Blender Bad Habits

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Hibit Spad posted a link in the SL Forum to an interesting Blender article, Blender Bad Habits. There are 10 bad habits that the author, Light, encourages people to unlearn. I have a few of those habits. I think it is well worth the look. I think the author is mostly on about those making video tutorials … Read more

Valentine Fail Update

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Yesterday the Market Place failed creating an annoying disruption. Today we got a follow up post on what happened. The Commerce Team: Hello, Yesterday, we posted a summary of the downtime we experienced on Valentine’s Day. We indicated in that post that there were still some orders that needed to be pushed through to completion. We … Read more

#SL Server/Scripting News Week 7

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The Lab has had some challenges with recent update packages for the servers. However, the main grid did get an update this week. We also got two new packages on the  release channels.

Main Channel

The information on the recent roll to the main grid is summarized here: Deploys for the week of 2012-02-13. The is the package with the improved list handling. The upgrade has better code for starting and stopping regions. Better memory usage code has been added. The Course Location for mini-maps has been fixed. There is a fix for  llGetParcelMaxPrims(llGetPos(), TRUE) so it now should be reporting the correct numbers. There is a fix for SVC-7443 Telehubs.

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#SL Pathfinding API Documentation

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Path by richardefreeman Flickr

Rand Linden has been adding information about the Pathfinding API to the SL Wiki. Also, a beta testing page is up in the wiki too. The testing page is incomplete. But, it is looking like we will soon see the new feature arriving in the Preview Grid ADITI.

What It Does

Non-Player Characters (NPC) or Non-Played Character, depending on who one talks to, is what we often call bots. A computer runs them. The SL Wiki has a page on the software that runs bots. See: Second Life Bot Software Comparison.

In addition to the more familiar bots we can have other NPC’s. The Linden Scripting Language (LSL) has a function named llCreateCharacter() that can turn any collection of prims, sculpties, and/or mesh into a NPC. The function is described as: Converts the current linkset to an AI [artificial intelligence] character. By default, the character’s shape will be an upright capsule approximately the size of the linkset, adjustable via the options list. The linkset must use mesh accounting.

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Niran’s Viewer Update 1.23.5

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The speed of updates to various viewers is overwhelming. If I reviewed every release, I would never have time to do much else. Fortunately several of the viewers do a good job of blogging what’s changed in their viewer. The problem with those updates is they tend to only tell one the good stuff, which makes sense if you think about it. If they find a problem, they tell the development team so it can be fixed. So, the problems they know about have been fixed.

Give a viewer to a regular user and we’ll do something odd with it that the developers haven’t tried. That is why users always find bugs. As good as the developers and testers are, they can’t think of or do everything that can be done by a user.

So, reviewers always have things they can find. The problem is finding it all.

Version 1.23.5 of Nirans is out and has a load of fixes and additions. As usual the interface has changes. Some you’ll like and some not so much. But we learn from experimenting.

Downloads

Niran’s now has both 32 and 64 bit versions of the viewer for Windows. The 1.23.5 was released in the 64 bit version about 10 AM today. Nirans Viewer download page.

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