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.
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 a move to Chromium Embedded Framework. Well, it is December, almost a year later, and we are seeing the change in RC Second Life Valhalla Viewer version 4.0.0.308641. So, it was some time…
The first week of Feb the main viewer was version 3.7.25-299021. The RC viewers were:
In February we were noticing a slowing of updates, server and viewer, but improved communication between the Lab and users. We were also noticing slower rendering and more items not rendering.
In mid Feb we saw an RC of Login Viewer version 3.7.25.298971 release. The Lab was A-B testing login screens.
The new versions of the viewers compiled with VS2013 will be driving Windows XP users to other viewers. The Discussion on dropping support for XP had yet to heat up.
More work on and testing of Group Chat was in progress. HUD’s were detaching after teleport. Oz Linden spoke about how bad an idea cache clearing is. See: YouTube Oz on Cache Clearing @ 1:01:20.
Render Muting was in QA. We know it now as Avatar Complexity Information, which as of December was still in the RC viewer stage.
Week 6 saw the conclusion of the 2015 planning meeting. We heard nothing about what was decided. However, excitement within the Lab was said to be high. We already saw the Lab’s post on recent improvements to Second Life; Hover Height, Notifications, Mesh Import, VMM, Graphics Settings Presets, and developer tools.
Gaia Clary was asking for feedback on AvaStar.
The No Link> error started showing up.
Astrid Kaufmat was writing about Fitted Mesh not fitting and the need for a new avatar. At the time I thought there was little chance of a new avatar. But, Project Bento (Dec 2015) has proven me wrong.
A Freeze Frame bug started causing problems. Freeze Frame is a feature in the Snapshot panel. Closing the panel with Freeze enabled froze your world. The only escape was a relog.
This was the month OSGrid came back online after L O N G time offline. Later in the month more assets were recovered.
Net Neutrality and Chinese hacking was all up in the news. See: Net Neutrality Explained
Road to VR was on about social VR. Lots of people in the SL community, including me, were blogging about VR.
A handy work-around for tweaking a region’s Windlight settings was revealed by Honour McMillan. See: Changing Windlight & HDR. Designing Worlds did a series on photography with Strawberry Singh, Honour McMillan and Wildstar Beaumont. See: Second Life Photography Tips.
MayaStar was released. The Maya side of Blender’s AvaStar tool.
Shug Maitland was blogging her wondering whether SL1 could compete with SL2 (Sansar). Later in the month Oz Linden was speaking on the same point. See: Second Life Continuing … for real…
Blender released a set of free 3D brushes. See: Blender 3D Brushes – Free.
Avatar render cost continued to be a big topic in the SL Blogosphere. Avatar Render Cost 2015-07
This month we started to hear more about Windows 10.
The gamer’s blog MASSIVELY closed. The employees behind it came back with Massively Overpowered a few weeks later.
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.
ra*******@***il.comUWA Challenge Machinima Stars Commissioned for Lit Up Festival in Singapore
As a virtual door closes a real life one has opened for the top three winners of the final University of Western Australia Machinima Challenge VIII. The diversely talented machinima makers have each been offered a commission to create something for a cutting edge live literature digital arts festival in Singapore.
Kobuk Farshore, Tutsy Navarathna and the third-placed team of Lilia Artis and Haveit Aeon will collaborate with the Writers Centre, Singapore and its seven year old flagship festival .
The lucky artists may also get to travel to the tech hub of South-East Asia in November 2016 for the launch of their new films.
“This will depend on funding, but we hope they can come and give talks, workshops and participate in panel discussions on the relationship between virtual art and the real word.”
She went on to say that the machinima makers will hopefully get to meet up in person with their Singapore collaborator Chris Mooney-Singh who is providing original material for the three projects. In SL he is better known as Singh Albatros, back in world after a long spell having completed a doctorate in Creative Writing from Monash University in Australia.
Ms Rasith also went on to say that the Writers Centre, Singapore, a non profit organisation was glad to support SL artists in world and out world.
“In a sense we feel we have been passed the torch by Art Challenge director Jay Jay Zifanwe and the University of Western Australia.”
“Its a creative alliance. Following UWA’s lead we hope to execute other in world events and stream them live to Facebook,” she added.
More information can be found at:
http://www.litup.sg
https://www.facebook.com/LitUpSingapore/?ref=hl
