Blender Update 2.59 RC

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There is a new Blender release out that several people are using with Second Life. Results are varied in regard to rigged mesh.

The current ‘stable’ release is 2.58a. If you search on Blender Download, you will find the 2.58a download files. The 2.59RC is hidden away in the development sections. Download Blender 2.59RC. If you move up one directory/folder you can see all the Blender releases. All the version information shows the version as 2.58.1. But, the archive is clear this is the 2.59RC.

Blender 2.59 Release Candidate - Uses older art

The download I have linked to is the ARCHIVE not the Installer. If you are not using the Blender Archive for your install, you’re working too hard to get Blender installed. See my article Blender 2.57b Released for information on how to do easy installs and upgrades.

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Remember the ARC Nazi?

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ARC is of course Avatar Render Cost. The lindens introduced it as a way to encourage more sensible avatar attire. What some residents did with it is to try to force others to conform to their idea of what is an appropriate ARC value. We call them Nazis.

Mesh ARC? - Pic by: amandabhslater @ Flickr

One of the things I suspect ARC Nazis have not considered is that different viewers give different ARC values. Nor have they considered that the current ARC values have little to do with reality. The numbers are a bit faked. It might have been better if the Lindens had ARC shown as; Good, Fair, Poor, Bad, Awful, and Disaster. Sometime after mesh roll out is complete the Lindens plan to revise the ARC numbers.

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What Mesh Means

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I have seen many people asking what difference mesh will make in Second Life. Others want to know what the difference is between mesh and sculpties. The best answer I’ve seen is in New World Notes article: What Mesh Will Do for Second Life Fashion – Illustrated.

The source for Hamet’s article is Damien Fate’s blog. Damien is showing many of the differences between mesh, standard SL clothes, and sculpty clothes.

I’ll point out again that the clothing textures people make for their mesh clothes will be unique to their clothes. If you do not have the clothing template for a particular maker, it will be hard to make clothes for that brand. But, will creators want more people making textures for their clothes?

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OpenSim News Week 32

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The best sources of news for OpenSim are the OSGrid Site, OSGrid Blog, Twitter, JustinCC’s blog, the OSGrid 11:00 AM PT Tuesday, Meeting in Wright Plaza, and Hypergrid Business. I have regions in OSGrid, so I tend to pay attention. But, it is harder to keep up on OpenSim news and most of the news is rather geeky. The result is I find less interesting news to report. But, I came across a few things this week.

Devokan Tao Linking Hub in OSGrid

OpenSim Programmers

There is a firewall in place between programmers writing code for viewers and servers. It is a licensing thing. Work is in progress to remove that wall. While it remains programmers must wait six months before changing sides. They either write viewer or server code but not both. That slows down development.

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#SL Server Update Week 32

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Mesh seems to still be the top priority. Two of the release channels are running Mesh Enabled versions; Le Tigre and Magnum. Blue Steel is running a Server Maintenance upgrade. The Lindens have posted in the Wiki what changes are coming over the next few upgrades.

State of the Art?

Main Grid

The upgrade called Improved HTTP Service made it to the main grid last week. One of the items is improved texture fetch. As more users pile on HTTP Texture Get a problem was found in the servers and routers that handle the requests. Lately I’ve seen the time needed for textures to download go up. I’ve also seen more textures simply not download. I’ve also been in crowded places where I’ve changed groups 2 or 3 times to all the avatars to render. I still think changing groups to rez avatars sounds silly, but I see it work. This fix should correct the problem, but I can’t say I have seen improvement.

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Second Life’s August Update

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It looks like the Lab is going to do consistent monthly news updates. This month we got a new update Monday as to what is happening in Second Life. August Update If you regularly read this blog, you’ll probably find you know most of the things announced in the blog post. But, there are some things I did not know about, so you won’t have found out about them here.

The New Splash Screen

Splash Page

I think everyone is now seeing the new Second Life Splash page. This is the one a wrote about: New Login Screen Arrives a few days ago.

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