Second Life News Bits 2014-32 #2

This is the last month before many schools start the 2014-15 classes, which in a round-about way makes it vacation time for families. Lindens are people with families and they take vacations. Those Lindens that supply us with information on the server side of things are on vacation. So, Oz and Caleb Linden are filling in. But, with a few people gone the work seems to have slowed, suggesting not much is happening… happening in the sense work progresses to where we can see change.

Sarawak - 2014
Sarawak – 2014

I think we are seeing the affect of a smaller team working on Second Life™. Previously vacations did not slow the pace of releases by a noticeable amount.

The result is there isn’t much news to write about. I think because of the reduced pace of change you see blogs covering more subjects. I know I am writing smaller blurbs about what is going on, thus the ‘bits’ articles. 

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Second Life Mirrors (real mirrors) – Possible?

Inara Pey has an article up covering the news that we may someday soon see real mirrors in Second Life. So, I’m not going to go into detail here. See: Reflections on a prim: a potential way to create mirrors in SL.

[youtube JhN2HnQl6g8]

Zi Ree of the Firestorm team is playing with implementing such a feature. See JIRA item: STORM-2055Real mirror reflections on prims

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HyFy Better Avatars?

You’ve probably seen the blogosphere discussing the work going on at HyFy (High Fidelity – Philip Rosedale’s new VW). The video everyone is on about is below.

The talk is about making the avatars look better. One of the HyFy staff, Ozan, is talking about what is being done. (Reference) The avatar shown in the video is NOT a good looking avatar, my opinion. BUT… the lip sync’ing is awesome and that is the point of this exercise.

[youtube 96wdX9EfzlU]

Expect the avatars to get better with time. For now HyFy is doing the cutting edge stuff no one has done before, at least at this level. There are lots of people making pretty avatars. Expect that once the hard stuff is done they will clean up the skin and shape.

Second Life Xcite!

I think Xcite! genitals are considered the Cadillac of genitals… there are so many ways to think of that… When asked today of they were changing over to fitted mesh Javier Puff answered, “We generally don’t talk about products we haven’t shipped yet, but you will notice that we’ve been moving everything in our store to mesh over time. :)” So, I suppose that is a hint in the direction of a yes answer.

Sarawak_016
Sarawak – 2014

It should be interesting to see what they do to make nipples and butts work with the new mesh avatar bodies. The new mesh bodies do respond to Avatar Physics when made properly. This means Fitted Mesh nipples could bounce with the breast, something they currently don’t do. I take off the Avatar Physics layer when I add my Xcite! parts. 

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Second Life News Bits 2014-32

Viewers

The Group Ban Viewer has been promoted to the main viewer: 3.7.13 (292225). The release notes are here. So, if you own a group and have problem people, you can ban them and they will not be able to get back in.

Otherwise there are no changes to the Linden Lab viewer line up.

Warbug @ Landing Field - 2014
Warbug @ Landing Field – 2014

Dolphin Viewer

A beta version of the Dolphin Viewer  is out, 3.6.99.32369. There is no new information on what is in this viewer. I assume this is just a bug fixed version of the July release.

See: Finally! The first public beta of the new Dolphin Viewer 3!

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Machinimatrix – AvaStar Ticket System

The makers of Avatar and other SL/OS related products have started a instituted a trouble ticket system for support. No other support is offered or provided. The time being consumed by answering questions was too much. They had to do something.

Tableau 2014
Tableau 2014

So, you can get most questions answered in-world in the Blender-Avastar group. It is free to join and enough users are around to answer questions most of the time. Plus various other groups like Builders Brewery and others answer questions and provide classes.

On the Machinimatrix.org site questions will only ne answered if you file a trouble ticket. No more impromptu help. See: New Ticket System available.

Current version: avastar-1.1-RC-2_blender-2-70.