Second Life Fitted Mesh Doesn’t Fit

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Yeah, we know… ‘Fitted’ does not necessarily mean it fits. But, Astrid Kaufmat has an interesting post in the forum about the problem. She is on about figuring out how to work with the SL avatar in 3DMax/Blender/Maya modeling programs without having to have a plugin. Well… good luck with that. I finally gave up, bought AvaStar, and started having fun.

She goes into great detail about the problem. But I’m pretty sure she hasn’t figured it out. She certainly seems to have missed the problem some of us have recognized. Explained here: Second Life Shape Export.

Astrid has been around since 2011. But, she seems to have missed the discussions on the ‘deformer’ and the problems with changing the system avatar. She goes on to recommend a new avatar for SL. I believe that is a losing battle.

Second Life Bits 2015 Week 09

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Freeze Frame Bug

It seems there is a bug in the SL Viewer. Yeah, I say that like there is only one… Well, you’ll see this one if you take a snapshot using Freeze-Frame and then close the camera panel before your release Freeze-Frame mode. The only fix at that point is to relog.

Slow Render @ Server-Scripting UG 2015-09
Slow Render @ Server-Scripting UG 2015-09

Once you relog, open the camera panel (Ctrl-Shift-S) and turn off Freeze-Frame. You don’t have to, but I would probably forget it is enabled and take another picture, close the panel, and have to relog again.

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OSGrid Up 2015-09

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Over on Hypergrid Business Maria Korolov is reporting: OSgrid is back.

New Firestorm Region in OSGrid
New Firestorm Region in OSGrid

February 24, 2015 @ 6:45 PM the OSGrid folks tweeted the re-opening of the grid. Plus the blog has an announcement: OSGrid Online.

Yay! While this doesn’t mean OSGrid is completely up or stable, it is open to logins. They warn that there may be outages as servers are tweaked. But, they feel the grid should mostly be up and open and no more major problems.

For those that run their own regions, new server software is available for download. Also, there are some instructions in the OSGrid blog for getting existing regions back up. See the announcement link above.

As you might imagine, there is likely to be a rush of people logging in. This may place heavy load on the system and slow things down.

Wireless Tech & The LAW

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The FCC was placed in charge of radio signal broadcasting in 1934. It took over the duties of the Federal Radio Commission that licensed radio stations and that commission dated from 1927. Title II of the Communications Act, 1934, was based on concepts from taken from regulations regarding railroads…

Evil Clown Mask detail
Evil Clown

That the FCC controls the technical side of communication is not all bad. Without some measure of control we would have people pushing their signals into our TV’s and radios. Or frequencies would be so congested we would never get a clean signal. So, it is not all bad. 

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Convrge – Social VR

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The Road to VR has an article about Convrge. Convrge is a social VR platform for the Oculus Rift. They have pictures of the world being built. It looks like Minecraft with triangles. It is promoted as a low-poly, high performance virtual world.

The avatars are a bit weird. At this point it is hard to know what they intend to build, witout digging deeper, no time for that. See: YouTube.

Interestingly the world can be streamed to a browser. That probably isn’t the Oculus image/view that gets streamed, but I’m guessing.

The big NEW THING is a 2D movie screen in a 3D world… uuuh, OK… I’m not excited… From what I am reading it looks like the developers plan to build the world and users create the events.