April 2013 – Page 6 – Ciaran Laval

April 10, 2013

The Hunt For Missing Prims And Lindens

There’s something afoot and it involves missing prims! Inara Pey has reported the issue in her update on Interest List and object caching but the problem seems to be spreading and the location of choice to spot the missing prims appears to be Tempura Island, as exemplified in a thread on the forums.

Basically what happens is that some prims aren’t rendering, you’ll see something like this:

If you look closely there’s a girl hanging in the air where there should be a prim, well the prim is there, hence why she looks like she’s floating, she’s not. Now if you look even more closely there’s a Linden in the foreground trying to figure out what’s going on, you get bonus points for spotting a Linden in the wild these days.

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April 9, 2013

Materials Viewer May Bring New Land Impact Accounting System

Yesterday Linden Lab announced that the materials project viewer is now available. This is something that will add some oomph to textures in Second Life and has the added advantage of meaning that people can do things with textures that they may otherwise be tempted to do with Mesh.

Now this is the sort of thing that you need to see for yourself to understand why it adds oomph. There’s a healthy discussion over at SLUniverse where a post from Imnotgoing Sideways gives an idea of what can be achieved with this viewer. Another post from Laverne Unit has a YouTube video comparing two chairs, one with the new materials system applied and the other without, you may need to watch the video at a higher resolution to see the benefits of the new system, but they are there in that video.

There’s also a post from Seven Paragorn demonstrating toadstools, with and without materials applied. In another post Orc posts an animated gif of a Damien Fate dress which exemplifies the system in action too.

The project viewer is available for download and you can get it from here. There are also release notes, which you can read here. The release notes are well worth reading because this is a project viewer, it has bugs, it’s an alpha release and you should most definitely not play around with anything you value whilst playing about with materials. I recommend you only play around with new items you don’t mind losing. The release notes also point you to the material data page, which is also important to understand.

I will emphasise again, do not try this with anything you value, indeed after reading Qie Niangao’s post about the possibility of increasing Land Impact costs, it’s probably best to play with this in a sandbox. Indeed Qie’s post raises a very interesting issue.

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April 6, 2013

No Booze In General!

Last night, whilst reading the Second Life forums I noticed an advert for Stella Artois appear on the adsense adverts. This was quite a surreal moment as at the time I was drinking a can of Stella Artois! Now as it wasn’t my first, the mind goes into the realms of fantasy and imagines a Google Adsense solution based on my eating and drinking habits that Google detect upon a person … one day maybe, horrid thought but I’m sure they’d love to do that.

However far from the Stella Artois advert appearing because I was drinking it, the more likely explanation is that the Stella Artois advert appeared because there are a few miffed and bemused merchants having their items unlisted from the General rating category on The SL Marketplace because they promote cigarettes and alcohol.

There are a few threads on the forums that discuss this issue:

Alcohol & Tobacco Police On The Prowl?

Marking Everything Mature

SL’s Maturity Rating System

The thing to bear in mind is that alcohol and tobacco are not supposed to be listed in the general category and this is not a new rule. The listing guidelines cite as examples of moderate content:

Depictions of or references to alcohol or tobacco use.

So if your item has been moved to moderate when it used to be in General, then it’s a fair cop guv’nor, but that brings us to the next question, who is instigating the crackdown?

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April 5, 2013April 5, 2013

The Drax Files Episode 3 – Eshi Otawara

Episode 3 of The Drax files features Eshi Otawara, I’ll embed the video at the end of the post. Whereas previous episodes have highlighted the benefits of Second Life in areas such as recreating real world objects and activities, this episode sees Eshi make a strong case for use of Second Life for things that aren’t really possible in real life, or as Eshi describes it, physical reality, which sounds more sensible than real life as a virtual world exists within real life, which is another point Eshi makes. A virtual world exists within a real universe …. well the ones we use anyway!

Eshi is an artistic person, a classical paint and brush art type person, who has managed to crossover and embrace art within Second Life by making dresses, which have a lot of flair by the looks of it. I’m not a fashionista by any stretch of the imagination so I can’t really comment on the style of Eshi’s designs.

Again Draxtor succeeds in getting behind the avatar and showing the real person, which ties in with Eshi’s views on using Second Life, it’s a real person projecting on the screen. I find this getting behind the avatar one of the most compelling aspects of this series, it’s the real person that pulls the strings but going into a virtual world gives the person the option to pull new strings.

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April 4, 2013

CHUI Hits The Main Viewer

Linden Lab have announced that CHUI is now part of the main viewer and will appear either by automatic update or when people update to the latest release of the main viewer. This is likely to be a Marmite issue for many, with people loving or hating it, although for me, I sort of like it, unlike Marmite, which should be illegal.

CHUI (Communication Hub User Interface) has pro’s and cons, one of the cons is that it takes up a lot of screen real estate. This is fine when you’re chatting away but when you’re roleplaying or getting immersive, it gets in the way and when you minimise it, you can easily lose track of what messages are arriving, although over time you’ll get used to it.

I’ve been using CHUI for quite some time, first in the form of the project viewer and then in the form of it being incorporated in the beta viewer. Over that time it has undoubtedly been improved, the issue with local chat not staying undocked being one major improvement, but there are issues with it that I still find irksome.

There are some good pro’s with it, the way you can view chat history being a really big improvement, no longer do you need to search through your hard drive for those old chat logs, once you’ve im’d someone, the viewer allows you to view a chat history. I’m not sure why you need to im someone for this to work, once im’d the setting sticks, you don’t need to im them again to view chat history.

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