Second Life Normal Textures Tutorial

The Materials System Project is steadily progressing. We do not have an ETA, yet. We do have a bit of a place marker in that we are told projects are moving in the order of; Chat HUD User Interface, Server Side Appearance, and then Materials. So, we know it will arrive soon, but is still a ways off. If we want Materials to work the way we want, we need to be able to provide feedback during the coming Beta Phase of the development process.

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To be able to give feedback we need to understand how to make and use of Normal and Specular Maps (or textures – interchangeable words in this case). So now is probably a good time to start learning the basics to allow us to participate in the beta testing without looking too ignorant. 

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Xing – The Land Beyond

I check the Myst Online community every other day or so. I found they are talking about and excited about the Alpha/Beta releases of a game called Xing (pronounced zing) The Land Beyond (more videos and pictures here). For those of us familiar with the Myst worlds the game is very similar. Several reviewers have already made the connection. Xing’s big claim to fame for Myst fans is, like Myst, its non-violent, so it is a great parent-child activity to share.

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The creative team behind Xing is White Lotus Interactive. John Torkington and Koriel Kruer started the Xing project as a classroom project in early 2012. The first 4 levels became one of the top ten finalists in the IEEE GameSig competition at Chapman University. In a completion judged by industry professionals they took second place. Then in late 2012 James Steininger joined the team.

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Region Crossing Update – Video

An avatar named ‘16’ made a video showing her testing of the fixes now running in the Magnum RC channel. [youtube xgwtXk9lCsc] The video runs 2:40 minutes. In it you can see what I’ll call perfect crossings and messed up crossings. When one can cross and turn it shows the system is working. Without comments … Read more

Second Life Scripting Changes

We don’t hear much about changes to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) these days. But, today is different. We got a bunch of stuff. Exciting stuff!

Server Beta Meeting 2013-12
Server Beta Meeting 2013-12

At the Server Beta meeting Kelly and Maestro Linden were announcing several new changes.

Particles

There are changes coming to the Particle System in Second Life™.  Maestro Linden said, “Alright, so there’s an upcoming server maintenance project, which will probably go to RC next week it has your usual bug fixes, but it also includes goodies for new LSL features.”

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Breaking Second Life AO News

At the Server Beta meeting Kelly and Maestro Linden just announced the addition of two new Linden Scripting Language (LSL) functions that will allow script-less Animation Overriding (AO). llSetAnimationOverride(“Walking”, “sassywalk”)  – where Walking = default animation state and sassywalk = the animation to use for that state. llGetAnimationOverride(string anim_state) – Get the name of the … Read more