Second Life Bits 2018 w05

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The rent is too damn high… a popular exclamation in Second Life™. For relief check out Penny Patton’s article Reducing the Cost of Land by Scaling Down.

This is not her only article on reducing land cost or making more efficient use of Second Life. So, you may want to browse her blog.

I’ll point out here that Penny’s ideas on the ‘Default Camera Position’ are being adopted by the Lab. We will soon have “Preset Default Camera Positions” as a feature of the Linden Viewer.

Doors – Another thing with Penny and her building to scale. In another article, Smaller Doors Anyone Can Fit Through, she on about making doors into SL building to scale.

The handy knowledge in this article is for those that have bought homes/building other have made. How does one scale down a building and still fit through the door? Penny has the answer.

Animations – I came across this video from a post in a Plurk.

Notice the hand and face animations.

On Plurk Dutchie® has been promoting the ‘dance’ chair. There are some NSFW images from the dances. 

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Second Life News 2018 w05

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Servers

The main channel is now running version #18.01.17.511913. The version ran on all three RC channels last week. It is reported in the wiki as having Internal Changes. Mazidox Linden described it at the Server Beta UG as, “This week we promoted a couple of things to RC on Agni including DRTSIM-367 (internal fixes) and a version of the service that handles avatar bakes, built with the new version of our OS.”

Shhhhh
Shhhhh

The bake service is not actually a simulator change. It is a change in a backend service. The server and service have to work together. So, there is probably some simulator change. But, maybe just in which API it uses to bake the avatar.

The Linux Operating System (OS) the Lab uses in its server gets updated every so often. They have been (are?) in the process of another OS update.

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January Windows Update

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You may have noticed your Windows machine installing a large update. This update is MOSTLY said to be in prerelease. But, I’ve seen some machines update. Also, there is some confusion as what the actual release build is named, 17083 or …

Here are some of the changes.

My main machine has not updated yet. I’m still on 160xx.xxx something.

Nothing Earth shaking.

New Select Subject in Photoshop

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Adobe has a new feature out that will make my life a bit easier. For none PS peeps I decided to use
PiXimperfect’s video. At times he is exasperatingly tedious. But, for the novice, that is probably a good thing.

It will be some time before I decide how useful this feature will be. I have ‘Select and Mask’ working pretty well. So, I’m not sure how much this will speed up my work.

 

Better Skies Are Here

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Skies – Hamlet has been following Stevie Davros’ development of improved sky textures for Second Life’s Windlight™. Today Hamlet is writing about their release. Seems they are now available in the SL Marketplace.

Below is the installation tutorial for Mac and the Linden viewer. I highly recommend using the package with Firestorm. But, while tedious they are usable with the Linden viewer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=40&v=ZykmGCpVG7c

This installation information for the viewers will be good until the release of EEP, Enhanced Environment Project, a Linden developed enhancement. There is no ETA for the release. I definitely expect it to release in the first half of 2018. But, I could be wrong.

You’ll find some free cartoon clouds. Other artistic clouds sell from L$99 to L$599. The Natural Clouds package sells for L$599 and has 8 cloud textures and comes with 60 Windlight settings files. You can see the effect of the package in a Flickr collection. Very awesome. A more organized collection showing the clouds in the various packages is here.

Warning: Changing the cloud textures requires some basic file handling. Also, clouds must be chosen before the viewer is launched. For the Linden viewer, this means going in and renaming a couple of files each time you change clouds. With Firestorm, it is a matter of a one time install and a menu selection before logging in. (Preferences->Firestorm->Windlight (tab)->Cloud Texture (drop))

Also, see my earlier article New Skies for Firestorm for a bit more information. There is a link to Juicy Bomb’s 2013 tutorial there too.

Firestorm Updates – Finally

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Firestorm released version 5.0.11.53634. The download is here.

Controversy and Confusion

There are some controversial changes in this version of the viewer. I think the controversy is from confusion which is from ignorance.

The issue is about the Level of Detail (LoD) setting RenderVolumeLODFactor found in the debug settings (Ctrl-Alt-D=Menu Advanced->Debug Settings). The Firestorm Team has explained why they are making the change. See LOD and The Upcoming Firestorm Release The What and Why. It gets all technical, but it is an accurate description of how SL works.

Gate Of Hell
Gate Of Hell

The TL:DR is that high RenderVolumeLODFactor settings have your computer spending time drawing complex things which are so far away they only take up one or two pixels on your screen. Does it matter if a jacker has a dozen buttons if the whole jacket is so far way it can be drawn in 4 pixels and is just a tiny tiny spot on your screen? If you can’t see the buttons, why draw them? LoD is about making these optimizations and providing better performance.

Doing all the useless drawing of thousands of pixels to average them down to 4 pixels for your screen lags your render process and slows the SL system because all that detail has to be downloaded. Dumb move.

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