We seem to be getting another round of poorly rezzing avatars. The particle cloud avatars we know about. That is often a connection issue. I write my fix-it article Avatar Render Problems: Ghost Cloud Smoke Ball Ruth in September 2010. But, something new is up.
The Problem - Extended Bake Fail
Blurry Avatars
For several weeks I have noticed when changing clothes I get a blurry avatar. My skin and clothes start blurry after a change, then rez nice and crisp once, then go blurry again and never seem to finish rezzing. They stay blurry.
If you use the ADITI Preview Grid for testing things you make or the new features coming to Second Life, be warned. A few of us have recently updated our password, which forces an update of our inventory as it exists in AGNI, the main grid, to overwrite our inventory in ADITI. In many ways … Read more
I’ve wanted to take time to play with the new Pathfinding feature now in alpha testing on the ADITI grid, also known as the Preview Grid. I took the time this weekend. I learned a few things. As you may imagine the documentation is incomplete at this stage. Not much point in writing lots of information that may change.
My First Pathfinding Bot
I’ll explain some of the problems I ran into with Pathfinding and then get into the script and how I fixed the problems. This is not a beginning tutorial for scripting. I am assuming you know about basic scripting with the Linden Scripting Language.
Simple
Writing Pathfinding scripts is way way simple compared to what was previously needed to create similar behavior. My first try was to create a follower. I have a Serge inspired character I made for OSGrid and decided to use that. My little bot is made from two prims and a sculpty. Because of the sculpties work I have to scale it to make it look right. That wacks the bounding box, which I was not over concerned with when I made it. Someday I’ll need to redo it in mesh.
The sculpty gave me my first challenge. I needed to rebuild my bot here in SL. I rezzed the spheres I needed and put him together. Then wrote the script and tried him out. He promptly fell over on his side…
I have been watching for a Development Viewer update since February 6. Yesterday SL Dev Viewer 3.3.1 (250315) became available for download. See: Snowstorm. If you are not closely following viewer development it is hard to know what new features and fixes are in the development viewer. If you read ‘repositoryese’, it is easier. I’m not that good at it.
ADITI Receive Testing Area
Viewer related fixes and features from all the various projects make it into the Development Viewer before moving to the Beta Viewer. The Development Viewer is for those that like to play with the bleeding edge tech from the Lab and do not mind some problems. The purpose of the viewer is to allow SL users that want to help to test the viewer. For most users of the Dev Viewer it is mostly about running and using the viewer and letting it send crash reports. Filing JIRA’s to help explain problems is greatly appreciated the various teams. Bitching about bugs in the viewer is poor form that displays a lack of understanding.
Download & Install
The download is about 28mb and it’s fast.
The install is simple straight forward run and done.
Several interesting things were discussed in Friday’s Server Scripting meeting.
Video Memory Compression
In pre-meeting conversation I heard a new texture compression process is being tested for storing textures in video memory. The feature is in one of the project viewers. I’m unclear on which project. While there are some video artifacts it almost cuts memory use in half. There is a Debug Setting that turns it on. It is off by default. …and I don’t know the name of the setting.
Second Life Server Scripting Meeting
It seems the current iteration of the feature also compresses the User Interface textures resulting in some oddities.
RC Roll Outs
Simon Linden says the new software packages rolled to the release channels Wednesday are working well. Another region crossing bug was found. So, they are planning to roll the Bug Fixes package to the main grid next week. I think that means the Le Tigre and Blue Steel will roll to the main channel and Magnum’s will stay on a release channel.
I see on Tateru’s and Inara’s blogs and in loads of Plurks that Esbee and Charlar are leaving the Lab. I’m bummed. As of yesterday Charlar was proceeding with Advanced Creator Tools. I got my join notice to the new group. Welcome Thursday,01 Mar 2012 16:05:28 GMT This group’s purpose is to provide a channel … Read more
