New World Makers Episode 3: Eshi Otawara

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Drax has a new video out this morning. When I look at it on YouTube it was 24 minutes old. The video runs 5 minutes. Eshi is a dress designer making dresses in Second Life™ that would be difficult to impossible to make in RL.

[youtube hNtup7U6A24]

Even if you watch the video here, please click over to YouTube and LIKE the video. As always get links to these video in as many places as you can, not to my site – which I like but, linking directly to Drax’s Facebook or YouTube. That helps get these videos better ranking in search engines.

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Second Life News 2013-14 #2

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The server updates seem to have gone pretty well. There are some good things and some bad things.

Region crossings are way better. A couple of sailors and pilots have commented in the Deploys thread about how much better things are.

[youtube t8IUxCMyElU]

With this rollout the problem of some items simply not rendering has gotten worse. If one clicks on them they show up. So, the server has told the viewer they are there. But, for some reason the viewer is not rendering them. It seems the problem is showing up in Linden and third party viewers. 

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Mesh Deformer 2013-14 Update

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I checked with Oz Linden about the Mesh Deformer Test Garments in Hippo Hollow. I wanted him to remove the old garments that do not work with the current deformer. He prefers not to, being concerned it might signal some action on the Deformer. I disagree and think non-working garments are creating more confusion, just read the 1716 JIRA thread. But, it is his choice.

I think this signals a full stop in the Deformer. Oz is taking every opportunity to request more staff and get the project moving. But, it seems the project the Lab saw as low priority remains low priority.

If you want to test the Deformer, there is a dynamic link to the latest version of the Project Viewer, which was updated this week. Code from the other viewer development branches were merged into the Deformer branch. So, the Deformer Project Viewer is very much up to date.  As far as I know there were no changes to the actual Deformer part of the viewer.

You will need to upload your own rigged mesh clothes and enable the Deformer aspect of them.

Animation Overrider Scripting Information

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Kelly Linden gave us some more information about the new animation functions added to the scripting language.

Kelly said, “The server has supported overriding animations for over a year. The missing piece was the LSL calls and a couple bug fixes. It is expected that once overridden they would continue to be overridden on older servers.”

This means this was something started some time ago. Those old changes have been in place for some time. So, if one overrides an animation in one of the Release Candidate channels, the override should work across ALL servers. It is only the script that has to have the new server code to work. This is the behavior Amber Murfin discovered and commented about.

Kelly also told us the new override functions do not allow setting by UUID. They must be set by a string constant, read that to mean an animation file’s name. The reason for this reveals some possible future plans of the Lab. Kelly says he originally planned to use integer ID’s to handle the state names. But, others in the Lab wanted a more flexible system that would allow additions or changes and possibly and update of the state machine.

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Cloud Party Block Building Contest

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New World Notes has a story on building with mesh building blocks in Cloud Party. See: Cloud Party Adds Mesh-Based, Collaborative Building Blocks Which Sound Super Superior to SL’s Prim-Based System. Win the contest and get US$50 of Cloud Party coin.

Originally I thought this was a feature that many have asked for in Second Life. The feature people ask for would allow those not interested in using Blender or 3DS to build with custom mesh in SL. They would be able to edit the individual vertices of an object. But, that is not exactly what they are getting in Cloud Party. The following video shows what is being added.

[youtube nkL0vv3CPnU]

While this does not allow users to tweak individual vertices, it does add an easy way to hook primitive shapes together. In SL we use Third Party Viewers (TPV) that have alignment tools to set cubes next to each other. In the SL Viewer we have to do math or use something like Prim Docker to fit cubes together. But, that process does not remove any of the hidden faces or vertices. My understanding is that in Cloud Party using blocks does omit the hidden parts.

The really neat feature in Cloud Party is that the new Block Tools work with mesh items made in Blender or another 3D modeling programs.

Things Failing to Rez Second Life

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For some months now there has been a problem of some prims not rendering. You can walk into them or on them. But, you cannot see them until you right click on them. With this current server release the problem seems to have gotten worse.

Inara Pey has an article up with more details: Missing” prims: collaboration confirms viewer issue.

She quotes Maestro Linden explaining how to troubleshoot. There are a couple of things in the explanation that will be handy for SL users to know.

Things Failing to Rez Correctly

If you run the main SL Viewer, Beta Viewer, and/or Dev Viewer, you may run into an additional problem where your cache corrupts. Mesh items can suddenly turn into Vertex Vomit, something sculpties first did. The object looks more like a porcupine than what it is supposed to.

I think I ran into this problem because of using so many viewers. I allowed all the SL Viewers to use the same cache. It looks like that was a mistake. I saw the problem when I changed to the new Mesh Deformer Project Viewer. I doubt that it caused the problem as there could be any number of things that might corrupt the cache. But for now I am making separate caches for the project and development viewers.