Breaking Second Life AO News

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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 animation currently set for state.

More to come…

These will soon be running on the ADITI grid and moving to RC channels…

Free Textures

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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.

RenderTexture.com
RenderTexture.com

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

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Second Life Vehicle Crossings

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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.”

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HTTP Concerns

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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.

ADITI Regions
ADITI Regions

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. 

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Second Life News 2013-12

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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.

This was too funny not to use.
This was too funny not to use.

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.

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Blender 2.66a Dynamic Topology Tutorial

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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 understand how handy it will be.

(There is a bug in the current Chrome Developer. The URL does not always update. It depends on how you move from page to page. On YouTube the URL sometimes fails to update. I’ve been able to reproduce the failure, but not consistently. So, I got the wrong YouTube ID for the original posting and didn’t preview the post. It was short. Sorry.)