Second Life Bits 2018 w09

by

Contest

Mystical Timbers Photo Contest

Pictures have to be taken on the sim, either on the ground or on the platforms, will run until the end of March, when for a limited time a voting board will be placed in the harbor area.

  • 1st prize is $L 2750
  • 2nd prize is $L 1500
  • 3rd prize is $L 750

Please enter your pic in the Flickr group and also please send a full perm pic in-world to SolKing.

Region: Mystic Timberland

Flickr Ad

Lauressa - Sandcasted Love
Lauressa – Sandcasted Love

Save 50% on Monthly SL Membership

The Lindens are offering a deal in Premium Membership. See: Get more out of Second Life – Save 50% on Premium*. Notice the asterisk. It is 50% off the first monthly membership payment.

The monthly membership plan costs US$9.50 per month. So, you save $4.75. The annual payments total $114 without the deal and $109.25 with the discount. However, you get a L$1,000 signing bonus and a weekly stipend of L$300. Or 300×52+1,000 = L$16,600 or about $65.10. This brings the annual monthly cost plan to $44 for this first year.

However… if you go with the annual payment plan the cost is $72. With the bonus and stipend that drops to about $6.90 for the first year and $10.82 per year thereafter.

Oops, goofed the math. Fixed 2/26 @ 3:30 PM SLT

Content Creators’ UG Meeting 2018 w08

by

I usually use Medhue’s video from his live stream of the Content Creators’ meeting and refer people to it. But, this week Medhue’s stream has no audio. Fortunately, I made it to the meeting this week and made a video.

But… all is not wonderful. Vir Linden’s mic was not working well. Examining the sound waves in Audition I see Vir’s voice is severely clipped. This happens when an input overdrives the system. You hear it when you turn the volume up too high on a radio with cheap speakers.

To some extent, this can be fixed in post-production. But, I’m a novice to intermediate audio person. I’ve never had to clean up an audio track this badly clipped before. I helped it. But, it ain’t great.

The time marks below are for my video. Following is my summary based on what I understood.

00:30 – Alexa Linden talked about the 360 Snapshot Project Viewer at the Content Creators’ UG Meeting (2/22). My take on the viewer is here: The Newly Revised 360-Snapshot RC Viewer is Out.

00:30 – Alexa Linden talked about the 360 Snapshot Project Viewer at the Content Creators’ UG Meeting (2/22). May take on the viewer is here: The Newly Revised 360-Snapshot RC Viewer is Out.

Read more

The Newly Revized 360-Snapshot RC Viewer is Out

by

Alexa Linden talked about the 360 Snapshot Project Viewer at the Content Creators’ UG Meeting (2/22). We last saw this viewer update in week #27-2017 (July). This is the black sheep or Cinderella viewer. It is the one that gets pushed to the back when a fire breaks out and some big bad bug has to be squished. But, YAY! We have a new version. See Official Alternate Viewers.

[vrview img=”http://blog.nalates.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/sl360_Fishergate_4096x2048_22215455.jpg” pimg=”http://blog.nalates.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/sl360_Fishergate_4096x2048_22215455.jpg” width=”512″ height=”512″ ]

This version handles the stitching… if you have built 360-images manually, you know what stitching is. It is taking a number of pictures in different directions and then piecing them together (stitching) to make a globe-shaped picture. Tedious.

But the new viewer is easy. Take a picture using 360-Snapshot and save it to disk, the picture should be ready to upload to Flickr and other sharing sites as a 360-image without further tweaking.

Read more

New SL RC Render Viewer

by

For a time, there has been a Project Viewer ‘Render’. That has promoted to an RC level viewer, version 5.1.2.512751. You’ll find it in the Alternate Second Life™ Viewers.

The viewer is based on the Alex Ivy 64-bit viewer technology. It also changes how Jelly Dolls are rendered. One change is a Jelly Doll’s attachments, they now will render on LoD zero. This prevents the higher LoD (think more polygons) levels from loading. This saves memory, which means fewer crashes.

Luanes World - Romantic Sim / Magical Love & Romance
Luanes World – Romantic Sim / Magical Love & Romance

Also, the LoD calculation has changed. No word on how.

Plus, there are about a dozen bug fixes.

Install & Performance

This is one of the largest downloads I’ve seen, 104MB. It downloads quickly.

The install installs over the existing viewer. Settings and stuff are retained.

Read more

Second Life News 2018 w08

by

A day behind.

Servers

There was no roll of a new package to the main channel. It continues to run #18.01.17.511913.

The three RC channels all updated to version #18.02.12.512536. The changes in this version are listed in the Release Notes as: Internal fixes and Simulator logging improvements.

#167.. Can you ..
#167.. Can you ..

Since I was traveling to see friends I missed the Server and Scripting User Group meeting. It was at the meeting where we learned there is a change to fix a problem in the server that has been crashing viewers.

Seems the server has been sending malformed update data that kills the viewer. The Lindens believe the problem was a memory corruption problem. A server would work correctly right after being restarted and after some time start sending bad information. Inara published a quote of Simon Linden describing the problem.

Read more

Photoshop Luminosity Masks – The easy way

by

We often spend considerable time selecting parts of images we want to change. Quite often we want to enhance the sky and clouds. Tress and other finely detailed objects in the image can make that a real time-consuming pain.

An example:

Complex Selections – Tedious and detailed

In early 2017 I was working on this image. I have since learned several ways to accomplish the selection task. All easier than what I was doing.

Following is a tutorial where Nemanja Sekulic is teaching the ‘standard’ way of creating luminosity masks. He explains what a luminosity mask is too. Nemanja assumes you know the PS basics. He is also showing you the classic method of making luminosity masks shown in most videos on YouTube. The second video her, PiXimperfect’s, shows an alternate method, which I prefer.

Read more