Second Life and Virtual Worlds
The nice looking stuff for the Particle Show is mostly in these videos for now. The first video was published to YouTube in November 2013. But, I didn’t notice any of the newly available particle effects. Still, it is gorgeous.
Mary Wickentower: Redemption (8 min)
[youtube ClECWMuyO_o]
That is a pretty awesome display of particles. The next one is similar.
There is a quick little tutorial on how to bake a specular highlight into a texture on YouTube. I like it because it uses the Blender Nodes.
[youtube VGKbLFqYY58]
This is a blog with great images taken from Second Life. It is, as the name suggests, about fashion. But, the images are gorgeous. See: SL Fashion.
Check Lada L-roy’s review policy. Nice philosophy.
The Linden Scripting Language has gotten some new functions:
These are the last features Andrew Linden added before leaving. The features are active in all three RC channels now.
The point of these functions is the allow the uniform scaling of link sets. You can scale every item in a link set with one command. I imagine this will reduce the script complexity for a number of things in SL.
It seems there is a new griefer gift rumored to be making the rounds. If you are given anything, make sure you know who gave it to you before opening or rezzing it. If it is a griefer crasher that you rez, you show up in the SL server logs as the one rezzing the griefer tool, which could create problems for you, i.e., Abuse Reported or banned from SL.
The attribution that this L$L thing was a warning from Simon Linden is untrue. Simon says he never made such a statement, but did comment to be careful opening anything you are given when asked about this specific item.
Shug Maitland has an article up pointing to Why moving a shop to Marketplace ‘hurts’ the SL economy. She prefers to shop in-world, where she can see what she is buying and demo it. I suspect many of us have similar preferences.
She uses the Market Place as an index and search engine for Second Life. In-world search sucks so badly we have little choice. That says something when we consider how bad the Market Place search is. I often end up using Google via a manual search command like: site:marketplace.secondlife.com gesture vendor
It seems there is a new prototype of the Rift out. I saw the notice on Facebook. It leads to an article about the new features. See: Oculus unveils new Rift prototype. Also, see Engadget’s: Oculus Rift’s latest prototype.
In the picture you’ll notice a Kinect-like position tracking device camera. Not noticeable in the pictures is the change in the display ‘screen’. They have changed over to an OLED (organic light-emitting diode) display for less persistence to reduce motion blur.