#SL Virtual Landmarks…

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Landmark Tower – By: fakelvis – Flickr

We have movement on Virtual Landmarks. I’ve been writing about Virtual Landmarks since August 2012 when Toysoldier Thor proposed them (see SVC-8082). See: Virtual Landmarks. They are a feature that is on the Linden ‘would really like someday’ list. The last I’ve heard is they are not on the production schedule. This means there is a bunch of stuff ahead of them and no definitive priority has been set.

That no priority has been set means we have no idea when we may Virtual Landmarks (VLM) in Second Life™. But, Darrius Gothly has just written an article titled: Time To Push Second Life Forward – Virtual Landmarks. Obviously it is about VLM’s. It does a very good job of explaining the purpose of VLM’s. The best part is there is now a way to get VLM’s.

The Tech

Darrius and I have both compared VLM’s to URL’s that use a web site’s domain name, like blog.nalates.net. Somewhere there is a server that looks up that name and tells your computer where my web server is and how to connect. VLM’s in SL will need a server to provide a look up service too. It is setting up such a server that the Lab has yet to prioritize and start work on.

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Niran’s Viewer 2.0.4 (2321)Release Review

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The 27th of November Niran released version 2.0.4 (2321). The download is about 50mb. Source Forge is the code and binary repository. You download from Source Forge. It was very slow this morning taking 15 minutes to download.

Nirans Viewer – 2.0.4 or 3.4.4?

I don’t use Niran’s viewer much anymore because Niran experiments with the user interface. I think that is a good thing, it just makes using the viewer inconvenient for me. I am forever in: where did ___(some control here)___ go mode. I needed to look at the viewer for another article I am working on, so I updated and checked it out.

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#SL LIQUID MESH is it a Real Solution?

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JD Lewellyn tipped me about an announcement by RicoRacer Flux about a new release of mesh clothes named: LIQUID MESH. The release is timed for today, December 1, 2012. The basic take away is: Good but over hyped.

Redgrave Store

According to the announcement:

Really simple! Our new LIQUID MESH products automatically adjust to your body shape! That means no more changes to your shape needed!

But we went even further. The mesh also follows certain body shape sliders. That means you can even kind of resize our products along with your shape which is not possible with any other mesh till now.

…

…with LIQUID MESH you can adjust your mesh now also with sliders for:

Body Fat

Legs:
– Leg Muscles
– Butt Size
– Saddle Bags
– Knee Angle
– Foot Size (to change pants cuffs width)

Oddly they did not include a link to their store. I forget links too, so I won’t complain too much. I’ll just be more determined to try and remember to put my links in my articles.

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#SL Mesh Deformer New Twist

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Take-Away – It is possible to animate the face of a mesh avatar using the Deformer. The details follow:

White Rabbit

Yesterday after the Server Beta meeting White Rabbit showed me a full body avatar. It’s eyes blinked. I mean blinked like the SL Avatar blinks. The eyelids moved. Now that is novel.

Now that may not seem like much, but if you have made avatars with mesh heads, you know that the face cannot be animated to show expressions as the SL Avatar can. What White Rabbit is discovering is that the Mesh Deformer in the current Project Viewer is handling the facial morphs used for expression.

I didn’t get to see all that White Rabbit has discovered as the region we were in on ADITI kept crashing and restarting. But, I did find what I saw impressive.

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#SL News 2 Week 48

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We had a roll back of the release channels this Thursday. SO, if you are wondering what happened, here is the story.

Quoting Maestro Linden in Thrusday’s Beta Server meeting, “So, let’s go over releases a bit.

This week was pretty ‘exciting’. The main channel got a maint-server that had been in RC for 2 weeks, which mostly included bugfixes. That went pretty smoothly.

However, on Wednesday we ran into some issues with the new code. We’d planned to put new code in all 3 RCs, and we took care of Blue Steel and Magnum, but by the time we got to Le Tigre, the grid was sick (unrelated to the new code), so Coyot aborted the Le Tigre roll.

Then there were reports in the forums about offline IM emails from objects being broken; if an object sent you an IM and you were offline, the offline email would contain all the usual details *except* for the message this bug affected both Blue Steel and Magnum since they both shared the responsible change.

Then, after digging into offline emails a bit more, we noticed that the ‘To’ field of offline emails would show the object owner’s name instead of the recipient’s name. So it would be like “To: Motor Loon <so***********@***il.com>” which was a little confusing 🙂 Fortunately they went to the right person at least.

Anyway, these bugs were kind of bad, but we weren’t sure that they were worth the trauma and downtime of an emergency rollback. But then this morning, we became aware of a 3rd bug, from support. It turned out that deeding parcels to groups was failing. That was the main cause for the rollbacks this [Thursday] morning.

So, now we’re back to Server 12.11.09.266804 on all 4 channels.

Kelly was pretty quick with bug fixes for those 3 issues, but they’re still in testing. We hope we can try again next week.“