Emily Short has a teaser on her blog for a new Versu title : Coming To Versu. All the teaser contains is an image and the word “Rome“. Now as we all know, Rome wasn’t built in a day, nor was the Versu port to Android. On that blog post someone asks:
“How’s the Android port coming along by the way? =)”
Emily replies: “I’m afraid I’m not in a position to announce a date on that. I hear you, though.”
Versu, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is Linden Lab’s interactive fiction product. There are plans to allow user generated content on the platform so it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.
Linden Lab don’t seem to advertise Versu that well, which is not going to surprise long term Second Life users. There’s surely scope for an official Versu blog of sorts to keep people updated. I’m also surprised that Linden Lab don’t use Second Life to promote Versu.
With the 50th anniversary celebrations of Doctor Who in full swing, I decided to take a look at the Second Life events calendar to see what’s going in the virtual world. I discovered best in costume parties, a themed Giant Snail race and a couple of concerts.
This is not an exhaustive list and the only place I can vouch for is Giant Snail Racing, which is heaps of fun.
Some places may be more moderate so check any places carefully before rushing in, one does wonder what’s going on at place where Madam Mellons is the host, but hopefully it’s all good fun! Now on with the events, all times are SLT. Some events are taking place tomorrow.
45 foot tall Snails compete for fame and money over a crazy obstacle Course. You can watch you can race. come check it out. get there a few hours early if you want to race if you haven’t raced before and well get you set up. Talk to RacerX Gullwing about that. You can see the races at http://treet.tv/shows/snailraces Oh the theme this week is the Doctor Who. If you customize your full perm free snail to the theme you might win a prize too. Get your free snail at the track. The track is always open come on down and give it a try touch the ? in green circles for the tutorial. or watch this video from youtube :
Come and join us at The Worlds End Pub, London City, for ‘Best in Dr Who’. Get your favourite Doctor Who outfits on and join us for an hour long event and enter the contest for a chance of winning some Lindens. Our resident DJ will be there playing all the top tunes from across the decades.
The arguments regarding the collision bones versus Mesh Deformer solution continue to rage in the Second Life forum. The problem with solutions is that better is very very subjective, both solutions have pros and cons and neither of them are the perfect solution.
Personally I’d have preferred to see a two state solution here because the Mesh Deformer and the Liquid Mesh type solution should have been able to work side by side as a server side value as to whether a mesh needs to be deformed was part of the Mesh Deformer solution. Therefore if a content creator went with the Liquid Mesh style solution, they would just have changed the value of their mesh to signify it did not need to be deformed by the deformer.
However when forming an opinion on solutions it’s useful to get feedback from people who know what they’re talking about and former Linden Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) has responded largely positively to the news that Linden Lab are adding extra bones to the Second Life skeleton to aid content creators to make Mesh clothing that fits various avatar shapes. This is despite the fact that Linden Lab are not implementing his Mesh Deformer solution.
I say largely because Qarl has some complaints about the way his Mesh Deformer project has been received at Linden Lab and quite frankly I agree with him. However in a statement on the Mesh Deformer Jira Storm-1716 Qarl says:
“Several people have asked me – this seems like the best place to answer.
LL’s assessment here is mostly good. in almost all situations, the simplest solution is the best one – and collision bones are indeed MUCH simpler than the mesh deformer. as i see it, collision bones have two downsides: 1) they are substantially harder to use for the person creating the garment and 2) probably don’t track as well to the avatar shape. in the end, the evaluation must be made by the content creators who use the tool.
i will reiterate that the two year delay and refusal to communicate are unacceptable.”
Are there politics at play in Linden Lab’s decision? I honestly don’t know but we’ll come back to that later. The fact of the matter is that Linden Lab have gone with a solution that will largely work as intended.
The second was more recently, on November 19th Linden Lab blogged about required tax documentation. These issues aren’t linked but I feel they should be and in doing so, Linden Lab would be killing two birds with one stone.
Wait wait wait, the tax documentation is only for those who have gross income of USD$20,000 and make 200 transactions in a calendar year, right? Well not quite, the tax documentation is certainly required if people meet that threshold, but at that point Linden Lab will file a 1099-K with the IRS, the documentation is required for Linden Lab to be able to file a 1099-K, but Linden Lab can ask for this information anyway.
Amazon do this with Kindle Direct Publishing. I haven’t yet published my international best seller and award winning novel, but if I wanted to do that via KDP, I have to fill out a W8-BEN for Amazon to file. The W8-BEN is the non US Citizen equivalent of a W9 form. When I logged into KDP today I saw this:
Tax Information Incomplete
The missing account information was soon revealed to me after I clicked Update Now:
Update tax Information
You may need to squint to read that so I’ll type it:
“Amazon is required by US tax regulations to request information regarding your tax status under US law. Required US tax identification and information has not yet been submitted. Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.”
Let’s just bold that last sentence to emphasise the point: “Complete your tax information to begin selling on Amazon.” So that’s before I’ve sold a single book, before I’m anywhere near 200 transactions, indeed it prevents me from making 1 transaction.
This could be pretty damn epic, although the proof will be in the pudding. In unveiling this project viewer Linden Lab have decided to go beyond the controversial Liquid Mesh solution and Qarl’s Mesh Deformer Project and release their own solution. The blog post explains that there are problems with getting Mesh clothing to fit the various shapes of Second Life avatars, as opposed to system clothing which just simply fits. In the blog post LL discuss how users have so far been addressing the issue :
“Users have developed two approaches to address these problems:
Rigging garments to the “collision bones” of the avatar skeleton (often marketed as “Liquid Mesh”). This works in current Viewers for some body parts, but there are some avatar shape parameters that do not have corresponding collision bones, so garments do not adapt to fit everywhere on the body.
The “Mesh Deformer” project added code to the Viewer to dynamically compute how to modify each garment shape by looking at how the vertices of the avatar were changed from that of the female and male base shapes.
The Linden Lab development team has studied both approaches, and compared their effectiveness, maintainability, and performance. Neither approach completely eliminates the occasional need for an alpha clothing layer to prevent small parts of the avatar skin from appearing through garments, but both work quite well at resizing garments so that they fit the avatar and move naturally with it. While the collision bones method requires the creator to do some additional rigging, we have decided that because it leverages more of the existing avatar shape system it is likely to be the more maintainable solution and to perform better for a wider range of users.”
However don’t get too excited just yet, this project is far from complete and things could change that make your efforts creating a ton of clothing here, pretty redundant.
