Ciaran Laval

September 23, 2011

Land of (Impact) Confusion

I’ve been spending a fair bit of time on the beta grid lately, mostly getting frustrated that I can’t make one mesh face on my mesh object a 1:1 ratio when I texture it, but that can wait. I really like the new upload tools, they make everything far easier to follow regarding level of detail etc. However tonight I decided to play with checking land impact figures. Land impact replaces prim equivalency on the beta grid, indeed it replaces all previous settings for counting objects in the about land settings! However don’t panic, legacy prims and sculpts will largely be protected…. I think, the further I dug into the murky world of land impact, convex hulls and prims, the more confused I got!

I started with a simple mesh object, which on its own has a land impact of 1:

I then duplicated it and got ready to link the two objects:

I then link the objects and as expected I now have a two prim linkset with a land impact of 2 .. oh wait no I don’t! The land impact score is actually 1! The advanced window displays the full information:

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September 23, 2011September 23, 2011

Faulty brakes allegedly behind suspension

This one is rather bizarre. A bug has recently been introduced to Second Life that has caused a failure for scripts that use llSetPrimitiveParams and llSetLinkPrimitiveParamsFast when those commands are used in conjunction with PRIM_PHYSICS.

This has led to a lot of angry content creators and users complaining, such as here on SL Universe where I first saw reports of this bug by Innula Zenovka and here on the Jira, where something extremely odd seems to have happened to Annmarie OToole.

Annmarie OToole has these automated vehicles running around mainland, particularly the Linden highways, these vehicles sometimes go off course and annoy people, they are controversial, some people think they shouldn’t be allowed, some people think they’re a nice addition. However the introduction of this bug has led to them losing a lot of control, Annmarie OToole says this has made the brakes fail and that this is causing fatal accidents!

“My vehicles rely on llSetPrimitiveParams([PRIM_PHYSICS,FALSE]); to stop suddenly to avoid collisions. This is not working in Blue Steel resulting in hundreds of fatal accidents.”

So Annmarie should get inworld and fix the bloody problem right, I mean it’s not her fault a bug has been introduced but there are workarounds, however the problem with that is that Annmarie has received a three day suspension, allegedly due to the vehicles misbehaving due to this bug!

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September 20, 2011September 20, 2011

Mesh Looks Like It’s Coming To Phoenix Viewer

A thread over at SL Universe, which you can read here, points out that Mesh support looks like it is coming to the extremely popular Phoenix Viewer. This is in many ways a surprise move as most people seemed to be under the impression that the Phoenix viewer was largely at the end of its development and that they were concentrating most of their energies on Firestorm, which already has Mesh support in their beta version. I’d post a link to the Firestorm blog post but there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing that! Weird blogging software they’re using there.

The summary of the changes to Phoenix can be read here apparently a lot of the code to bring Mesh to older style viewers has been carried out by Henri Beauchamp, who releases the Cool VL Viewer, which has a version that unsurprisingly, supports Mesh.

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September 19, 2011September 19, 2011

Talk Like A Pirate Day Events

The official blog has gone Fashion crazy with a whole slew of posts on fashion …. so sod that for a game of soldiers, let’s leave these landlubbers alone and look at what events are happening for Talk Like A Pirate Day … this is where we all say “Yarrrrr!”

Second Life is great for pirates, they can try and plunder and pillage but they can’t really hurt you …. I hope!

There are quite a few events going on and it’s time consuming to list them all, seriously it should be easier to link to events Linden Lab! Anyway here’s a few events that caught my eye:

Vibez Gay Dance Club has a cutest pirate contest starting at 4pm SLT with a L$500 prize, DJ Trickey24Love will be spinning the tunes, more info here.

Redwood Island Docks & Fishing at Castle Redwood are holding a five hour long pirate extravaganza starting at 5pm SLT, with contests for best costumes and DJ NTropy Sellers banging out the pirate ditties. More info here.

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