Second Life Bits 2014-21 #3

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Blender – Baking Normals

I came across a simple to the point video tutorial on baking normal maps in Blender 2.6, which is enough like 2.7 it doesn’t matter. He manages to crash Blender before the end. But, the important part is complete by then.

[youtube bck1eU4e8xo]

SVVR

We are seeing more videos of the SVVR conference. The sound in the current batch is awful. Rumor is some professional grade videos are coming. I am waiting.

Second Life Down Time

The Thursday down time is being postponed. See: Scheduled Maintenance. Presumably the problem from Tuesday that stalled the main channel’s rollout and pushed the RC channel rollouts to Thursday are the cause of the postponement. 

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AvaStar Updates 2014-21

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We are now on an Alpha version of AvaStar. Gaia has cleaned up the download page.  The featured download is currently version: avastar-1-1-alpha_Blender_2-70.

But, there are now new test versions. The latest being: avastar-1.1-alpha-23_blender-2-70.

The change log as been updated too. It is now named: changelog-1-1-alpha-23.txt. How the logs are used may have changed. We will see with time. For now the changes in alpha-23 are:

  • 2014-05-19 18:41:16 +0100 Avoid blender crash when removing shape sliders while in edit mode
  • 2014-05-19 10:39:00 +0100 Added option to enable adaptive slider attachment and iteration count
  • 2014-05-18 23:31:46 +0100 Fix: for slider attachments for non default shapes
  • 2014-05-17 18:26:27 +0100 avoid exception in Armature Info Poll when no active Object selected
  • 2014-05-16 07:16:30 +0100 Added checkmarks to the Freeze operator ‘Join Parts’ and ‘Remove Doubles’
  • 2014-05-12 15:47:40 +0100 Added Armature Info panel to show number of animated Bones
  • 2014-05-12 15:44:39 +0100 Added generic message display operator to be used in various locations
  • 2014-05-12 15:40:21 +0100 Improved error message for when too many bones are animated

More Bits & News 2014-21

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Unscheduled Maintenance

Today there was a problem and the Lindens pulled maintenance on the SL system to fix something. Logins were failing for a time Tuesday. The Lindens thought they had it fixed by about 12:30 noon. I wasn’t trying to login until late today, so I don’t know. But, they did not post an All Clear until about 2:30 PM PDT.

See: Grid Status Reports. This is a good report to read as it has advice about logging in after system wide problem.

Server Rolls

Because of the system problem the Tuesday roll outs to the main grid did not complete. Those will be restarted for the main channel tomorrow at 9:00 AM PDT/SLT. The Lindens say more information will be in the Grid Status Reports.

The Wednesday rollouts are being moved to Thursday.

Thursday Down Time

I haven’t seen anything about rescheduling the planned maintenance for Thursday. My assumption is it will still happen as planned… I suppose they can roll region servers and do maintenance at the same time. 

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Second Life Bits & Pieces 2014-21

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The basic SL News is here; servers and viewers. But, there isn’t much to say about those so I’ve mixed in the bits an pieces of news from around the grid.

Second Life will be down for an hour on Thursday, 22 May beginning at 7am PDT. If you are in-world you won’t be ejected. But, you won’t be able to do much. Avoid pulling things out of inventory or changing outfits. Of course don’t attempt any Linden$ transactions. Building is probably out of the question.

This has something to do with the assets database and backend systems.  Firestorm will have the grid status on screen as usual. I’m not sure how many people will notice. I’ll have to see if the SL Viewer’s splash says anything about it.

If the SL Forum is working (I suspect it will be), we’ll see a load of people asking why they cannot login.

Server Rolls
The main channel will get a roll Tuesday. This will be the maintenance release that was running in Magnum this past week. This is a fix for a network issue occurring in busy simulators.

Server RC’s
The Blue Steel and Le Tigre channels will continue to run the AISv3 update package for Server Side Avatar baking. The Sunshine viewer is getting updates and hopefully went into QA today. 

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New ‘Starter Avatars’…

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New Avatar - Interesting Mesh Density
New Avatar – Interesting Mesh Density

OK everyone is posting about these.  If you haven’t already heard, you have to be hiding. They are far better than the Ruth and Roth avatars from earlier times.

They are interesting and noobies will look much better. However, noobies will still act like noobies . They won’t be all that hard to recognize.

However, Saturday when I was trying to play with the new avatars the SL system was acting up. The Choose an Avatar panel did not want to load. I kept getting an empty panel. I left the panel open and relogged, that got it working, or it may be just the relog did it. Or my region may have been having difficulties.

Once the panel was loaded then some avatars would not load. I would get what looked like an LOD4 version 0f the avatar only, very bizarre looking up close but ok from a distance. Switch to another one and later retry the one with loading problems, seemed to work.

When you wear one of these avatars a folder is created in the Clothing folder of your inventory. The ‘Lucy’ avatar is of course in the Lucy folder.

These avatars completely replace, well are worn over, your system avatar and a full body alpha mask hides the system avatar. They are complete mesh bodies and clothes. I am not sure why they made them No-Mod. 

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Fire

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Too many things to worry about…

San Marcos Coco Fire Burning into Escondido
San Marcos Coco Fire Burning into Escondido

At least the wind has let up. They seem to be getting ahead of the fires.

9 fires in different places. All but one has suspicious beginnings. Its arson…

The large building on the skyline right of center is the new Palomar hospital. Looking west over Hwy I-15 from the east-side frontage road near the Valley Parkway exit. Over the mountain in the center is the University of California at San Marcos. It and thousands of homes to the west were evacuated yesterday. Over night the fire came over the mountain. Many homes have burned, but it is not as bad as a few years ago… Lots of tragedy.

The air is horrible from all the smoke.