SLACTIONS 2012

Ginette Pinazzo sent me this bit of news.

***FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE***

SLACTIONS 2012: Research conference on virtual worlds will include Machinima Contest this year

SLACTIONS, the international research conference on virtual worlds, is including a Machinima Festival this year as part of its exploration of met averse creativity. The RL/SL conference will occur November 15 – 17 with the Machinima track on the first day, and virtual film directors are encouraged to submit their works for consideration in this global event.

Now in its fourth year, SLACTIONS is an annual international conference held simultaneously in several countries on the topic of metaverse platforms. Topics range from educational research to content production, from gender studies to media distribution, and from metaverse-based branding, advertising, and fundraising to emerging mash-ups and technology applications. SLACTIONS is unique in its format too, as a one-of-a kind event conducted both in a metaverse platform (Second Life) and on-site in multiple countries throughout the world. SLACTIONS contributes to the current redefinition of the way we think about hybrid online and on-site scholarly collaborations. The show concept is “Life, imagination, and work using metaverse platforms”

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#SL News Week 22

PATHBUG-136

PATHBUG-136llSetRot() completely broken in RC PF 12.05.10.256473. This is a problem only on the Pathfinding (PF) enabled servers/regions.

Andrew Linden thinks he has this one fixed and believes the fix for that was deployed yesterday, Thursday. I’m not sure if he meant to AGNI or ADITI and didn’t think to ask him at the time.

Andrew has moved on to fixing Keyframe bugs in the Pathfinding.

Server Scripting Meeting

Rebake the Navmesh

There was a problem where rebaking the Navmesh would go into a perpetual pending state. Falcon Linden thinks he has that fixed. The change rolled to the AGNI (I think) PF Test Regions Friday morning. Falcon wants you to report if that happens again. Include the time and region name in your report.

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MetaReality

I’ll do the indexing to this podcast a bit differently, just because… I used the outline from MetaReality’s page and added to it. Hear the podcast here: The Status of Virtual Worlds.

Metareality Podcasts

Again I paraphrase things. What I write is my take away from what I heard. This is a good discussion and has some good information on the possible future directions of Second Life. It also is the first I’ve heard of someone criticizing the mobile Apps explosion and putting it in realistic terms. I’ve wondered how people were going to deal with data caps on their phones.

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#SL Mesh Deformer Debate Update

There was lots of debate on the Mesh Deformer and whether it should have a single default shape as the basis for deformation calculations or whether it should have multiple base shapes. That question is still undecided. Discussion has kinda died down, at least in my circles.

If you are unaware of the sides of the debate, see: The Great #SL Deformer Debate.

Open Source Meeting

Questions

One of the prime questions I asked in the article is how it will be funded. That is not likely to be a problem.

Another problem is what it would cost to add the capability. Emma Gilmour asked Qarl what it would cost, not that much. We are certain we can raise the needed money in a very short time. We have almost half of it covered now.

So, a couple of questions are down and the possibility becomes much more likely.

And the Lab…

The next challenge is where are we with the Lab and Avatar 2.0?

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#SL News Week 22

We have a bit more news on this week’s roll outs to the Release Channels. Actually some BIG news.

[youtube mGPiywc6Hh0]

More information below the fold.

Blue Steel

This channel will be updated Thursday instead of Wednesday. The package will contain an avatar render change. The avatars in the Library will now have pre-baked textures.

You probably know that the viewer downloads all the textures worn by an avatar and bakes them intop a composite texture. So, skin, tattoos, alpha layers, undershirt, and shirt layers are baked into a composite. That is uploaded to SL and is the image others download. Even you download a copy, which is why you see your avatar start blurry then render crisp, which is the end of the bake, then go blurry and then hopefully crisp again.

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