AvaStar Update 2014-13

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Gaia Clary has some news up on the Machinimatrix.org site. It is announced that AvaStar and PrimStar­‑2 will no longer install in Blender versions before 2.70. Uuuummmm… I could have said that better. With Blender 2.70 you will need newer versions of AvaStar and PrimStar-2 to be able to install them.

[youtube XfezG5M2ICg]

Gaia also explains a problem that some of have run into when installing AvaStar updates. When one removes AvaStar then installs a newer version, the install fails. I figured out that I needed to uninstall the plugin, save the User Preferences, exit Blender, restart Blender, then install the updated AvaStar.

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Second Life Bits 2014-13

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Viewers

After my Tuesday morning post I found the main release viewer updated to 3.7.4.288138. This was the Hotfix RC viewer compiled Mar 15 2014 and released some time Monday.

Image by: Reema Xue, Flickr
Image by: Reema Xue, Flickr

I am finding this viewer runs pretty fast (30+ FPS) when few people are around. Add a dozen people and it slows down horribly. I’ll need to spend more time with it and try it around other groups, but in the little time I have had it, that seems to be a pretty consistent experience.

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Oculus… Facebook?

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Jo Yardley has an article up about Facebook buying out Oculus Rift. It would be nice to know the details of that deal. But, an upfront US$2 billion… that is a deal. See: Facebook buys Oculus Rift for $2 billion.

Is this a good thing for Second Life™ users? At this point there is no way to know. Everyone on both the Facebook and Oculus sides are talking about how great a deal this is. Companies always do that.

Putting $2 billion in Oculus’ pocket is a good thing for them. Having access to Facebook’s resources is a good thing for them. But, they had to give up some measure of control. Only time will tell if that works out. Remember the movie? Still that is a lot of money for a tech company that has yet to prove the tech will be as popular as hyped.

For Facebook they get the Oculus tech. They obviously think they can to something with it. Strongly enough they shelled out $2 billion. But, what they say they will do with it is pretty vague.

We do know Facebook is NOT privacy oriented. Nor are they a game company. So, where will they take Oculus development? Minecraft developer Markus Persson is backing off plans for teaming with Oculus because Facebook creeps him out.

I just want a ‘retail’ Rift to play with.

NVIDIA 15 Times Faster?

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I came across a link to this article in the SL Forum: NVIDIA, AMD, Intel Explain How OpenGL Can Unlock 15x Performance Gains. That means if you are getting 20 FPS you should jump to 300 FPS.

The long version is the video and it is way techy:

[youtube -bCeNzgiJ8I]

So, what are they saying? Loosely… They are creating sides of the render process that are not locked together. This means the CPU and GPU are mostly never waiting on each other. As it is now, single note pads (large blocks of memory} are being cleared, being drawn to by a single process to build up images, then used, and erased with the process starting over. Multiple processes need multiple note pads. The next process can’t use the resources until the preceding processes release the resources/note pads. The memory that makes up the note pads has to be moved around.

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Flickr 2014 Review

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I joined Flickr in 2009. I made use of Flickr up until March 2010. By that time I had nearly 200 images and that was the limit for a free account. That is almost 4 years ago. A lot has changed. More is changing. Yahoo is changing Flickr faster than people make tutorials for it.

I was way behind on Flickr. I didn’t know how it had changed. Many of you probably already know. For those that don’t here is some news.

Flickr 2014 - Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr
Flickr 2014 – Image by: Alexander Kaiser, Flickr

With Jo Yardley adding a new group named Second Life is Looking Good I wanted to add it to my collection of contacts and groups. Wile I haven’t been adding photos I have been looking at what others post and I use it as a source of Creative Commons images I can use in my blog. I think I have some interesting images to add and wondered what it was going to cost me to with a Pro account. They don’t have ‘Pro’ accounts any more.

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