#SL Mesh Deformer Worries

by

Worrying is generally pointless. However, the concerns that bring the worry can be important to consider. Such concerns have come up in a thread over on SLUniverse. The basic concern is what will the Deformer do to our existing mesh clothes? Since they are mostly expensive it would be good to have an answer.

This is Alpha

The Deformer is in the alpha stage. So, we don’t know what the final Deformer will make mesh clothes look like. We have found problems and it seems many feel we will need a flag to tell the deformer whether to deform or not. But, even that is undecided as some of the problems the flag would address can be handled in other ways.

There is also the thought that perhaps a slider setting the amount of deformation may be better. So, we could tell the Deformer to deform by 0% to 100% of its normal deformation.

With so much unknown, all we can do is make intelligent guesses and speculate.

Read more

SOPA Update

by

ReadWriteWeb has an article on recent developments in the SOPA, Protect-IP, and OPEN bills. The Obama administration is saying they will not sign any bill that would allow censorship or changes in the domain naming system. Personally, I think that is smoke to quite the resistance these proposed laws are drawing from around the world.

[vimeo 31100268]

I will point out that this is the same administration that issued a ‘legal opinion’ telling government agencies they may ‘legally’ lie to avoid complying with Freedom of Information requests. See the LA Times editorial:  Obama’s secrets

Additionally this is the administration that signed an executive order that relives the government from following due process when American citizens are accused of sexual misconduct on campuses. Guilt is to be determined by the college or university administration. Failure to do so is cause to cut off funds to the institution. See this article by a Buddhist Obama supporter. (It links to the WSJ)

I suggest that any time a politician tells you what he is going to do, you better watch them. The result you get is often very different than the politician’s words.

Keep writing letters to Congress. See: SOPA is Still a Problem for detailed information.

Qarl Alignment Tool Rejected

by

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…

    Read more

    Dolphin Viewer 3.2.4.22939 Released Review

    by

    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.

    Read more

    Blender Collada Plug-in 1.8 Released

    by

    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.

    Read more