Virtual World News

Mesh Deformer Project Meeting Today

by

To day at 2 PM PT/SLT in-world will be a meeting about the Mesh Deformer Project. The meeting will be at Garden of Dreams. This is designing Worlds Treet.tv studio. A featured speaker is a Maxwell Graf, well-known designer and owner of Rustica. Also Graham Dartmouth of Builders Brewery and and Jusden Jonstone, an Opensource Developer, who has worked both for Linden Lab and for Third Party Viewers will be speaking.

Designing Worlds Planned Mesh Deformer Project Meeting

The Mesh Deformer is about getting mesh clothes to work with the appearance sliders. It is more complex than that, but basically that is the part that will affect most SL residents.

I suspect we will get new information on the project. There is likely to be some fund raising going on too.

This meeting is an hour after the Content Creators User Group (Mesh Group) meeting. This is the week the Lindens said they could give us more information on their research into what may be the best way to provide mesh deformation in SL. I’ll have more on that later in the day.

You can learn more about the project at Indiegogo.com.

SL Viewer Interface to Change

by

Well… this should be interesting. We are getting a new Viewer Interface by the end of October or there about.

It also explains why the viewer development team has basically disappeared. While the Lindens were proclaiming they would never do another Hide and Develop project without user input, our new CEO having messed that fiasco has the Lab apparently doing exactly that… we’ll see how it works.

The announcement is at SLUniverse. This is an expansion of the recent SL Forum announcement of New Things in SL. The information is about a week old. Finding these gems of information in odd places plus some stats someone posted in the  SLUniverse thread about how many have read the SLUniver forum vs the SL Forum shows the Lindens have yet to figure out how to communicate with the users.

Cyanist to Fix Second Life Clothes

by

This is just an interesting bit of trivia for my Myst friends. The trivia is the headline and is repeated in the last line of this post. The rest in between is making it make sense for Myst-Uru fans. Many in the Myst-Uru fan realm are not 3D modelers and they are not part of the SL community. So, many of what those of us in Second Life consider basic information needs to be explained.

Relto in Myst-Uru World: Uru Live

To set the stage, Myst fans need to know what’s up in English not SL jargon. Second Life (SL), is a virtual world in which about 660 Uru fans have joined the in-world group D’ni Refugees (SLURL). I’ve long pushed it as a place to start learning 3D modeling. I think a large portion of those fans in SL have learned some aspect of 3D modeling. Whatever the case, modeling in SL has been done with primitive shapes (usually called prims). The primitive shapes are changed by parametric deformations. There’s a geeky term, I’ll explain it.

Read more

Shockwaves in Second Life

by
End of SexGen?

The Alphaville Herald has a story about Stroker Serpentine leaving Second Life and making his Cadillac of sex beds, the SexGen Ultra 600,flagship of his SexGen line, available for free. Yes, for free. This was a multi-thousand L$ product.

Think about what that will do to other sex bed makers and the makers of sex animations. For them this is disaster, economic chaos. At least many are spinning it that way. When one considers there are entrepreneurs that sell prim cubes to noobies for L$100 one gives less credit to the sky-is-falling screams.

As The Herald points out, some regions pay tier from sales of their sex products. This release will impact many of them and we may lose a number of regions… or not. Only time will tell. But, it seems likely to me.

Read the article here: Free Sex Beds

There is lots of drama in the issue and RL lawsuits.  Some of the drama is… discussed… here: Jumpman Lane – The “Kang” of Second Life. This is an interview that appears in the Alphaville Herald. You’ll have to decide who is telling which truth or building drama and ego or whatever else you can read into it. I have no clue.

Getting the Free Goodies

The free stuff is sitting here: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/SexGen/131/120/22

Read more

Viewer Evolution User Group Closed?

by
Communication?

Once upon a time we had a group that dealt with the evolution of the Second Life Viewer. Esbee Linden ran the group for a time then left Linden Lab. After she left Oz Linden ran the group for a time. When Esbee came back to the Lab Oz dropped the meeting. Presumably it was Esbee’s to deal with.

Office Hours – User Groups

The User Groups page used to have a Viewer Evolution User Group (VEUG). That has been removed. Some of the meeting archives still survive. Some links for VEUG now forward to the Open Development User Group (ODUG) or so I’ve heard. I haven’t found any links left.

The ODUG meets Wednesdays at 1:30 PM SLT/PDT. See the User Groups page for location.

Read more

Language Translation in Second Life

by

Some time ago I wrote about Google shutting down their free Translation API. This is the service Google provided and Second Life Viewers use to handle language translation. Google has now come out (8/24) with pricing for the Paid-Translation-Service-API. So, what happens to our viewers?

Google Translate

As It Is Now

It only works in Local Chat and is disabled by default. One enables it in Me->Preferences->Chat. At the bottom of the panel is a check box to enable machine translation.

Read more