Second Life News 2014-33 Friday

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Servers

As previously reported the main channel got the maintenance release with a JSON rollback.

Nachwerk July 2014
Nachwerk July 2014

RC Channels

This week the RC Channels are running the same release as the main channel.

Maestro Linden tells us that next week the servers will get fix for a sim crash. After the fix is in place we MAY learn what it was. But, for now they are not saying.

Other Server

Maestro looked into the BUG-6925/BUG-6908 bug of attachments ending up on invalid attachment points after a teleport. The Lindens are having trouble reproducing the problem. Speculation is the low ping rate within the Lab eliminates the problem.

Whirly Fizzle is reporting that the Mystitool HUD sets the bug off as well as another couple of HUD’s. 

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Understanding the Render Pipeline

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This isn’t a Second Life specific article, but SL is all about getting our world rendered and concepts are similar in all rendered worlds. Arton Rotaru found the blog page and posted a link in the SL Forum. So, if your are curious and wonder how hard can it be to render a world? Then this is something for you.

Lost-Eden_003
Lost Eden 2014

Also, if you are a creative type and hopping to optimize your builds to reduce lag, there are concepts you will likely find interesting.

See: Render Hell 1.0 – For discussion see the SL Forum: A lovely explanation of how a Render Pipeline works.

On the blog the top video is just the author’s explanation of what is come and why he made the page.

The rest of the page is an illustrated text. Some illustrations are pictures. Others are short animations or videos.

 

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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