Blender 2.63a Released – #SL Review

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Blender has a new version out. This is a significant release. It will change how we work. For Second Life® users it is an important release. It is going to change how people build clothes and rigged mesh for Second Life, at least the possibility of change is there. How quickly people will learn to use the features is an unknown.

Two weeks ago 2.63 was released and 2.63a has just popped up.

Blender 2.63a is Out

Blender Modeling

Blender CG Cookie says this, “This is the long-awaited modeling system overhaul that has been in development for many years. Bmesh brings a much less destructive, streamlined modeling workflow that will let you model faster than ever before in Blender.”

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#SL News Update Week 19

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Mesh Deformer Examples

It seems Inara & I are credited in some measure for getting the word out that mesh clothing examples are needed. Oz says a steady stream of examples are coming in now. If you want any say in how the Mesh Deformer works, get your samples to Oz Linden.

Server Beta Test Group

Spell Checking

Eventually the Linden SL Viewer will get spell check for chat. There is some user interface feedback to be handled and a couple of fixes. Then it can be merged into the viewer and begin moving through the QA pipe. No telling when the work will be completed.

The dictionaries to be packaged with the spell check are; US and UK English, Spanish Spanish, and Brazilian Portuguese.

See STORM-83 – Interactive Spell Checking. Also get a copy of the Spelling Project viewer.

People Search

There is some cleanup work for display names that is incomplete that apparently affects people search. Hopefully the cleanup work make people search better. Until then you may find it works better if you type in a name and click the drop down to search for people.

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The Size of Second Life

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Andrew Linden spoke to one of the people in engineering, I suppose the engineers in this case are the hardware and operations people that deal with running Second Life®. It was one of these engineers that got Andrew (more of a software engineer) the current size of the Asset Database.

Image by puuikibeach - Flickr

A couple of days ago Andrew guessed the database was about 4 terabytes. He did know a garbage collection run recently completed and reduced the database by 85%. But, Andrew’s guess was off a bit…

The engineer told Andrew the Asset DB is now 192 terabytes…

Working backward and knowing the current size that is 15% of the previous pre-garbage collection size we can deduce the Asset DB had grown to 1,280 terabytes or 1.3 petabytes or 1,280,000,000,000,000 bytes. That was a huge database and the post-garbage collection size isn’t exactly small.

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#SL Pathfinding Update Week 19

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There are lots of interesting bits of news on the Pathfinding topic this week.

In an odd start just as the Pathfinding User group (PFUG) meeting was starting the region was rolled to a new version. I just assumed my viewer had crashed and relogged. By the time I could restart and login, the region was back up. That is a pretty fast restart, but it is ADITI.

The new version is (or may be was by the time you read this) DRTSIM-100D 12.05.10.256426.

Pathfinding User Group

Navmesh Height

If you know region owners that are in the Pathfinding (PF) Beta, let them know the Lindens need user input on what value the community would like for a default HEIGHT for Navmesh. The Lindens will soon have to make a decision and implement it.

This height is the default character height the Pathfinding system assumes for Pathfinding calculations.

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#SL Land Impact Update Week 19

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Since my last update on Land Impact Costs changing there has been a decision on how the Lindens will handle sculpties.  In the recent Pathfinding (PF) User Group (PFUG) meeting Falcon Linden reminded us of the new equation for figuring Land Impact Cost.

As Falcon put it, “…sculpts will be capped at 2.0 streaming cost, not 1.0. (Note, that’s a CAP, so if they were less than 2.0 in new accounting before, they’ll still be less than 2.0).”

Ardy Lay asked, “What was jacking up the streaming cost?”

Falcon’s response, “It wasn’t a bug, it was just a formula that, upon further consideration, we decided was not appropriate, i.e., when it was first implemented, it was actually calculating a triangle-based render weight, which for meshes is a good measure of streaming cost, but not for prims.”

Yuzuru Jewell asked, “Is the new cost applied to all the objects?”

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#SL Damage Control

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I heard someone talking about MetaReality having new information from Qarl on the Mesh Deformer Project. So, off I go to listen to it, an hour and 20 minute audio. This one is titled Damage Control, which inspired my title… just in case… never mind.

Well… there is new discussion about the Deformer Drama… but not much on the actual Deformer, nothing that I haven’t already covered. Since I have my notes from the listen I’ll publish them.

Again the time marks are approximate. The descriptions are my take away from the listen. Any resemblance to what is actually in the audio is more than coincidental. Any actual quoting is improbable. But, I did try to convey the ideas expressed in the audio tape.

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