We are midyear already…
Chip Midnight, the maker of the clothing templates that many of us use, has put up some interesting posts about Materials over on SLUniverse. Chip is working with materials. The image here is an avatar he made.
Matching Skin Color – Second Life
This tutorial is intended for those people using RedPoly kits. But, anyone can learn some basic ideas on how to match skin color. Like starting with changing Windlight to eliminate extraneous color and shadows. (7:40 min)
[youtube L9HRzNfNIQ4]
I usually run my viewers on DEFAULT Windlight or local region settings. So, I haven’t needed to change my Windlight for some time. I had forgotten how few Windlight settings come with the new viewers: 36. The CalWL setting was not in my current viewer.
Firestorm Update 2013-26
If you are wondering why Firestorm does not yet have materials and releases I expected didn’t make it out last week, it is the CHUI (Chat Hub UI). Getting the CHUI code from the Lab to work with the Firestorm code is a challenge. It took the Lab about a year, hearsay on my part, to get CHUI working in the SL Viewer.
The Firestorm team has only had the code a few weeks. The Lab keeps adding fixes and that is not likely to speed things up for the Firestorm team.
That CHUI is the hold up leads to the question, what does CHUI have to do with materials? Well, consider what Tonya Souther posted on SLUniverse, “The problem isn’t that the materials code depends on the CHUI code directly. The problem is that the merge process depends heavily on code changes being applied in the same order to the same files.
The CHUI changes hit a large part of the viewer codebase. (That’s why it took LL a year to get CHUI out the door.) Inevitably, those changes hit files that the materials project changed. When they do, if you don’t merge in the CHUI changes first, then you have to do a lot more work to fit the materials project changes into the code – work that you’ll have to undo when you finally get around to putting the CHUI changes in, or will have to do over and over if you ignore the CHUI changes altogether.”
They are down to about 20 merge issues. Then the team has to run it through QA. So, this may take longer than I anticipated… or not.
Rod Humble Interview 2013-25
Jo Yardley (Another Rod Humble Interview) caught an interview with Rod in the SF Chronicle: Will Second Life have a second life?
I think this interview is well worth the time to read. Rod reveals some interesting bits of information about Second LifeTM. Like most of the 400,000 new monthly subscribers are not coming from advertising. Also the best selling items in both The SIMS and SL is hair. Lots of work has been done to reduce lag and more work on reducing lag will be done this year. The makeup of employees has changed with most now being designer engineers that can express creativity in code. The employee headcount is still about 200. A next generation virtual world is coming in a few years. 36 million people have tried SL and left. Rod plans to get them back.
Rod seems to have good free market ideas for SL.
Jo has also published an article on how the media is being lazy and miss representing Second Life. See: The problem with the media. I’ve commented on that one, I think she will approve the comment. It was still in moderation last I looked.
Mars Billion Pixel Picture
You have to see it to understand. Awesome.
Kokua Viewer Update 2013-25
The Imprudence-Kokua people have released Kokua Viewer version 3.6.0-28975. This version has the Materials System updates. Plus several other feature updates.
Chat got a rework of the newer Firestorm chat.
New Point-At and Look-At options were added. Top menu, Develop->Avatar->…
The Build Panel got Copy/Paste for prim dimensions, rotation, and location, which I think is a big thing. The base code for that feature came from the Zen viewer with tweaks from Firestorm added.