Second Life and Virtual Worlds
It seems we are getting more people biting on or may be just casting phishing scams in Second Life.
About a month ago I did an article on Second Life Phishing and how one can avoid being suckered. See: PHISHING? NO, THANKS.
If you haven’t read the article now is a good time. This is psychological warfare.
I was curious if the Lindens knew how many people use features like AO (ambient occlusion in this case) and Sun/Moon shadows. So, I asked them. Seems they do not track that information. There assumption is that people will be using shadows and AO.
The consensus of those at the meeting, some top content creators, is that baking shadows into textures for use in SL is probably a poor idea.
With ambient occlusion the consensus is to include AO in the bake. It seems several have the opinion that the viewer’s AO is weak enough that it needs help.
The Adult Content User Group has pretty much evolved into a joke and is poorly attended. It supposedly meets the 3rd Monday of the month now.
However, activity in regard to Adult Content is alive and well, pretty much growing into resident driven private groups. But, the Lab is still involved to some extent in some areas. The Adult Hub is a cooperative effort between a private group and the Lindens.
In my reading I came across an excellent video on how to simplify models. Masami Kuramoto posted the information in the SL Forum. Video Tutorial on Retopology in Blender. 14 minutes of excellent information.
[youtube icqPZnD_3lA]
If you are making Second Life clothes, you need to see this tutorial.
The first tip ralusek provides stumped me. He is not using a key/click display and he went fast enough I missed it even after rewinding three times. I couldn’t get it to work. It is just too handy not to figure out.
There is stuff happening in Pathfinding. This past week has seen several changes roll out. A new Project Viewer and another version of the Pathfinding server code made it to the Pathfinding regions in ADITI, the preview grid.
In the PATHTEST1,2,3, and 4 sandboxes in ADITI one can see how Pathfinding works without having to program and build their own characters. You can visit and click the big box shown in the image above. You can get all characters for the different Pathfinding behaviors; Evade, Pursue, Patrol, Wander, etc.
Region owners can sign up to be a beta tester in AGNI. Contact Lorca Linden to volunteer.
You may notice that the Pathfinding regions’ World Map tiles are messed up. It’s only a cosmetic problem. The Lindens already have a fix in QA.
There is some meaty news out.
The blog post and charts on grid stability are still in progress. Oskar Linden seems excited that the grid did as well as it did for the past four weeks. May be we will see the post and charts next week. I was expecting them this week.
Maestro Linden gave us a bit more on the Network Stability fixes that rolled out Tuesday. Some of the throttles and fixes were to prevent some griefer DoS type attacks. That’s about all we are going to get on that.
Next week this server maintenance package should make it to a release channel. The package is currently running in Sandbox Island, ADITI.