Vanity Skin Fair
Vanity Skin Fair is going on now. Loads of skin makers are participating and displaying their new skins. The event hosts have chosen to give us an example of what future event may look like. There are a ton of problems.
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If you haven’t met Gaia, you probably don’t make machinima or sculpties. I met Gaia on the SL Forums, like two forum versions ago. Domino and others were developing tools that became PrimStar and JASS. Both of which any sculpty modeler using Blender must have.
O2 by Machinimatrix
Gaia made a new machinima for an entry to the Go Green Eco Film Competition. Gaia’s flim is one of two machinima’s entered in the contest. The winner is determined by popular vote. One needs to visit 48GoGreen, signup, watch the video, and vote. I’m writing about the film to help out Gaia and we both hope good placement in the contest (winning?) will also help Second Life. So, your votes will be appreciated.
Spyware in SL - Image by: Anonymous9000
Update: 2011-3-2 – RedZone removed from market place. Quickware detector disappears. CDS remains but the product description is gone.
Update: See JIRA SVC-6793 vote and watch.
More people are becoming aware of what RedZone (RZ) is and what it means for their privacy. From June 2010 to February 2011 people have changed from ‘wus zat?’ to ‘WTF is being done about RedZone?’ Alphaville Herald has been reporting the state of RedZone and resident reaction along with the Labs actions. I am getting more curious about RedZone (L$3,999 in Market Place) and decided I needed to review the product and state of drama around it.
If you have not yet heard about RedZone, you will. It is currently the biggest scandal on the grid. I came across a good blog post on it that explains well and fairly. I highly recommend you read the post.
See: Spies, Lies & Cold Hard Cash: Second Life Erupts In a War Over Privacy
The chatter is the region crossing changes are being activated today. I have yet to chase down the sources. The release notes for Tuesday’s rollouts show the rollout to Blue Steel. In world chat is that they are active on Magnum. One person quotes Oz Linden saying activation will be immediate.
I have to do some reading and searching to find out the details. Is this activation just for the release channels or the entire grid? I’ve been to Magnum. (Magnum RC Sandbox 1 — boxes 1 to 4 are the region names). I find it works well going from some of those regions and not so well for others.
Update: 2011-01-06 2:00 PM SLT – It seems the activation is for the Magnum release Channel. That is about 10 to 20 % of the main grid.
There is a meeting with the Beta Server team at their regular Office Hours, today at 3 PM in the ADITI Preview Grid, in Morris.
It seems an avatar carries 4 to 10 megabytes of data from region to region. It is unclear just what all that includes. Your baked avatar textures may be part of that. The state of scripts you are wearing is included. So, it is actually quite a lot of data.
News is leaking out that Linden Lab will be running a closed beta on Skylight, a browser based viewer for Second Life. Only selected regions and people will be allowed into the test. I first saw the news on New World Notes (Linden Lab Testing Version of Second Life That Runs on a Web Browser).
I’ve since come across a first hand account with the details here: Beta Testing of Skylight Web Viewer for Second Life
Viewers and Mesh
The opinions on Collada mesh coming to SL are mixed. Hamlet put a set of links in a recent blog post calling them ‘gems’. I find some are and some aren’t gems. But, digging through the chaff usually reveals nuggets of neat information. Here are the current tidbits.
One line of thinking is that Linden Lab has again botched a new feature. Some people would be unhappy if the Lab sent them chocolate, cherry filled orgasms. When one starts from the premise that the Lab can do nothing right, it is hard to see what is being done right. These negative people are leading me to the conclusion that at an SL age of 3 or 4 one becomes an old curmudgeon.
Whatever the case, there are some interesting tidbits of information leaking out. Continue reading
Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden, has written viewer code to add an alignment feature to viewers. The code has been released for TPV Developers to use. He of course has a working viewer with the code in it. I’m so jealous…
In SL I use Prim Docker to align prims and textures. But, Prim Docker is not available in OpenSim, AFAIK, which is where I do the majority of my building.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UCeU8ItZGA]
New World Notes broke the story today: Ex-Qarl Linden Creates an Alignment Tool for Second Life Building, Offers Code to Third Party Viewers – UPDATE: Qarl on Still Working in SL & What Else He’s Working On
Qarl blogged the news Wednesday: setting things straight. But, that is the first post on his blog in a couple of months.
See JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-360
And vote JIRA: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-23537
2010-12-23 – Phoenix and Imprudence have added this feature to their viewers. I expect other TPV’s to add it also. I don’t see any effort on Linden Lab’s part to reach out to Qarl and Qarl is not signing the release LL needs to add the code to the main SL viewer. However, Esbee has designed an alignment tool for the SLV2’s. I have not seen anything recently to suggest when coding and implementation might start. So, for now this is a TPV feature only.
For now those in SL are stuck with using resident made tools. Of those the most professional one and one I like is Prim Docker, available in the Market Place. It does both prims and texture alignments.