Experience Tools Update 2014-28

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Today Dolphin Linden was at the Scripting-Server User Group meeting answering questions about the Experience Tools (XP Tools) and how they will work. The made for an interesting meeting. I posted about this meeting’s coming Q&A last week.

Dryland Mado - 2014
Dryland Mado – 2014

The current request for Beta Testers is for experience creators, Madpea or Loki Eliot type people. Latter they will be asking for experience participants (users) to join the beta testing.

There is a knowledge base article up: Experiences in Second Life. This is mostly for users not scriptwriters. We are told by Oz and Dolphin Linden that wiki documentation is in the works. The current draft is being reviewed by those Lindens that do the reviews. Scriptwriters check the last line of this post.

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Second Life News 2014-28 #2

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Servers

Late yesterday Maestro Linden posted the Deploys post. The main channel is rolling this morning. The new package contains the changes in LSL that allow us to control Materials via script. See  llSetLinkPrimitiveParams and llGetLinkPrimitiveParams. Look for the new perimeters in those named; PRIM_NORMAL, PRIM_SPECULAR, and PRIM_ALPHA_MODE.

Forgotten City 2012
Forgotten City 2012

RC Channels

Blue Steel and Le Tigre will get a new maintenance package tomorrow, Wednesday. This package has fixes for :

  • Temp Attachments are sometimes not removed on the viewer when detached from a region change event.
  • BUG-6466 – Numbers expressed in scientific notation and include a plus sign in the exponent are not parsed as json numbers by LSL.

New in this release is a feature: L$ transactions from llTransferLindenDollars or llGiveMoney now include a “Description” field with the object’s name in the L$ transaction history section of the website.

The Magnum channel will continue to run the Experience Tools package. It will be updated with the changes going to the main channel. There may be some updates to the Experience Tools too, bu they don’t say what.

Viewers

The SL Viewers are unchanged from yesterday.

New Blender 2.71 Weight Painting Video

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Medhue, of Medhue Animations, has a tutorial video up on weight painting for Second Life using Blender 2.71. The information in general works for any modeling system. But, is specifically for Second Life and Blender w/AvaStar users. While the ideas are transferable to any system, the button presses are specific to AvaStar users. He does not get into Fitted mesh, but for a button press or two it is the same.

[youtube h4-h-cVCPP0]

There is a commercial in the middle if you watch on YouTube. Its short but it is a surprising burst of sound.

This tutorial is based on Medhue’s work flow, which is very much like the workflow pattern I use. The basic idea is to make one master weight garment or body and then use that for all future weighting. Medhue shows how to do that.

You can discuss the video with Medhue in the SL Forum here: Tutorial – Rigging & Weighting in Blender  2.71 with Avastar for Second Life. (I modified the title a bit…)

Second Life News 2014-28

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Viewers

Currently there is only 1 RC Viewer in the cue. Other viewers are in QA, but have not yet reached RC stage. The Snowstorm RC Viewer is said to be doing well. I’m not sure I agree, but it will likely be the RC Viewer that gets promoted.

Open Source 2014-28
Open Source 2014-28

Group Ban and Oculus are Project Viewers. I expect Group Ban to move to RC status soon. The Oculus Project Viewer is not going to change status any time soon. It has been waiting on the Oculus DK2, which has just started shipping. Once the Lab has DK2 in hand I expect to see some changes in the Oculus Viewer.

There is an Experience Tools Project Viewer. But, it has yet to appear on the RC & Project Viewers page. Experience Tools is still in closed beta. Oz says that he has seen lots of requests to participate in the Beta come in. The Lab is going through them. I know some people that are playing with the Experience Tools (ET) project viewer. It is out there. Oz is going to see if they will put a link on the Project Viewers page. 

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Second Life News 2014-27 #2

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Servers

There were mostly no roll outs this week. None on the main channel or Blue Steal and Le Tigre RC channels. But, the Magnum RC channel did get a roll.

Summerfest '14
Summerfest ’14

Next week the Blue Steal and Le Tigre package will roll to the main channel as they have not reported any problems. The Lindens chose not to roll that package this week to give users more time to test the new LSL functions for Materials. So, once this rolls we will have the LSL for Materials on all channels. 

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