Second Life – Blender Animation Problem

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I need to create some poses and short animations for use with an sofa I am making. I’ve been using Blender 2.71a and AvaStar RC3 to make models. So, of course I thought I would use that setup to make my poses and animation. It didn’t work. So, a couple days later I’ve figured it out.

Planned Pose
Planned Pose

Animations exported from 2.70, 2.71, and 2.71a using any version of AvaStar don’t work… mostly. To explain mostly… I want a pose of an avatar laying on the sofa. In this pose the avatar is reclining and I want the hands on the tummy. Everything worked except the hands. See the image. It shows the hands where I want them.

I rotate the hands about 40-45 degrees in the pose. So, the movement should show up. But, it doesn’t whether I use anim or bvh file types. The hands show in SL with no change from the forearm to hand T-pose positioning.

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Second Life’s New User Avatars

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Designing Worlds has a show up in which they interview people running Japanese new user help regions. I watched the show on SLArtists, the Treat.tv site seemed to be down this morning, at least I could not access it. The video is here: Designing Worlds DW 245 – Japan’s New Residents. The Designing Worlds page that should have the video is here: Designing Worlds visits the Japanese regions to learn how they support new users – now on the web!

Taciturnly - April 2014
Taciturnly – April 2014

About 3:30 minutes in, they talk about the problem the new user avatars are causing. They feel this is a MAJOR obstacle to improving player retention.

The new mesh avatars for new users was thought by some to be a definite problem for new users. The thinking was they would create more problems than they solve and harm player retention more than help. The people doing support in beginner areas are confirming the problems are manifesting. The question they are hearing often is, the promos say we can customize our avatars, so why can’t I change my avatar?  

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Second Life Money Hack

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Iris Ophelia wrote an article appearing on New World Notes: A Second Life Public Service Announcement: Here’s Why Free L$ Cheats Don’t Work. It is a nice clean explanation of one of the ongoing YouTube scams, not by YouTube, but on YouTube.

I see these everyday as I scan my aggregator for news of what is happening in SL. They have titles like SLWorld Hack, SL Hack, Second Life Cheats, Revision 2 – 100% Success, Second Life Money Hack, and on and on.

Ophelia points out why it technically doesn’t work, money can’t be created by users in SL. It can be stolen from other players. But, that leaves a trail and the Lindens can follow it to recover the money.

Of course the real purpose of these scams is to get the SL ID and password of whoever tries the ‘hack’ program, so the scammer can steal from them.

W. C. Fields once wrote, you can’t con and honest man…

 

 

Second Life Bits 2014-33

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Servers

There is no server UG meeting today as the Lindens are having an internal meeting.  The Deploys thread and information from last week is that the main grid got the package previously running on all three RC channels last week (32), a maintenance package with a JSON fix roll-back.

RC Channels

None of the RC channels are rolling this week. That MAY mean no restarts for those regions.

Viewers

The current main viewer is 3.7.13 – 292225. We might see that change this week.

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Second Life BCU Phishing Exploit

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There are numerous exploits used in Second Life™. YouTube has a series of videos titled ‘What is Scond Life?’ or ‘This is Second Life.’ And links to download the program. Some of the videos are obvious crap and others are pretty good and look enticing. I suspect those are plays on the current popularity of VR and HMD as they are recent.

Lost Eden 2014
Lost Eden 2014

Many of these lead to pirate download links. I am betting the viewer one gets is a basic password/account stealer.

Today I see the United Content Creators of SL has issued a warning in Second Life™ about BCU.exe. I think this is also known as the Browser Configuration Utility. If so, it has been around since 2010 in a couple of forms and most anti-virus software is aware of it. But, run from inside the viewer, which you have given permissions to, it can circumvent your anti-virus software. 

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Second Life’s Necronom VI in Video

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I tried taking pictures of Necronom VI (NVI). But, the lighting is often animated, which doesn’t show up in the still images. So, Saturday I took some time to make what I think was a last visit to NVI and take some video. I’m not a machinamist… or even that experienced with FRAPS. So, I forgot to turn off the cursor for most of the video. But, I think I caught enough to show what NVI was/is like.

[youtube -rgHQjkd6-c]

This video is uploaded in 720p format. That means it looks best in the default YouTube viewer or smaller, not full screen… over 1024. 

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