Jessica and Oz were discussing the blog article Jessica put up: ‘Restore to Last Position’ Needs You’, in the third party developers meeting, Friday (3/28). There are now 389 comments (as I write) by people explaining how they use the feature and why they need it.
Nobody Wants To Talk About The Elephant In The Room by Connie Arida, on Flickr
Oz Linden is making his way through the comments and is about half way. He promises to read them all.
His take is that there are definite use-cases that need to be handled. He remains unconvinced that RTLP is the best solution. You will find the discussion at TM: 22:00±.
I am a Myst games fan. I am looking forward to Cyan World’s new game Obduction.
Hayden Dingman at PCWorld wrote an article about Obduction having live-action Non-Player-Characters (NPC). You can see live-action NPC’s in a video of Senza PesoI (below – link), a trailer for an Oculus VR experience. If you have a VR Headset, the video is in Oculus format.
Apparently Obduction will work with Oculus and similar VR headsets. The Cyan peeps rant into the problem of how to put video of RL actors into a virtual world and not break the immersion. While some games have animated avatars (in SL we call them bots) Cyan found that outside their expertise and thus too expensive for them to do. Since this game is funded by a kickstarter project the budget is constrained. They looked for a cheaper way.
Their solution is to film with 2 GoPro gamers to create 3D video. They use a green-screen room in the basement of Cyan’s studio. The character can be placed into the virtual world. You can see that in the video above.
I think the idea is to be similar to what Cyan has done in the past. When they reach a point where they need to tell some of the story, they move to a cut scene and the NPC tells you whatever is needed by the story line. It would be rather jolting to go from a VR experience to a 2D movie. This style of video cut scene will allow them to maintain the illusion of the world they are building.
Look for more details about Obduction to appear in August 2015.
Hopefully you know that each week and almost every day Fab Free publishes a list of what they think is the grids top ten hunts. See: Today’s Top Ten Hunts in Second Life. I’m not sure how Fab and Hunt SL hook up… but, they are the people to follow if you like hunts.
Skip Oceanlane posted an update on the saga of getting Linden Lab’s attorney to approve the Capital Exchange game or not. At this point Skip is saying they are on their last attempt.
A new release is out. It is primarily for users with AMD/ATI video cards. Unless you are having a problem, you don’t need this release.
From the video “Inner winter” 5 by Pepa Cometa, on Flickr
You may be aware of a recent AMD/ATI driver update to stopped mesh items from rendering. This isn’t a Singularity problem. It affected all viewers as it was a driver problem. If you had an ATI/AMD video card and updated your driver, you had the problem.
If you know the viewer, you know it is an experimental viewer. The author of it tries all sorts of things. Like Benjamin Franklin and others NiranV has lots of what I label failures. But, the gems that do work out make it worth it.
Dragon Warrior
A current feature Black Dragon has is Volumetric Lighting, previously labeled GodRays. This is a rendering process that reveals light interacting with air… the atmosphere. The feature makes for dramatic images. I think this is going to be an awesome features for those using Oculus Rift type displays.
You may have picked up from the SL Viewer news that a change is coming to the Lab’s mesh uploader. There are, I think, some nice changes coming.
WA D-Lab PICCOLI2 IN YOUR GARDEN by Willow, on Flickr
As it is now, when uploading mesh we often get an error and the error message is basically useless, no help. The Lindens are working to improve that. They hope to give us a better idea of what went wrong.
Also, we are currently limited to 8 faces per mesh. That means any single mesh object can only have 8 materials. That too is going to change. The Lindens are saying if there will be a new limit just that we can have more than 8.
There is also something changing about how the various LoD models and physics models will associate with our item based on file naming. I don’t get what they are doing here as I have yet to play with the RC/Project viewer that is out.
