I am one of those caught in the Great Southwest Blackout. Obviously I have power back.
It was interesting to start to realize what had happened. Being September and close to 9-11 concerns ran through my mind as the scope of the outage was revealed.
At home it was just power out. In the middle of the Beta Server User Group meeting chat stopped and my avatar was stuck in place. Then my battery backup alarm went off. Time to shutdown the computer. No big deal.
Went out to check the meter and look around to see if it was just me or the neighborhood. Neighbors were out checking there breakers and meters. My power comes in along an arterial street and it is not uncommon for traffic accidents to take out power for several hours. So, on a hot after noon (98F – 37C) it is time to get out and find some place with AC running and cold drinks.
You probably know by now that an avatar’s in-world profile and web profile are the same web page. You may not have realized people see different presentations of you profile depending on your profile’s settings and whether they are logged into SL or not. You also may not have noticed that the avatar profile system is getting more features. Opensource Obscure has an interesting post listing features that people are interested in.
There are several feature requests and bug reports that Obscure links to. If you are interested in those, click VOTE and WATCH. Clicking WATCH is the more import click, if you want Linden Lab to place more priority on it.
The Firestorm/Phoenix Team is releasing a mesh capable viewer. However, the Internet connection to their site is having problems. A main trunk line was cut by some kind of construction. It should be repaired sometime Thursday. So, if you have trouble getting to the site, don’t freak.
Information about the Firestorm Mesh Viewer 3.0.1.22525 is on the blog site, if you can get to it. I find the site a little slow, but working. The download came down without a problem.
Problems
Jessica tells us that under normal circumstances they would not be releasing a viewer with this many problems. But, the demand for a mesh version of the viewer is so high, they decided to release it bugs and all. There are some serious bugs. Read the bug list in the wiki. Hot LL JIRA Issues Of The Day. These are serious problems as in Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) serious. So, read the list before you decide to install it.
As with the Sim User Group, things are a bit mundane right now. That are a few interesting things that came up in the user meeting.
Two second lags… some people are seeing short lags where the viewer sort of freezes up. One fix that has been suggested is to change the Debug Settings value for curlUseMultipleThreads. Because of some crash issues the default value is FALSE. Some say changing this to TRUE solved the mini freeze/lag problem. Try it at your own risk.
Curl typically requires a connection for each thread, afaik. So, setting curlUseMultipleThreads true may increase your number of connections. Some user modems can only handle a limited number of NAT connections. One can try to reduce the maximum number HTTP Texture Get connections to offset the cURL increase.
One of the changes rolled to the main grid was the ability for regions to detect users with Premium Accounts. That is needed for the new enhancements to premium membership. Oskar hints that other benefits than just the two announced for premium membership are coming.
Not a lot is happening in sim development right now, well … that is exciting anyway. The work of fixing bugs and tweaking performance continues and keeps Lindens busy. There are a few interesting tidbits.
The Morris region in ADITI got a new version of the LSL Optimization Project last week, week 35. Scripts should run faster there. Andrew is looking for any data people may gain experimenting with scripts there.
Andrew Linden is looking at the Lab’s auto-build service and considering how to move server development over to it and VS2010. There are advantages to using VS2010. I’m not doing any serious software application development, so I have no idea why it is better, other than the general newer is better thing.
But, there are several compile issues that will be improved by moving the server development over to the auto-build process. Things like using newer libraries and upgrading the server’s OS kernel are dependent on moving to auto-build. So, the move to VS2010 may just be a side effect.
Update: 2012-03-08 – The coming Mesh Deformer is going to change some of the thinking in this tutorial. At the time I wrote this and these tutorials were being made the thinking was using our avatar shape to make custom mesh clothes was a good idea. In some ways it still is. But, for those of us that sell clothes, not so much. The Mesh Deformer will allow mesh clothes to be adjusted by the viewer to any avatar. This means making clothes for the base avatar is probably the better choice.
UPDATE: 2012-05-13 – There is a Mesh Deformer Project Viewer available with the 0.3.3 version of the Deformer. You need this viewer to upload mesh that will use the Deformer. This the only SL Viewer that recognizes mesh deformation and displays and uploads it. A number of TPV’s have the Deformer in test versions.
You can get a copy of the Deformer Project Viewer from:Downloading Viewer Test Builds. I also have a link in my blog’s left column. You can find lots of information on the Deformer in this blog, just click Deformer in the tags section of the right column. There is additional information in JIRA STORM-1716.
Ashasekayi has made a 6 part video tutorial on making mesh clothes. The tutorial uses Blender 2.49 rather than 2.5x. That is good and bad news. The good news is that Blender 2.49 has been doing a better job of making importable clothes than 2.59. The bad news is everyone is moving to Blender 2.59. Linden Lab is working to fix problems with Blender 2.59 clothes imports and has it mostly fixed. Following are my tips to help get you through the tutorial, avoid some gotchas, and descriptions of each video part’s content.
Mesh Clothing Video Tutorial
I suggest you use Blender 2.49 if you plan to follow the tutorial, especially if you are not familiar with 2.59. I started out using Blender 2.59 to follow the videos. It is not too bad. Keyboard shortcuts are mostly the same between 2.4 and 2.5. When I reached the point where I needed to copy bone weights I ran into problems. Over the last couple of days those have been worked out. Read this article and you’ll know how to use 2.59 for the bone weights work. I used Blender 2.49 while I worked through the problems with 2.59. Then redid it using 2.59.
