Second Life

Things about SL

Second Life Mesh Update Week 23

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The 6/6 group meeting had one of the largest agenda lists I’ve seen, 23 items. So, there is lots I found interesting.

Recent Priorities

Nyx is working on a new upload pipeline for mesh. Runitai Linden has done some optimization on the render pipeline indexing textures to improve performance. Sandbox 20 and Mesh City 2 are being used to test the new pipeline. Anyone uploading mesh without the new viewer with the new pipeline will not be able to upload and rez sculpties and mesh and have them rez correctly in these regions. A flat disc is indicative of the problem.

Second Life Mesh
Blender 2.57b

New Pipeline and Format

Once they have the new upload pipeline and mesh format stable they will publish the information. I suppose this means that third party viewers and OpenSim are somewhat on hold for their mesh support updates.

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Second Life Server Updates Week 23

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Today we are getting new roll outs to the main grid and tomorrow release channels. There have been problems with recent releases for 3 or 4 weeks. Projects were rolled back, revised and retested on the release channels. Code for the introduction of mesh has and is being merged into the main code base during this time. It seems this has revealed a rash of problems that are being fixed. The result is the news about server upgrades is rather boring and vague.

Main Grid – AGNI

The changes rolling to the main grid are mostly what I’ll call backend changes, those we don’t really see. They affect our experience in terms of performance. But, there is nothing new like shadows or Display Names to see.

This release has the ever ubiquitous bug fixes.

The API (Application Programming Interface) for working with friends changes.  This is something those building applications for Second Life and viewers can make use of. For the rest of us, it has little relevance until others implement the use of it.

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SL Search Update

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You may know that Linden Lab is testing a new search. They have a project viewer and everything now. I’ve tried the new search and I think it is better than what we currently have in SLV2. But, not as good as what there is in SLV1. I’ve been waiting for Darrius Gothly to post … Read more

Second Life Translators Dying

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Many if not most Second Live Viewers have automatic language translation features. Those translators depend on Google’s translation services. The viewers use a Google API (Application Programming Interface – basically a protocol for asking a question and getting an answer). Google has announced that as of December 2011 the service will be turned off. (Reference) Google’s translation page will remain. But, the door to the service which SL viewers use will close.

Effective immediately, the service is being ‘throttled’. A limit is set on the number of requests an application can make per day.

Why?

Google sited their reason for closing the API part of their translation service as abuse. It seems it was too popular. As it was a free service the ‘abusive’ load on Google servers was a financial drain.

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New Sculpty Tutorials

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Gaia Clary is updating the sculpty tutorials on Machinimatrix.org. The original tutorials were made using mostly Blender 2.49b. Now that Blender 2.57b is out and in popular use the need for new tutorials is growing. The way things are done in 2.49 and 2.57 are different. So, one can’t transfer a process from one to the other.

The first video tutorial in a series came out June 1. You can see it here: Basics about Sculpted Prims

Blender 2.57 Sculpty Tutorial
New Sculpty Tutorial for Second Life

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