Creating Basic Mesh Steps In Blender Using The Array Modifier

This is going to be a very basic tutorial, I am not going to cover super efficiency, texturing, UV Mapping or anything like that, although if you want your steps to be bloody useful, you’ll want to learn those aspects. Nor will I deal with reducing vertices, removing doubles and other tricks, although they’re useful, I’m not a teacher, I work in education but I’m not a teacher! Really what I want to do here is show how useful Mesh can be by demonstrating how to create a basic set of steps that will come in at One prim. Ideally Torley would be doing this with friendly greetings, however I’m not Torley and I’m not friendly!

I should also point out here that if you don’t know how to login to the beta grid, you should learn to do so! The beta grid is great for playing with Mesh as you don’t pay for uploads there, so perfect your Mesh on the beta grid. Details on how to login to the beta grid are here, but please note, you’ll need to pass the Mesh quiz for the beta grid too, even if you’ve passed it for the main grid!

Ok so to start with we need to open Blender, then press the N key so we get the properties up, which will show this menu:

Blender Props

The x, y, z dimensions work just like they do in Second Life, you have to do something to make them ideal, but it’s just like setting them in Second Life. For my steps I’m going to use settings of 0.750, 3.000 and 0.500 for my x,y,z settings, which is a nice size for step, choose whichever settings you think work best but remember this is for just one step.

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llSetMemoryLimit Mono And A Bit Of Confusion

I’m going to talk here about a relatively new scripting function, llSetMemoryLimit, this may not work the way one thinks it does, but it basically sets the upper memory limit your script can use. I’m far from being a scripting expert but this looks like a function that people should get used to using where they can, even if it might not actually save memory for a sim the way we may think it should, I’m not sure how the server handles the space.

Anyway, when you create a new script, if Mono is ticked, it has an upper memory limit of 64kb, if you don’t compile the script as Mono, it compiles as LSO, and that has an upper memory limit of 16kb, with LSO it’s a hard rule, all LSO scripts have an upper limit of 16kb, llSetMemoryLimit won’t work with LSO, with Mono however you can set a lower limit. In this post I’ll show how this works with a very basic script, a notecard giver.

I’ll start by visiting LSL Wiki and going to the llGiveInventory section. LSL Wiki isn’t as up to date as the LSL portal but I often find the discussions and examples on LSL Wiki more helpful. So all I want is a notecard giver, I rez a prim, go to the contents tab, click new script, get the default hello world script, delete everything and replace it with this (with apologies for the horrid coding style):

default
{
state_entry()
{
}
touch_start(integer total_number)
{
llGiveInventory(llDetectedKey(0),llGetInventoryName(INVENTORY_NOTECARD, 0));
}

Then I make sure there’s a notecard in the contents of the prim and when I touch it, I’ll get a Notecard. However this is a Mono script so it defaults to an upper memory limit of 64kb:

Default Mono Script Limit

So let’s look at how we can reduce that using llSetMemoryLimit()

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SOPA Is Dead! Long Live SOPA!

The Guardian informs us that SOPA is to be shelved. However, we don’t all live happily ever after here, I’m sure that just when we feel it’s safe to go back into the water we’ll see SOPA 2 – The Return Of The Bad Bill. There’s still the little matter of the e-parasite act.

SOPA falls squarely into the be careful what you wish for category. On the face of it a bill that aims to stop online piracy should be one that business and people get behind. When I go to YouTube to listen to music or find a track I want to embed into a blog post, I’d rather it was one that ticks the right boxes, being on YouTube is no guarantee that it does of course, plenty of uploads get taken down or silenced.

However SOPA simply goes too far, which is why there was widespread criticism of it. The bizarre exchange between Rupert Murdoch and Google shows how polarised opinions can get on the issue, but Google rebuff Rupert Murdoch’s claims in an article on CNET. In that article Google point out that they removed five million infringing websites from their search results last year alone, it’s not in Google’s interests to be associated with pirated content.

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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.

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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.

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