Blender Collada Plug-in 1.8 Released

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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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Old #SL Viewers Fading Away

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We have all heard about the Lab’s version 1.23 viewer disappearing, no longer available for download. It is no longer just the 1.23. Over the last couple of days several of the older versions were taken off the download server and marked as ‘Not available for download’ in the Old Versions list.

You can find the list in the SL Wiki here.

All versions prior to 3.0.0 have been removed from download availability.

There is information about which viewers can connect to the grid and which cannot. Plus there are instructions for how to get them to connect if you really need to.

#SL Content-Mesh UG Week 2

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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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Direct Delivery Beta Post

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Commerce Team Linden posted the following:

The Direct Delivery Beta on Aditi launches today [Jan 10, 2012] (Aditi is the Beta grid and testing will not impact production). If you would like to try out Direct Delivery please see the Direct Delivery Instructions and the Beta Release Notes on the wiki. These instructions include pointers to Knowledge Base articles and ways to provide feedback.

You can read the announcement and about users experiences in the SL Forum. Direct Delivery Beta Launch.

We may see Direct Delivery arrive in the first quarter.

#SL Viewer 1.23 Dying

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For some time I have said that the series 1 viewers are doomed and will eventually stop working. That day is drawing nearer. Several blogs have covered the demise of Linden Lab’s Viewer 1.23.5. Word is that OZ says it will soon lose the ability to deal with some inventory handling aspects. I’ll try to put that in factual perspective.

So far few have found where he said that. Oz doesn’t post meeting transcripts, so one has a hard time knowing whats going on there without attending. However, Fri, 06 Jan 2012 16:15:58, Oz Linden sent an email to the Open Source List saying:

We’re going to deploying changes to the inventory backend soon that improve robustness and performance, but in testing those changes we found that existing viewers relied on certain things being strictly ordered.  With the new backend, that assumption does not always hold true.

Changeset d327dcc8ae51

<https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development/changeset/d327dcc8ae51>

from viewer-development implements the viewer change needed to avoid race conditions.  It should be straightforward to apply to any viewer, and is safe to release before the changes are deployed (it is compatible with the services as they are now).

You are strongly urged to port this patch and get it deployed.

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#SL Scripting UG Week 2

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Tuesday the next server maintenance pack should roll out to a release channel. For scripters this roll will have llSetRegionPos(), the frame_number parameter for llGetEnv(), and some llSetKeyframedMotion() bug fixes. We’ll find out which channel gets the update Tuesday.

Roll outs are a bit off and the pipeline is a little dry because of last week’s network switch failure. So, I think we will see release channels roll Tuesday instead of Wednesday.

A backend feature has been added. Kelly Linden says it is a % scripts run stat. This tells one what percentage of scripts ran in the last frames as an average. We will eventually see it in the viewer. But, it has the QA pipe to make it through before we see it. Version 3.2.7 made it to the development alpha today. So, % scripts will likely be one or two versions behind that.

This new stat is the average percentage of scripts that ran in the last frames. A 100% average means all scripts are running in every frame.

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