AvaStar Tutorials and Second Life

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Gaia Clary of Machinimatrix, the AvaStar makers, has been providing the Second Life™ community free tutorial videos showing how to use Blender/AvaStar for making animations and mesh clothing. The challenge is in having the time to make them and keep them updated. Blender changes quickly and such videos go out of date a Blender moves forward.

Gaia's Free YouTube Videos
Gaia’s Free YouTube Videos

AvaStar itself has needed to change as Second Life has changed. Plus this past year AvaStar has changed as it developed and improved its tools to provide a better user interface and more efficient work flow. Also, the design community and Linden Lab changing to fitted mesh avatar bodies is changing how we make fitted mesh clothes.

Second Life being 11+ years old now also requires designers learn how to deal with the peculiarities of 3D modeling for a 3D world that, with amazing success, has maintained legacy compatibility. 

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Second Life Bits 2014-45

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Flickr

I am finding lots of people that make amazing images using Second Life. Blanche Foxclaw is one of the people that is posting images I like.

Silver (Close-Up)

Nebraska Oddfish has posted an image of her ‘average experience… a small number of people are complaining about this problem.

My average SL experience these days...

Fab Free Help Wanted

Fabulously Free is looking to add bloggers to their family of writers to help with their blog. See: Want To Join Our Blogging Team? The requirements, guide lines, and applications questions are all on the page.

Jingweidu Technology Co., Ltd

Jingweidu Technology Co., Ltd is taking pre orders for their Oculus Rift knock-off. Hypergrid Business has an article on it. See: Chinese Oculus alternative hits the market. (US$327± depending on the day’s exchange rate.)

Capital Exchange & Second Life

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I see that SL Capital Exchange is suspending trading in Linden dollars. Today I see they announced:

On July 16, 2014, I filled out the first form for the Skill Gaming Application for Capital Exchange Stock Market Simulation Game. From that point until today, there have been numerous correspondences between me, my law firm, and Linden Lab. As of today we still do not have an official determination, positive or negative, on our application.

I was hoping that because much of the delay has been on the part of Linden Lab, that we would be allowed to operate past the November 1, 2014 deadline set forth in a recent post by Linden Lab. Unfortunately I was informed by Rowan Linden that we cannot. So therefore effective immediately, I am suspending all trading at Capital Exchange until our application is approved or denied by Linden Lab.

….

See the full article for more details and information: Capital Exchange Suspends Activity Until Further Notice.

Second Life Performance Boost

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Market Place

Yesterday about lunch time the Lindens posted a blog article titled Performance, Performance, Performance. The surprising part, at least to me, is the performance improvements made to the Market Place. I’ve been covering the coming change to Viewer Managed Market Place. But, I don’t recall hearing about Market Place (MP) performance improvements.

Whatever, the Lindens say they are seeing a 70% faster response time and pages load 30% faster.

Builder's Brewery Materials Class
Builder’s Brewery Materials Class

Group Chat

I’ve been sort of covering the improvements to group chat. News in this area is almost always after the fact. The Lindens have realized that whenever they say anything about changing something they get complaints about how the change is the cause of whatever problem users are having. So, they think they get better feedback on some things if they change and listen before saying anything.

This last week we have been running on new code in the chat servers. The metrics say things are MUCH better. I know I haven’t got a ‘cannot connect’ error when trying to comment in group chat this past week. But, I have also been busy and not in world much either. 

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Second Life Inventory & Performance

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Over on SLUniverse the question was asked about whether large inventories degrade viewer performance and cause region crossing problems.

Oct 2014 - Testing Alchemy Viewer
Oct 2014 – Testing Alchemy Viewer

Trinity Dejavu give a pretty good explanation of how inventory size affects viewer performance here. I think basic information needed for understanding inventory was skipped over and a couple of points could have been more accurate. So, I added my 3 cents worth and I’ll post it here too.

To understand inventory one needs a basic idea of how assets, the stuff in your inventory and the regions, are handled by the Second Life™ system. I’ll keep it lite.

Everything in SL is a collection of vertices and textures/images. Primitives, cubes, spheres, etc., are just some numbers; type, size, rotation, and position. The lists of vertices for primitives are built into the viewer, so no downloads beyond the parameter values. So too the avatar is built in. All that is ever downloaded for primitives and the avatars is a list of numbers, parameters. For the avatar we call the values collection: Shape.

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Trying Out Alchemy – Second Life

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Alchemy Viewer Logo
Alchemy Viewer Logo

Download size is 42mb that uses 159mb of disk when installed. The install was error free. Recently I get errors with the Linden installs. Some times a retry fixes it. Others times I have to ignore to continue. The Crash Logger seems to be the problem with the install. I am almost always installing just after running the viewer. The Linden Viewers still seem to work OK in spite of the errors. But, it is reassuring to not have errors.

The install places the viewer in C:\Program Files\AlchemyBeta.

The cache installs in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Local\Alchemy64. You can set that to be any location you want. I usually move it off my C drive for better performance. Windows uses my C drive for its swapping and temp files. Moving it saves the viewer having to compete for hard drive bandwidth.

It seems the cache for the 32 and 64 bit version are different. I’m not sure why they would do that.

The logs are installed in C:\Users\[Win_login_ID]\AppData\Roaming\Alchemy. So, it seems the 32 bit and 64 bit version use the same logs and chat files. There is a setting that will allow you to place the chat logs wherever you want. 

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