Qarl Alignment Tool Rejected

Tateru Nino has an article about a reject response from Linden Lab in the JIRA STORM-468 comments. Charlar wrote the comment.

Thanks for making this effort. Alignment and snapping are an area where there are useful enhancements to be made.
However, we are not able to accept this contribution as it is.

These are the primary issues we found which resulted in that decision:

  • The feature should support the same modes as the other manipulation modes.
  • It does not work for non-mod permission objects. This functionality should work for all objects that the user can manipulate in-world.
  • It only supports World snap mode, not Reference and Local modes, unlike all our other manipulation modes.
  • It packs and aligns to the face of the object bounding box. If objects are not cubes and do not share the same alignment, or aren’t aligned with the world coordinates (see above), the result of the operation is unexpected. Ideally the operations would use the actual shape of the object for aligning and packing.
  • There are also some coding implementation style issues that would need to be addressed. These can be covered in more depth after the functionality is dealt with.
  • In it’s current form, this is usable for purely prim-based builders under specific circumstances. It’s less useful for building with non-cube prims, mesh, sculpties. It’s minimally useful for building when the structure is not facing a global direction (ex: North, South, East, West). It’s not usable by non-building residents who need to place and organize purchased items.

    I found many of the comments to Tateru’s articles interesting examples of transference. I always find it odd that people when told why something is rejected speculate on why it’s being rejected. Whatever…

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    Dolphin Viewer 3.2.4.22939 Released Review

    A new version of Dolphin Viewer 3 (DV3) is out. This one has a power user feature for inventory, show/hide links. I’ll get to that. The ability to change LookAt is added. There is drama there. New inventory API has been added. This is the one that sort  of breaks V1 viewers that have not been upgraded. Subsequent shift-D snapshots save in the correct file format. Plus other fixes.

    Dolphin Viewer 3 Look At Beacons

    Download

    File size is 27mb. Download is fast.

    Install seems to have changed and seemed quicker, may be multi-tasking just makes it seem that way today.

    Experience

    Links Explained

    Links… these are great. In inventory I often have items that are no-copy. Yes, I try to buy only Copy-ok items. But, some things are just too cute to pass up. Whatever, links allow me to place ‘apparent’ copies of no-copy items in more than one folder.

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    Blender Collada Plug-in 1.8 Released

    The debate about how Blender will deal with the lack of support and activity from the open source Collada crew is still up in the air. Fortunately for Second Life residents there is a fix available. It comes to us from Gaia Clary in the form of a free Python script. So… here is the story.

    New Collada Plug-in for Blender

    Hopefully you know Collada is the file format used by Second Life for import of 3D models made in various 3D modeling programs.

    What many don’t know is the Collada open source project is not very active. It has great ideals and is arguably the current the best model import/export plan for transferring models between various modeling programs and games. But, there is not a lot of work going on in that open source group.

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    #SL Content-Mesh UG Week 2

    The big news for mesh is currently Qarl’s Mesh Deformer. It is out and now in several Third Party Viewers (TPV) and a Linden Lab project viewer. I had to figure out where it is hiding. When I found it found it I had a ‘D’oh’ moment. The download link is in the summary. The feature works well enough in TPV’s. There are some problems.

    Deformer Complcations

    Part of the idea of the Mesh Deformer was to eliminate the need for us to change our shape to fit the clothes. The clothes would change to fit us. But, we are finding it is not that simple. Things like mesh shoes mess up unless one changes their foot size away from the 0 size many of us use. At 0 size the distorted foot distorts the mesh shoe. So, some are thinking that a switch is needed to tell the mesh deformer to deform or not. We could then mark the shoes No-Deform.

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