Nalates' Things & Stuff

Free Textures

2013/03/21 by Nalates Urriah

When modeling I am often looking for just the right texture. I skip looking for textures in Second Life™ simply because it is too hard to look at what is there. Some Third Party Viewers have better tools for managing textures and there are texture managers for sell in SL and the Market Place. But, I find them slow and awkward.

I usually browse over to CG Textures. They have an easy to browse collection of textures. Some are great and some are crap. Most require some serious work before they can be used and many lack the supporting files; normal, specular, occlusion, etc. But, they are free, with a daily download limit.

A new site I came across is RenderTextures.com. They also have free textures and Terms of Use I can live with.

Second Life Vehicle Crossings

2013/03/21 by Nalates Urriah

If you build or use vehicles you know they have been having region crossing problems. According to reports in the SL Forum things are much better in Magnum regions.

Andrew Linden explains what they found and worked to fix, “The problem was caused by the new Interest List code which tries to not subscribe to objects that are outside of the camera view. When crossing a region boundary your viewer would extrapolate your camera forward, the vehicle would be created behind the camera, and the server would not subscribe to it. The faster the vehicle the more likely this would happen.

The solution was to special case Interest List subscription to whatever you’re sitting on — the server now ALWAYS subscribes to your seat. We already had some special case code for seats, but it needed a little more.”

HTTP Concerns

2013/03/202013/03/20 by Nalates Urriah

My readers know the HTTP aspects of Second Life™ are being upgraded to the latest and greatest tech available for HTTP. For most of us this is a non-issue we hope will give us better overall performance; faster texture download, more stable connections, and world that renders quickly.

For others this is a matter of their in-world systems, think vending machines and subscription machines, working or not. If you use vending machines or other tools that depend on a third party server, you should be checking with the creator to see if they are testing their products with the new HTTP protocol services.

Second Life News 2013-12

2013/03/19 by Nalates Urriah

This week a new package rolled to the main channel from the Magnum RC channel. As of noon today the crash or scream rate was low enough the Lindens were happy. That doesn’t mean everyone is happy. We still have major crossing problems with mesh vehicles.

While we just got a fix for the BUG-1814 – Fix for ‘No object updates from vehicles after some region crossings’ the problem of vehicles crossing is not resolved. This fix is for the case where a vehicle appears to get stuck at the crossing. The fix for vehicles failing to cross, or at least the camera failing, is supposed to be in the RC release to roll out to Magnum tomorrow, Wednesday.

Blender 2.66a Dynamic Topology Tutorial

2013/03/192013/03/19 by Nalates Urriah

This is a 15 minute video on Dynamic Topology. It shows the difference in how we work with and without it. [youtube HKuOIfNKz8g] This tool can be used for adding AND REMOVING polygons. This tutorial also shows using the Symmetry tool that is part of dynamic topology. Once you see the tool in action, you’ll … Read more

Rod Humble Speech Released

2013/03/18 by Nalates Urriah

In 2011 Rid Humble gave a keynote speech titled: Apocryphal Game Design Problems at the UC Santa Cruz meeting Inventing the Future of Games. For whatever reason, the speech was just released on the Design 3 blog and popped in my news scanner. At least this is the first time I have come across the video.

I found this speech to be an interesting insight into Rod Humble. He has some interesting ideas on game design. Now that we are having a national debate in the US about mass killings and how to stop them, the viewpoints expressed in this speech should be well understood.

Transcribing audio is not a task I enjoy. Nor in this case would it do the topic justice to turn it into written document. The video provides the sense of timing and body language for the humor to come across and aids in placing comments in perspective. Still I’ll provide a summary to give you an idea of content and an index to the video because I suspect at some point I will want to refer back to parts of this speech.

The video runs 51 minutes. I found it worth the time to hear.