A rather bizarre blog post appeared yesterday: Marketplace to Move to Second Life Billing Engine. I say the post is rather bizarre because I’m bemused as to what other billing engine The Marketplace was previously using. This is probably because I’ve only ever purchased items from The Marketplace using Linden Dollars from my account balance, which were merged with Marketplace accounts quite some time ago.
I can only assume that when people purchased Linden Dollars for use on The Marketplace, they made the purchase via some sort of legacy system, if that was the case it certainly makes sense to update the system to use the same system the rest of Second Life uses. I guess we’ll see if there are any issues in the future, but off the top off my head I can’t think why there would be.
In other, and rather less bizarre news, The Materials Viewer Has Been Released! I haven’t yet looked at this, although I hope to shortly but the blurb tells us:
“This Viewer will allow content creators to build objects using normal and specular maps and will allow users to view the effects of this new feature set. The end result is photorealistic textured objects inworld, such as the SL10B Bear Avatar, which will look even better with this Viewer.”
There’s a video, which I will embed in traditional style at the bottom of this post … well it’s traditional for me to do that! There are some important things to note regarding materials, one is that you need to be using a viewer that supports Materials, which obviously the Linden Lab Materials Viewer will do and secondly, you need to have a system that can handle advanced lighting, unfortunately not all systems will support this option.
However Linden Lab do provide an FAQ to help you along. That FAQ is really useful, which isn’t surprising as Jeremy Linden is involved with its publication, some important questions on the FAQ:
What are the system requirements to view Materials?
OpenGL 3.0 is required
One of the following supported GPUs:
GeForce 8 and later
Intel HD and later
ATI Radeon X1000 and later.
There is also a long list of supported graphics card, which you can read at the FAQ! Another issue, and certainly one that may take people by surprise is:
Why are my Materials objects now using Land Impact as opposed to Prim Accounting?
Moving forward, all new graphics features will use Land Impact to better evaluate the system load so users and creators alike can make more educated decisions about how to build and what to place in their regions.
Now that’s interesting, I’ve blogged about texture usage in the past and I’ve blogged about how some people feel that textures should be included in Land Impact calculations. There’s no doubt that textures can add to the strain on viewers and sims. I can recall that in early beta testing, Qie Niangao ran into an issue with materials textures increasing Land Impact, but unfortunately I can’t remember exactly what the issue is.
This is an interesting development and may encourage people to engage with more efficient texture usage in the long run, it’s a shame that the guys at Linden Lab can’t run across the road into the HQ of Flickr and explain to them the issues of lots of large textures loading in a scene, but I’m in danger of going off on a tangent here!
I’m also pleased to see that LL’s blog post promotes both the Content Creators Guide and the Good Building Practices Wiki. I’ve talked about the latter a few times, it’s a very handy resource that should be well promoted.
I will end, with the promised video, this is interesting stuff: