Second Life and Virtual Worlds
This time I’ll warn you up front, the title is a deliberately ambiguous headline.
We have lots of interesting Second Life™ promotions stuff going on. Firestorm is asking for people to submit photos: Share your photos this weekend to promote Second Life. The photos will go in the Firestorm Gateway section of Flickr. Canary Beck is moderating the photo pool. It has 4,678 images as I write this.
CAUTION: SPOILER AHEAD!
There was a Third Party Developers’ meeting this past week. Of course Project Bento was a main topic and Vir Linden was there to talk about and respond to comments in the Feedback thread of the forum. So, what did we learn?
The Second Life Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.307894 was promoted to default viweer status Thursday 12/17. This viewer has fixes for Bento, which mean little as Bemto animations and avatars are not yet allowed on the main grid. It also changes from Webkit to CEF – Chromium Embedded framework.
Co-Routines or Second Life HTTP Update Viewer version 3.8.7.308134 is merging with the Second Life Vivox Viewer version 3.8.7.307744 and will reappear in RC as a single viewer named… we don’t know.
As I scan through the posts in the Second Life™ blogosphere I find more and more articles are about places. The blogosphere is becoming a tour guide. It seems Second Life is fashion and tourism. Fashion makes money, tourism doesn’t.
Whatever the case, Inara has an article on Ghost Town. But, her story is not about tourism. Ghost Town is a training area in the Firestorm Team’s regions designed as a game by MadPea. The area opens today (12/19) at 14:00 SLT or 2 PM SLT/PST. They will have entertainment from various people/groups. They are expecting the 4 regions to handle about 200 people.
This is the second of may be twelve articles on what was happening this past year, 2015. February 2015 – 43 Articles The RC server channels got an update to fix a teleport problem SL Go users were having. Viewer-wise we were being told it would be some time before we saw Webkit abandoned and … Read more
Adeon Writer has filed a Feature Request in the Second Life JIRA: BUG-10990 – [Bento] A formal method of bone-translating animations is vital for the creation of proper facial expressions.
Included in the JIRA is this quote:
[04:28:52 PM] EpicGordon Broome: I don’t like getting involved in development, JIRA’s or forums or whatever. But disallowing bone translation in animations is ignoring some very basic fundamentals of animation theory, dating back decades. I’ve scrapped multiple projects because of the lack of squash/stretch in walk cycles (Toony characters). This update is also going to break features in an upcoming avatar of mine, regarding facial animation. Which is funny, because they give us so many new facial bones – that we just can’t use properly. Raise eyebrows, pull up mouthcorners for a smile, extend a tongue, using only rotations? I cannot for the life of me see a GOOD REASON for this limitation.
I have this feature – http://imgs.moyloon.com/i/05d71e3d26.png – almost done for a new avatar of mine, a pose-able tongue. The new rig has two bones for this explicit purpose. But they are useless, as I cannot pull the tongue out of the mouth in any good fashion. I cannot pull the mouth corners around without arbitrarily locking them to rotating around a bone.
Not to mention non-humanoid avatars. We’re getting so many new bones – and yet we’ll be limiting the design freedom so much, since anything non-humanoid will be unable to avoid issues caused by inheriting rotations, since locations cannot be transformed.
Allowing animations to do this is a trivial change, as I’m fairly certain that limitations were put in place to prohibit this (Hence why .anim’s were able to do things .bvh cannot), rather than requiring lots of labor on the engine.
It doesn’t affect me personally, too much. If this is the way it ends up being, I’ll just hog more resources by alpha swapping meshes, and using more animations for each of these different states. However, it’s unnecessarily clunky, and will ruin a lot of content creator’s livelihoods in its current implementation.
Visit the JIRA and click WATCH. You’ll get update emails as this ticket proceeds. DO NOT voice opinions in the JIRA! Opinions and ‘me too’ is for the forum: Project Bento Feedback Thread. The discussion there is growing quickly.
Interesting… A friend asked me to post this press release. I’ve seen bits of information about the festival floating around the net. If you are into machinima, check it out. Issued: December 18 2015 PRESS RELEASE IMMEDIATE RELEASE MEDIA CONTACT Rahimah Rasith, Lit Up Festival Online. rahimah23@gmail.com UWA Challenge Machinima Stars Commissioned for Lit Up … Read more
