A little bit of dialog has started between merchants and Linden Lab. Rod Humble has engaged in the conversation. There is lots of history, debate, drama, and a ton of frustration. If you have never heard of the Lab’s Commerce Team you’ve missed one of Second Life’s great sagas. Well… may be not so great.
International Commerce Center by: jimbowen0306 – Flickr
The short story on the team is: the Commerce Team is responsible for the SL Market Place and I’ll guess more than half of all complaints about Lab’s poor communication ability coming from residents. I’m one that believes they are hiding.
The short story on the Market Place is: It doesn’t work. Yes, you can buy stuff. You often actually get what you buy. But, that does not mean the merchant gets paid. Merchant’s paying for advertising often don’t get the ads. They are often billed for what is supposedly free advertising. Merchant’s product promotions often end up in another merchants store and product images get mixed up between products and merchants… the list of failures is long and this is supposed to be the short story.
It seems Magus Freston has created a viewer patch for a problem with importing animations and weight painting rigged mesh data. He explains over on SLUniverse.
A limitation of the attachment points in the LL character is that many of them have names with spaces, like “Left Pec”. Collada 1.4 doesn’t handle bone names with spaces as space is used to delimit bone names. So the idea is to replace the spaces with an underscore for the collada file so you get “Left_Pec”, which of course SL doesn’t recognize. The patch just translates “Left_Pec” back to “Left Pec” at import time.
Links to the patch and instructions for testing the patch are included in the post.
Darien Caldwell compiled a test viewer for Magus. To which Magus responded:
With Darien’s help in compiling a patched viewer we’ve been able to confirm that the patch works
This means all bones including all attachment points can be weighted to mesh and animated.
The viewer can be downloaded here: Patch Test Viewer. There is no install program. So, if you are not into manual installs in Windows this is not for you.
If you want to be brave and try it, use the link in my left column to get a copy of the Developer viewer. Install that. Download the Test viewer. It comes in a ZIP file. Use whatever to unzip the file into its own folder. It does not automatically create a folder on being unzipped. I had to specify one.
To run the viewer, look in the folder you specified for the unzip. You will find a file named LindenDeveloper.exe. Double click it to start the viewer. The viewer will open and you are good to go.
If you find a bug or have a problem with imports because of bone names, let Magus know. He will want specific information, so provide the details. Use the thread at SLUniverse.
On Plurk Indigo Mertel posted that Blender has a bug fix release out. Ashasekayi Ra, on Plurk points out that Blender 2.64’s Collada export works with Cloud Party (CP) allowing weight painting data to transfer into CP.
The Mesh Deformer is in testing. Oz Linden still needs more test clothes to test with. While the first part of the Deformer is complete, a second part is just getting started.
The Deformer as is works. I think pretty well. That ‘deforming’ part is being tested. But, a part that was added to the Deformer is the base shapes feature. Currently we can select two base shapes for the Deformer to start its calculations from. But, we could have more base shapes because choice is really what Karl added in.
Possible Prototype for Deformer Upload
The only shapes that exist right now are the default female and male. Where are we going to get more? By making and uploading them. But, we can’t do that right now. That upload thing is the part that is in development now.
Darien Caldwell is currently working on that project. The repository branch https://bitbucket.org/oz_linden/viewer-storm-1716 is what Darin is forking for a starting point.
Oz Linden has given us some news on the crashing problem they have had with the Beta and Development viewer. The Lindens believe the current Beta viewer (3-4-1-265642) has the memory leak, or whatever, fixed. The crash rate is back to low rates.
For the techies, the problem had to do with how the cURL wrapper was threaded. The cURL thing has to do with computer network communication over networks. It is a programming library that makes it easier for programmers to implement communication protocols like HTTP and HTTPS. It helps with encrypting communications.
Wind Vectors Displayed – Red Lines
One more round of testing in the Beta viewer is in progress. Once completed the basic fix and changes will move to the main release viewer, likely next week (42).
It takes a couple of days of testing to collect enough data to make a determination on whether a fix is working or not. The current Beta Viewer was compiled on Saturday and released on Monday. If you have Auto-Update on, you got it before it was on the web site.
