find script weight already a problem.

I love the Slink Redux body because it reduces my script load by about 2MB. A BoM-Head that increases script load seems counterproductive. Continue reading →

Pages: 1 2 3

Second Life News Week #37

by

0

Destinations Video

Experiences

Many of you will know Experiences have been borked. The Lindens have a fix, sort of… See their SL Blog post on their fix. See Experience Scripts Experiencing Trouble.

The bug is BUG-227526 – Issue with compiled experiences being lost when a script is copied in-world.

The Shrek Ears Thing

If you used Places Pages in 2017 then you noticed a problem back then. They were suddenly gone. Seems a developer ran a clear & reset script on the live database of Place Pages. Then they found out the database’s backups (plural) were scrambled.

The result was the database could not be restored. That data was gone. So, Place Pages had to be rebuilt by the page owner. It also meant ALL the SL backups were tested to make sure they would work if needed.

It was purely human error. A bummer. But, I bring it up now because from it we learned about Shrek Ears in the Linden offices. You’ve likely seen the movie or at least the trailer so you know what Shrek’s ears look like. But what they mean in Linden circles is unique and SL lore now. The full story is here, “Re-experience the fun of customizing your Place Page!” A Tale of Oops from Ops. Check it out to learn what the Shrek Ears thing is about. Then you’ll understand why some Lindens were recently wearing Shrek Ears… the recent problem with Experience scripts. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #36

by

3

General News

SL Travel

Ever wonder how the SL travel and places blogs find those awesome places?

It seems the Blogger & Vlogger Network has a list of them. (here) They also have a form one can fill out to add to the list. So, they find these places when people stumble-on or otherwise find them and add them to the list.

Only those who dream learn to fly

Only those who dream learn to fly

The list is titled Photogenic, Rezzable Sims. Rezzable? My first thought was griefers will LOVE this list. However, many of the locations require membership in a group to get rez-rights and a number of those groups have a Join Fee. About 20 of the 37 locations are listed as free. If there is a cost it is referenced in the listing. They also have the region’s maturity rating, PG, Moderate, and Adult. Nine are rated Adult, but not all 9 are hook-up places. And even those that are, look good.

The list apparently has some age. Several of the links landed me at places other than the obvious intended landing point but the correct region. However, a couple of regions were gone or repurposed.

I found Backdrop Cove (Map URL) in the list. Got some pictures. This place is not as crowded as Backdrop City. So, posing and setup was nicer. Also, you can rez stuff without having to join a group. They use a 60-minute return. It is a moderate region and the pose and animation stuff I saw was PG. Donations are appreciated. Please help out. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #35

by

5

I’m late getting this news out as I have been playing with my new Slink BoM version of the Physique body. I posted that article yesterday.

General News

Last Friday’s Third-Party Devs’ UG meeting lasted 30 min. Oz Linden wasn’t there and most of the usual crowd wasn’t there. Vir Linden facilitated the meeting. There was not much in the way of ‘new’ news.

Vir spoke about the BoM viewer being planned to ship Monday, which it did – 6.3.0, and the updated documentation for BoM. With the limited attendance, there was little information on when third-party viewers will adopt the feature and release BoM capable viewers. None of the FS programmers were around. So, for now, it is ‘wait and see’.

BoM Viewer Comparison

Any viewer that does not support BoM will not show avatars using BoM correctly. So, serious adoption of BoM will wait on Firestorm’s next release.

I have no doubt that a Firestorm BoM viewer is in testing, but, no one has said so. If there are no bugs found then I would expect a new release of Firestorm in the next 4 to 6 weeks, possibly sooner. The last update was about 6 weeks ago. The FS Team gets blowback if they release updates too often. It is a grouchy bunch of users on Firestorm… Yes, I do happen to use FS… So, I can’t predict what they’ll do update-wise.

New Project Viewer Musadine – This is the Animesh modify version. See below for more information. Continue reading →

Pages: 1 2

BoM to Release Monday

by

4

Vir Linden has posted in the SL Forum BoM releasing Soon.

So, BoM will release August 26, Monday.

Never Let Me Down Again…

Never Let Me Down Again…

There is an RC level viewer for BoM here, which you can use now. Presumably, that RC Viewer will promote to the main default SL Viewer.

There mostly aren’t any BoM products to play with. But, you can jump to the Knowledgebase article on Bakes On Mesh and learn how to use BoM. There is also a step-by-step for making BoM stuff. For users, the use of BoM will be almost identical to how we use the classic avatar and system clothes.

I know Slink is ready to release their BoM compatible Slink bodies. We should see those quickly. Presumably, other major designers have BoM products waiting in the wings. So I expect BoM to quickly be adopted by a significant number of SL residents.

The hope is this feature will reduce ACI and improve SL performance. BoM should affect bodies, clothes, feet, heads, and hands. But, it will NOT affect existing mesh bodies and clothes. Those will all continue to work as they do today. Only new BoM capable stuff will use the new feature.

Second Life News Week #33 Late

by

0

General News

Busy week for me in RL. I’m behind. MIssed the Topless Cruise. We do have interesting news.

We had the first Content Creators’ meeting in a couple of weeks. Vir Linden gave us a little information on what came up in the Linden Summit Meeting held in Massecuites a couple of weeks ago.

orinoco valley

orinoco valley

The ARCTan project is being set at a priority such that we will likely see work resuming on it this quarter.

EEP and BoM are hopefully to soon release. Vir is on BoM now. There are a few bugs blocking the release of each. EEP has some performance issues and problems with various graphics cards. BoM has good overall performance. But shadows and alphas still have some render problems.

Also, there should be a new Animesh Project Viewer out soon. This will have the Phase II stuff, animesh customization. There will be LSL stuff to play with.

Dirt Sim 421 is the server-side of the viewer on ADITI that works with this coming Animesh Viewer. Continue reading →

Second Life News Week #32

by

0

General News

The Third-Party Dev’s meeting was a couple of weeks ago. We learned the BoM and Render viewers are very close to release. The EEP viewer was/is not quite ready.

So, file your JIRA’s on BoM.

The Render viewer would have released except for it being Linden Summit Week. But… it got an update this week and did not release…

No new rendering projects until the current ones are released.

Parcel Voice has some problems the Lindens are considering solutions for. See BUG-227350. The JIRA was accepted for its value as a problem statement more so than its presented solution.

Topless Cruisers has a new hangout, Eden Naturopolis. There are 7 boat slips for rent in the area. Also, this location is often the destination point for Tuesday’s cruises. Bouncing boobies parties.

Topless Cruising Map for August 6, 2019

A number of Lumiya Viewer users showed up at the Server-Scripting UG. You probably know the UDP turn-off for assets killed Lumiya for anything but chat text use. I expect they will show up at Oz’s Wednesday morning UG for Open Source.

There is a mobile viewer in the works. But, don’t expect a Lumiya replacement this year or probably not even next year. WAY MORE people are going to have to show up at meetings asking for help.

Servers

Last week the Linens were having their Summit Meeting. We don’t get to know everything going on in those meetings. There is usually a bunch of planning going on. I suspect we will hear a bit of that news in the coming meetings. Otherwise, there has not been much news.

There is no Deploys post today.

My Zindra region has not restarted as of 11:00 AM SLT.

Simon Linden told us at the Server-Scripting UG that we will get a new RC release next week, maybe two. Continue reading →