New Second Life Search Beta

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Today Linden Lab announced a new search has been rolled out and is in use. This new search has taken longer to arrive because the Lab elected to make a large change rather than a series of smaller changes. A test group has tested this new search and found that it gives better results than the search we are using 75% of the time. Really?

New Second Life Search

Where is this Search?

Didn’t notice it in your viewer? That is because it is not there. One must get the Search Project Viewer to see it work.  Download: Search Project Viewer Oh boy, another install… In Windows it installs the viewer in: C:\Program Files\SecondLifeProjectViewer-Search. This means it should NOT affect your other viewers. This version is: Second Life 2.6.9 (230635) May 23 2011

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Myst-Uru Crossroads

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This is one of those articles about part of my past life related to Myst games. If you are an SL or OpenSim fan and have never heard of Myst or Uru, this won’t be of much interest and may not make sense. However, you may be interested in some of the sociological issues, but this is mostly for the Myst-Uru community. If you are curious about why trolls and online abusers do what they do, then you may want to read on.

Image by: gideon_wright @ Flickr

Lots of ‘I am Quitting’ Going Around

I’m seeing lots of forum and blog posts about people quitting and leaving the community. They have lots of reasons why and most are about how the community is so bad and how Cyan has done so much to destroy the community. We see the same stuff in most online communities. However there are some unique aspects in the Myst-Uru community I will point out. First a bit about human nature to put us on the same page.

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Second Life Avatar 2 and 3

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If you make clothes for #SL avatars you know the problems with the SL Avatar 1, the one we have now. Making bikini bottoms, panties, and shorts is difficult as the texture mapping blurs sharp lines on some parts of the avatar. Shoulder straps jog around rather than run straight, so one has to jog the design to get close to a straight strap. It is a pain. So, the idea of a better avatar has been coming up for years. Are we going to get one?

Second Life Mesh
Second Life Avatars

The answer is yes and no. May be a more accurate answer is; some day. The Lab would like to build Avatar 2.0. However, their effort is going into getting general mesh ready for the main grid. (5/23 Reference – Nyx Linden) Any work on a new avatar by the Lab won’t start until after mesh is out and stable.

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Revised #SL Mesh Arriving

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The viewer using the new mesh format should be out Thursday of this week. The ADITI grids should have the new server side mesh software installed across most of the mesh regions. Mesh in ADITI will likely vanish as it is returned. New versions of user mesh will have to be uploaded. We’ll see an announcement when the sims and viewer are ready.

Update: See warning below.

#SL Mesh Design Blender 2.57b
#SL Mesh Design Blender 2.57b

New Format

With any luck the new mesh format will be published on the Wiki this week. That means OpenSim coders can start making their changes.

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Learning Blender 2.57 Basics

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If you have been put off learning Blender because of the arcane user interface and myriad of invisible shortcut keys, it is probably time to reconsider learning Blender. If you learned Blender 2.49, you may be frustrated with 2.5. I know one of the challenges I’ve had shifting over to Blender 2.57 is figuring out where the tools are that I use in 2.4. The new 2.5 user interface in Blender has drastically changed. I think it is much easier to learn than 2.4. If you are looking for good, simple tutorials on 2.5 read on.

Blender 2.57b Released
Blender 2.57b

Blender Basics

It seems most tutorials are about how to do something in Blender. How to use Blender, it’s user interface, is a byproduct of learning to build or texture something. The basic information needed to use Blender is skipped over and it is assumed you know or can find the commands needed.

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Designing Cheap SL Mesh

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A recent post on the SL Forum went into the details of creating cheap mesh, cheap as in low upload cost and tier. The actual costs remain in a state of change. There are still some obvious problems with the current implementation of the mesh uploader in respect to cost. But, the basic ideas of controlling mesh cost are becoming apparent.

What Affects Mesh Cost?

Performance is important to Linden Lab. Your render performance in the viewer and the load on the server are both of concern to the Lab. In the viewer it is all about appearance, how the mesh looks in your viewer. That aspect is all about Level of Detail (LoD) and total polygons.

On the server side it is all about physics calculations, which means the complexity of the shape for collision calculations.

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