Ciaran Laval

January 15, 2012January 15, 2012

Qarl’s Alignment Tool – This Is Why TPV’s Prosper

There’s a bit of a hoo ha about Qarl’s alignment tool being rejected by Linden Lab for implementation in the official viewer, this discussion takes place in Jira Storm 468. I’ve never used this tool, so I can’t comment on how awesome or not it is, I did try to install Firestorm last weekend but Norton 360 threw a wobbly about slplugin.exe, this is a known issue. I’m not a big fan of third party viewers (TPV’s), however this issue highlights why TPV’s are a useful community addition.

Let’s just rewind slightly to try to demonstrate why Charlar Linden isn’t acting like Darth Charlar over this issue. I recently blogged on how Blender may drop COLLADA import/export from the official release. Collada is the export tool to make Mesh items in Blender compatible with Second Life but it creates support issues for Blender as a whole. Blender have as an option thrown this over to the Blender community to fix COLLADA issues, as Sergey Sharibin explained:

“More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..) ”

Linden Lab’s approach to the prim alignment tool is very similar, only of course, it’s not already in the official release viewer.

Continue reading “Qarl’s Alignment Tool – This Is Why TPV’s Prosper”

January 13, 2012January 13, 2012

Money Talks So Listen To It

Art for art’s sake, money for God’s sake …. I love that line! Anyway, on with the show. Bryn Oh’s Immersiva has had to close due to financial difficulties. The sim had previously been very generously backed by Dusan Writer, who has gone very quiet lately, does anyone know what he’s doing? I hope he’s ok, I liked his blogs on Second Life a lot. Anyway, unfortunately, for whatever reason, the backing no longer exists, there’s a link here to another sim which hosted Madpea production games.

The good news is that Kiana Writer of Madpea productions and Bryn Oh have both stated in comments on blog posts that they have no desire to leave Second Life. They did request special support from Linden Lab but that request was turned down and I agree with turning it down, not because I don’t think Madpea productions or Bryn Oh don’t add anything to Second Life, quite the opposite, I just get uncomfortable with the idea of Linden Lab subsidising experiences when other people’s creativity is stifled by the same issues at play here, namely how difficult it is for artists, game makers, roleplayers etc. to make ends meet to have a Second Life presence.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have sympathy, I have great sympathy, I just feel the discussion needs to be opened up to looking at ways to making it so that artists and their creativity can thrive.

Continue reading “Money Talks So Listen To It”

January 13, 2012

What Is Live Chat For?

This evening I arrived home from work and after indulging in a traditional Friday evening meal of Fish and Chips opened my email to find an an offline IM regarding a sim being offline. Logged in and sure enough the sim was offline. Therefore I decided to contact concierge live chat, for the first time in quite a while.

After being pointed to the SL Grid Status page that indicated that hardware maintenance was in progress, I was eventually told to file a ticket, the live chat operator informing me that all offline region reports should be submitted via a support ticket and that this was pointed out in a previous blog post. I couldn’t recall reading about this in a blog post, but then again I rarely notice the blog these days. However I think I’ve found the blog post in question, it’s in the SL Grid Status report linked from the original SL Grid Status report I was pointed to:

“Ongoing Issue with Offline Regions

[POSTED 10:28AM PST, 12 November 2011] We are aware of a problem that causes regions to go offline more frequently than normal. Our developers were alerted to the issue over the weekend and continue to work around the clock towards a solution. We understand how disruptive this is to your inworld experience. If your region is offline, please go to your support portal and submit a case using the following types: “Land & Region” > “Report an Offline Region”. This queue is being closely monitored to ensure the fastest turnaround possible. We will post an update as soon as we have more information on resolution.”

Continue reading “What Is Live Chat For?”

January 12, 2012January 12, 2012

Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic

The Mesh Forum has a post from Masami Kuramoto pointing to a mailing list discussion, which suggests that Blender, the hugely popular open source 3D creation tool, may soon drop support for COLLADA in release builds, if you’re unsure what any of this means, COLLADA is the format that users export their creations to from within Blender to make it Second Life compatible in terms of Mesh. The opening to the discussion reads:

“Hi,

As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what’s much worse — we don’t actually have developer who maintains this area.

We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself isn’t actually maintaning — there are only few commits in several months. Ofcourse it doesn’t mean this library is useless and all bug from our tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it’s possible to fix issues in clear way, check if design is good enough — not sure, haven’t touched this code deep myself)?

Here’s our proposal: – Move all collada-related issues into it’s own tracker. Like it was done with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will see that it’s not actually core stuff and that it’s community-supported. – Disable collada in release builds. It’s not useable and only seems to be making artists disappointed.

More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)

— With best regards, Sergey Sharybin”

This initially looks like a massive blow to Second Life’s Mesh implementation, but in reality it isn’t.

Continue reading “Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic”