Second Life 9th Birthday – Perception

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Linden Lab® has announced Second Life’s coming ninth birthday in June. It is a small announcement, 158 words. See: Help Us Celebrate Second Life’s 9th Birthday! If one had no history with Second Life® the announcement would just be an announcement, neither good nor bad. But, those having history with Second Life are having various reactions to the announcement based on their history, expectations, and perceptions of Second Life and Linden Lab.

Tateru in an article on Dwell On It, Anniversary time. Everything new is old again, recalls what, to her, is probably the best SL Birthday in all time: SL3B. Tateru see this announcement as possibly opening the best opportunity for a great celebration in years. She goes on to speculate on why the Lindens are proceeding this way, but that is speculation.

D'ni Refugees at Second Life 5th Birthday

Innara Pey at Living in a Modem World sees it as a shame. For her the collection of regions devoted to the celebration and the large number of builds for the Second Life 8th Birthday (SL8B) made for a great party.

I was somewhat disappointed with SL8B. I like to see great builds. I like to see creative ideas well expressed. I love things like Kerryth’s lacy, fairy like buildings. I like the interactive art. I like finding a bunch of friends parting and having fun. There were 3 or 4 builds in all the dozens that fascinated me. I want to be endlessly fascinated. But, such builds take a huge amount of effort. Building just for a few days and then seeing the build disappear has to take its toll.

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ADITI Inventory Loss

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I ran into this problem in early March. It seems my idea to change my password to flush and refresh my inventory in the ADITI grid was not such a good idea. It seems others use the same idea and change their password too. Or some may do it for security reasons. I suspect those of us playing and working in ADITI are more concerned about our inventory.

Several Problems

No Save Inventory – This is an annoying problem. When a password is changed one’s inventory is copied over to ADITI. Any inventory one had in ADITI previously is REPLACED. This is an expected behavor. It can be used to clean out the tons of test stuff one generate playing and experimenting in ADITI.

The new problem is anything created and saved to inventory will be gone the next time you login. Build something, save it to inventory, relog, and it is gone.

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Dolphin Viewer Release Review

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A new release of the Dolphin 3 Viewer is out: 3.3.3 (23731). This one seems to be mostly small bug fixes. The announcement on the release lists these:

  • The avatar offset reset button in the status panel is now properly hidden in mouse look.
  • A new setting in Preferences -> Dolphin Viewer 3 -> UI that controls what the Dolphin does when a scripted object sends you several menu popups at the same time.
  • A new reset button in the extended build options floater, which resets the pivot offset options so that the coordinate origin is back in the center of the object again. My wife is happy about this one.
  • A fix for how fading music in and out behaves when you teleport within the same parcel.
  • A fix for the bug that prohibits the mouse cursor from switching back to the normal arrow shape when hovering over certain UI elements.

Download and Experience

All seems very typical and nothing out of the ordinary.

I find the viewer gives me about the same performance as the Linden Lab® Development Viewer, 10 to 15 FPS in my Core2 Quad w/ASUS GTX560Ti.

The Viewer’s Fast Timers show it is spending 62ms rendering a frame. My CPU cores are run about 25% and the 560 about 15 to 45% load. There are almost no page faults. So, I don’t see a hardware bottle neck. Viewers using the latest Linden Lab® code are just slow. Finding a fix is like questing for the BIG ‘O’.

Beginner’s Second Life Mesh Tutorial

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Gaia Clary has 3 new tutorials out from a new series of mesh tutorials for Second Life® users new to mesh. This tutorial series starts with the basics of mesh and defines what vertices, edges, faces, polygons, and quads are. I think it is a great series for anyone considering building with mesh and unfamiliar with 3D modeling.

New Machinimatrix Tutorials

There are 10 videos on the new Mesh Path page at Machinimatrix.org. All but the 3 Coffee Cup tutorials I have seen before. Some use Blender 2.49 and other various versions up to Blender 2.62. The new Coffee Cup series uses 2.62.

It may be subtle but, the Coffee Cup tutorials are about 3D modeling concepts more than they are about using Blender. Additionally, the overall focus is about modeling for Second Life. The other 7 video tutorials take one farther into modeling for Second Life.

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#SL Removing Scripts from Stuff

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I have some older accessories in my inventory that have color changing or sizing scripts. They do not have a Remove or Delete Scripts feature. Some of the items have hundreds of scripts in them. Fortunately they are Modify-OK so I can remove the scripts. The challenge is how to get them out and not die from repetitive script deletion syndrome.

I found a way! Here is a handy tutorial for removing scripts from jewelry, shoes, hair, and whatever.

Script Library

You may know about the script library, if not you should. It provides scripts to solve all sorts of common problems. The best part is all the scripts are free for you to copy and use.

Visit the Second Life® Script Library to see what they have stashed away in there.

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#SL The Great AO Debate

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From a couple of sources we have bits and pieces that suggest the Lab is looking to provide a built in viewer feature for handling avatar animation. Currently we use animation overriders (AO) to override the built-in avatar animations. Most of those are a HUD of some type.

Animation Overriders

Discussion is in progress to determine what AO feature set is needed for the Lab’s viewer. Since AO’s are basically free (only the animations cost) the user’s choice of which one to use is entirely based on features and personal preferences. Free market principals allow the best to become the most popular.

Concern is voiced by some that a built-in replacement for AO’s by the Lab may limit our freedom of choice. However such limiting would break a considerable amount of existing content. Breaking all the existing AO’s, or any content, is something the Lab is loath to do. So, I can’t image the Lab will take that path. Whatever they do, will allow users to still use their AO’s.

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