Qarl Fizz né Linden on the lag issue, in a comment on this NWN post:
...mostly, when gamers complain about lag - they mean the render speed lag (2), usually measured in frames per second (FPS). the single greatest reason for this lag is the inherent geometric inefficiency of prims. the (only) solution is the meshes project.
Here are two examples. They're simple; you don't have to understand NURBS to see how they work. A plain vanilla cube, the standard prim that everyone starts with, isn't the eight vertices and twelve triangles you'd expect, but fifty-six vertices and 108 triangles. A wall of a small cabin: with mesh, twenty-four vertices. With prims, 336 vertices.
Will people suddenly go back and totally redo their builds with mesh? I doubt it--but if these are representative examples, isn't cutting the work of rendering down by an order of magnitude tempting?
One of the pitfalls an organization can fall into is NIH, "Not Invented Here": the unwillingness to use products developed elsewhere. The result: wasted time and effort taken away from one's real goals, and reinventing the wheel badly.
Case in point: LSL. Was it really necessary to invent yet another scripting language and implement it in-house, ignoring all the other work done on development environments, efficient compilation and optimization for languages that already existed? (Not to mention instructional material... "python tutorial" turns up over two million results from Google, and "java tutorial" over twelve million; "lsl tutorial" about 57,000.)
Now that meshes are coming to Second Life, among the various complaints that have arisen is that there's no in-world way to create meshes. Maya, Blender, Wings3D, and so forth? Darn it, they weren't invented here! Never mind that vastly more effort has been put into them than Linden Lab could muster, or even could have mustered before laying off so many people.
Yes, in world development tools are good to have. Nobody seems to gripe about people creating textures outside of SL, but it would be nice if one didn't have to, or better still,. could do what one really wants to, i.e. paint in-world directly on the shoe, shirt, wall, or whatever. But is the immersion really worth having a so-so emulation of real life techniques? (I don't know about you, but I'm so-so at just painting a wall in real life, much less painting in the artistic sense. I doubt I'd be any better at it in SL.)
Now, perhaps there is a way to avoid NIH and still give the appearance of creating meshes in world--map the in-world actions to commands fed to an existing 3D program running on the resident's computer, and keep uploading the result so the resident can see what he or she is doing--but is it really worth it?
If the choice is between having the advantages that meshes provide and either not having them (another argument is that they shouldn't be allowed for fear of driving prim wranglers out of business) or having a mediocre in-world way to create so-so meshes, I know which I'll choose, thanks. (Not to mention that one of the groups you'd think would take to SL like ugly on an ape, architects, are VERY familiar with 3D creation tools and, according to some, are quite put off by the primitive building tools in SL.)
"I am endeavoring, Madam, to construct a mnemonic circuit with stone knives and bear skins." --Spock, "City on the Edge of Forever"
P.S. Prims are only simpler than meshes if you are only interested in simple shapes, like the proverbial child's lollipop "tree". Yes, in theory you can come arbitrarily close to any shape with only boxes, or only spheres... if you're willing to devote an unbounded number of them (and an unbounded amount of effort in positioning them) to the purpose. Sculpted prims are/were a compromise between meshes and the limitations of the original prims, but they have their drawbacks... just ask anyone who works with them.
P.P.S. Re LSL: remember the speedup by over 200 times reported for scripts compiled for the Mono VM? That wasn't around at the very beginning of SL, but many other virtual machines were that could have similar speed advantages over the home-grown VM.
Hamlet Au kindly points at an LL post about the status of mesh for SL. Read, follow the links to the YouTube videos, and rejoice, especially because it will be possible to create meshes for avatars. Do also read the comments; amidst the whining about an alleged "FIC" (that somehow manages both to be a select cabal and something that anyone can join just by learning to create meshes...) and the supposed ruination of existing SL content creators from the usual suspects, you'll find pointers to free software that allows mesh creation.
Kirsten's SL client was very well behaved and only sucking down a gigabyte of RAM... and I had to be bleary-eyed and about to face plant in the keyboard. Soon I'll be on longer, for a little bit at least.
The beta release of Ubuntu 10.10, aka "Maverick Meerkat", has been out for a while, and if all goes well the official release will take place on October 10th (10/10/10, whether you follow English or American date notation). It shouldn't be long before the countdown graphic shows up.
For those who don't know, Ubuntu is a distribution of the Linux operating system, based on Debian Linux. If you use Windows and have yet to try Linux, it's easy to do without disturbing your current setup. Live CDs make it trivial, or if you are willing to devote some hard drive space to the purpose, Wubi lets you do so without the delays of retrieving programs from the CD and uncompressing them.
Oh, Massively is still around. It's just that there's no longer a reason to read it, at least for me, because Tateru Nino is no longer writing there, and hence it will be devoid of Second Life-related articles.
I'm not sure how long this has been in the making, but if you take a look you'll see that SL articles had gone down to barely one a month. There were a couple of people whose comments were always basically "what's with all this SL stuff", though they seemed to have gotten tired of that and gone on to what I'd hope is something worthwhile.
So, buh-bye, Massively. If you don't follow Tateru's blog, Dwell on It, you should.
No, I won't parody the Monty Python sketch. ("Six foot five?! Damn you!"); I returned, as always, to a LBD, and thus thought I'd compensate with something other than the usual auburn hair.
I'd not worn the hair, Calico Creations Ember 2 (Fire), in so long friends asked me if I had new hair. I said no, but in a way it was new to me. The cloud of strands, with the graphics available today, struck me as it would were it new. Thank you, Calico Creations, for such wonderful hair.
Check out the Mozilla Labs Gaming site. If web-based gaming is the future, let it be based on open technology. rather than plugins tied to particular OSs.
RL work (fun, but still work) will be consuming my weekends for a while, but I managed to spend a little time in-world last night, revisiting Lemondrop's Forest.
I wonder, was all this civilization there when I was there last? If it was, I must have explored far less than I thought I did. Now you can walk long, curving paths through a row of shops...
...or even go to an airport. Don't worry, though; the wilderness is still there to enjoy.
Yow! I'd better improve my game. Maggie Bluxome's first blog is gorgeous, but her current one is downright magnificent. Now Cheyenne Palisades has turned her already-elegant blog into a work of art. (I'm a sucker for Garamond italic.)
Not only that, but they're as functional as they are beautiful. If you don't already read them, now you have less than no excuse. As Joe Bob Briggs would say, check 'em out.
I happened across a magazine I had to buy for an artist I know... and found something in it that might be of interest to SL clothiers.
It's ImagineFX's How to Draw and Paint Fantasy Females. Lots of tutorials and hints for illustration, especially eyes, lips, and hair; telling a story with an image... but in particular, three tutorials on clothing. The one that especially caught my eye described how to draw a satin gown. How I'd love to be able to wear that gown in SL! It won't happen really until SL dresses become something more than strips of cloth tied together at the waist, but the texture and the detail at the top will, I hope, inspire someone not to duplicate it, but to do something in satin that is as lovely.
After a hiatus of several months, Big Booby Girls in Second Life has come back with the first of a series of reviews of prim breasts. Part one is a review of Lolas, and if prim breasts are of interest to you, do not fail to read it. It's an honest review, covering the product (sigh; no double entendre intended, honest!) thoroughly so you can make an informed decision.
I look forward to future installments. Thank you, Cindy!
This has become a serious question lately, what with the Emerald splash screen set up to run up bandwidth on a targeted site (are there really enough Emerald users--or even SL users, if all clients did that--for that to constitute a DDoS attack?), and Emerald grabbing a pathname including one's home directory name--though if you're paranoid about that, do you ever post SL client debugging output, or have your client set up to automatically send in debugging information when it crashes?: It's laden with absolute pathnames, too.)
Some claim that quite a few people use--or now, perhaps used--Emerald. (I hope the Emerald developers clean up their act quickly.) Some cite the use of third-party SL clients that preserve the 1.x UI as an indication that many SL residents are voting with their feet against the 2.x client.
So, which SL client to use? KirstenLee Cinquetti's client is very good if you want the graphics bells and whistles enabled, but lately I find it barely usable. After running for a few minutes, it grinds to an unusable crawl. Moving the window to another screen helps, temporarily, but eventually it crashes... and I find it pulling down 2.6 or 3 GB of RAM, which seems an insane amount--there's got to be a memory leak in there.
Imprudence, OTOH, has a 64-bit version, and with graphics cranked up as far as I can (I'm not sure where the "global illumination" knob is for it), goes at a decent pace... but it has a very nasty shadow-related bug, namely that alpha textures flicker in and out of view randomly--notably if you move your camera POV, but sometimes even when you just sit there. (I can see my eyes with shadows enabled, though--yay!)
So, what to do? Necessity seems to be pushing me to Imprudence.
UPDATE: draw distance makes a big difference with Kirsten's client. Cranking it down from 256 to 128 meters cut RAM usage considerably and made it usable for longer before the huge slowdowns occurred. By the time I gave up on the session, it was sucking down 1.3 GB of RAM.
You may be familiar with Heywood Banks's song "Interstate 80 Iowa".
Someone with more skill than I at machinima should do a parody of this song, inspired by Chris Pirillo's BS characterization of Second Life. "Registration... welcome area... porn, porn, porn, porn, porn..." etc.
Then, fade to black, cue soft laid-back music, with voiceover: "But to know what Second Life is really like, don't listen to the bloviation of pundits who tried Second Life once a few years ago..." and fade into shots with voiceover descriptions of just a few of the amazing places in Second Life that have nothing to do with porn. (And trivially nothing to do with gambling, seeing as how that was banned from Second Life three years ago.) Finally, "Second Life is what you make of it. The only way to know what it's like is to experience it." Show URL, hold, fade to black, roll credits with music.
I haven't had much luck with past machinima requests, but I think this is an important one. Anyone?
Some time back I submitted a bug report; I'm not sure whether it's been dealt with. I was wandering about Apollo, a very popular sim, with a friend, and we'd managed to get separated, so I offered him a teleport. SL refused, because there were too many people on the sim--but someone teleporting from one spot on Apollo to another spot on Apollo leaves the population unchanged!
Just now, I tried to buy a Camera Control HUD which lets you put the default POV closer to your head level; judging by the reviews on the page it's highly regarded, and one certainly can't complain about the price: 0L$. I clicked buy, and was refused: "Sorry", it said, "We can't confirm your L$ balance at the moment"--but the HUD is free!
"Well, a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song, and he told me it was the perfect country and western song. I wrote him back a letter and told him it was not the perfect country and western song, because he hadn't said anything about Mama, or trains, or trucks, or prison, or getting drunk..." --David Allen Coe, "You Never Even Call Me By My Name"
I was wandering about the sims near the Botanical Garden, and took a picture in the dead of night... and it occurred to me that it might be the perfect fashion photograph. because the model is all but invisible, leaving only the outfit to capture the viewer's attention.
I'm even less a fashion photographer than I am a general photographer, but I do wonder whether that's really the idea behind fashion photography.
Read "Self-entertainment and the end of newbies". Basically, there's more of the "tl; dr"/"Here we are now, entertain us" crowd than there are of those who see an open world like SL and take to it. Can LL survive catering to the smaller market? I hope so.
I didn't have much time to spend in SL this morning, but I had to go visit the gorgeous Costa Rica Ladies' Botanical Garden--a day late for the ball, but the photo of the site in NWN made me want to explore.
Seriously, it's an Antec Neopower, and it runs very quietly indeed. I'm very, very happy!
UPDATE: OK, maybe a little less happy now that Newegg is selling it for almost half off this Labor Day weekend, but you can't choose when components fail.
So... there's a brouhaha over a video and blog entry by Chris Pirillo and a followup thereto. Pirillo, in response to someone who asked what happened to Second Life, went on at grimacing length about how it had been "overrun by people addicted to porn and gambling." Never mind that it's trivial to check that Linden Lab prohibited gambling in SL over three years ago. Apparently Pirillo tried SL long ago (he's "Wicket Pixie"), didn't see a point to it, and couldn't be bothered to do any research before shooting his mouth off.
A visit to New World Notes would also suffice to disprove the stereotype of Second Life (one we all chafe at; it's been spread by a lot of lazy and/or dishonest journalists). "75 Year Old Navy Vet Recreates His Korean War Vessel in Second Life"; "Chestnut's Choices 8-12/8-18: Attend SL Community Convention Inworld or in Boston, Immersive Pink Floyd-Inspired Art Performance and Much More"; "Keiko Takamura Debuts Her 1st Album Co-Financed with Linden Dollars from Second Life Fans". Admittedly, nobody asked the Navy vet whether he was into gambling or porn.
So... SL residents didn't appreciate gratuitous ignorant bashing (people are funny that way), and said so. Also, Oliver Szondi offered to take Pirillo on a tour. Pirillo agreed, graciously allocating a few minutes to the purpose. The result was another video rant, this one about lag and about sim owners' choice of background music (which one can turn off, but I guess if you are more interested in kvetching...), and wondering why SL users took him to task for pointing out how slow SL is. (They didn't; they took him to task for painting them all as porn and gambling addicts.)
I can sympathize with being frustrated by lag; a lot of SL residents are. (OTOH, over at Parktown Progress, Boyd Doghouse raises an interesting question: did Pirillo set things up to make SL perform badly?) But here again we see Pirillo either omitting information or not bothering to research. He sees SL as being as slow as it was years ago when he tried it and bashes Linden Lab about that, but years ago, if you were on SL you'd watch it groan and regularly crash under a load of 20,000 simultaneous users. These days, the maximum runs around 60,000. Linden Lab hasn't been sitting on its thumbs for years as Pirillo insinuates.
Chris Pirillo has a following, and yes, to the extent that some of them haven't already drunk the "SL is all sex" kool-aid, he may have put them off SL. Did Linden Lab miss an opportunity, as Grace McDunnough asks? No. There's no point in discussion with someone whose mind is already made up.
P.S. Troy McConaghy delightfully punctures some complaints about SL in "The Piano is Dead".
Here's my photo for the protest of Qarl Linden's layoff. As a prim breast user, LL's laying off the man who was the major force behind sculpted prims, and later played a major role in mesh import, a feature whose fate people now wonder about, is especially significant to me. I hope you'll consider joining the protest.
UPDATE: I am pleased that I refrained from playing on any of the works of Rusty Warren, or Brian Eno's "Baby's on Fire", when making this post.
In the middle of a conversation with Susyn Stenvaag, my computer shut down. Power outage? No, everything else is on... Looks like it's the power supply.
So, I'm off the grid until a replacement is here and installed. Sigh.
...and possibly to improvements in the appearance of Second Life, too.
Qarl Linden is the main person responsible for sculpted prims, which have revolutionized the appearance of Second Life. More recently, he's been similarly responsible for work to bring meshes to Second Life, which made it to closed beta, but may not make it any further than that, because Linden Lab has laid Qarl off.
This is a guy who helped with visual effects on some movies you just might have seen: 300 and two of the Matrix movies. He is highly enthusiastic about Second Life, as one can tell from his blog: "...i really do love second life. SL is the coolest thing on the planet - the world we’ve all built is literally incredible - beyond belief."
...and LL laid him off.
I fear this means we can kiss meshes goodbye. Incredibly, I've seen an assertion that this is a good thing, that you should be denied the improvements that meshes make possible so that some SL builders can continue to sell their stuff without actually having to like, you know, learn something. Mind-numbingly stupid, as was the decision to lay off Qarl Linden in the first place.
You'll recall that Miriel Enfield closed her store and stopped making things in Second Life. In her words, "...I quit because I was frustrated with a lot of things, especially SL's artistic limitations, my own inability to work around those to my satisfaction, and my belief that LL is not going to ever give me the features I want." How long will it be until the really good content creators similarly give up on SL? Having features like mesh dangled before them and then snatched away is only going to hasten the flight.
It's been a while since I sat down and priced a computer for running Second Life. It's kind of fun, save for the part where I don't get to spend the money to actually put it together. :)
Case: I like not needing a huge heavy case, so it's Micro ATX for me. The Apevia Q-Pack 2 has been my choice for some time, but the package includes a power supply that isn't what one would really like: it's not modular, so you have to deal with all those extra cables, and these days graphics cards want more extra power connectors than it comes with. So, this time I pick a somewhat larger Micro ATX case that doesn't come with a power supply: the Compucase HEC 6T Series 6T18BB, $45 at newegg. (Yesterday it was a "shell shocker" and going for $25.) The Antec Neopower 650 is modular and not outrageously expensive, at $80.
Motherboard: the GIGABYTE GA-785GMT-USB3 is a step up from the motherboard I currently use, and supports USB 3. $95.
CPU: One of the Phenom six cores is awfully tempting at $200, but SL doesn't take very much advantage of multiple cores, at least not yet. The Phenom II X4 945 is just $140... or it may be better overall to get one of the dual or triple core CPUs, or a Propus quad core if you are willing to forsake the L3 cache, for about $100 and spend about $100 on an SSD to put the operating system and Second Life and its data on.
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4 GB (2 x 2GB) is of a speed the motherboard supports and is about $100 at newegg. Watching the RAM usage when I fire up Kirsten's client makes me wonder whether 4 GB is enough, but maybe that's a memory leak.
The nVidia 460 is getting rave reviews for price/performance. The GIGABYTE GV-N460OC-1GI GeForce GTX 460 1 GB is going for $230.
We'll get a hard drive that's "just" 750 GB: Western Digital Caviar Black WD7501AALS, $80.
DVD/CD burners are pretty much commodity items these days: ASUS DRW-24B1ST/BLK/B/AS SATA DVD/CD goes for $24.
Not counting shipping, if you pick the six-core it comes to $854. We didn't go for cheap this time around.
OK, not louder, but... someone named Niran has written a guide to installation and settings for KirstenLee's SL client. I will sit down soon and take its advice (mentally mapping Windows flavored paths to the appropriate ones for Linux). If you use Kirsten's client, I'd suggest you check the guide out. If you don't use Kirsten's client, I suggest you try it out... which may well be best done with the guide at hand or screen. Many thanks to Niran for posting this guide, which is clearly the result of a lot of experimentation to determine how to use Kirsten's client to best advantage.
Since I had on a Victorian dress to visit the wonderful Posture is Everything store and check out animation overrides, I decided to put on the beard and explore a bit. I had to take a picture; I didn't quite have it adjusted right on the first one I took. Here's the result, taken in the lovely Caledon Moors sim:
The best thing about writing this blog is meeting or getting an IM or email from someone who reads the blog and likes it. I'm doubly happy if the reader found out about prim breasts in SL from the blog and joined SL because of it.
I've had that pleasure a few times, and it keeps me going. Thank you, Gentle Readers.
P.S. That doesn't include comment spammers like the one whose comment I just wiped.
Last night Janey Vansant asked me if I'd like a preview of a new outfit... I said something to the effect of "Yes, I'd love to see it"... and suddenly SL asked me, would I like to accept an item into my inventory? Um, yes... I wasn't expecting that! I thanked Janey, and asked if I could put up a photo. Yes, came the reply, as long as I make clear that it's not yet for sale. I agreed... so, here is something to look forward to when it becomes generally available from Ms. Vansant:
The skirt will be a bit more modest for those of you who don't share my predilection for legs as long as SL permits.
P.S. Those are bird of paradise flowers, and the photo was taken in Whimsy. (If you've not been to Whimsy, why not? It's gorgeous, and the hummingbirds aren't that dangerous...)
The nVidia 460 graphics card. $200 for the version with 768 MB RAM, $230 for the version with 1GB of RAM. It's not a 480, but for less than half the money pretty darned respectable, and by the time I can kinda sorta justify getting one, it will be even less expensive.
UPDATE: Reviews say that there's more difference than just the amount of RAM. and that one should spring the extra $30 for the 1 GB version.
FuturePunditcites a report that suggests that fish oil lowers the risk of breast cancer. A study that will give us a better idea about whether this really works has been recruiting subjects since January. (They want both men and women; the study is looking at various illnesses.)
I hope it's true. The occasional fishy belch from a fish oil capsule strikes me as a small price to pay.
I've mentioned, here or in Pectoral Virtual Fashion or both, that there are people who offer the service of creating textures that adapt existing outfits or tops to prim breasts. That approach needn't be custom; there are those who mass produce packages that let you apply a clothing texture to prim breasts to let them work with an outfit or top.
So... I finally got around to purchasing such a package. This one is one of several from EPIC Proportions that let one use certain sets of prim breasts in conjunction with various colors of the Bugshit Gloss bustier. (No, that's really the name of the store. Honest.)
I got the purple one. The applicator for eCorps prim breasts works well with Foxbean Liebknecht's Nadine 1.5 breasts; the photo shows the results exactly as applied, with no followup tweaking as I've had to do with some other outfits. I'm quite pleased with Tenyene's work, and with the bustier proper, save that I'm too modest to wear the extremely short skirt that comes with the bustier; the skirt in the photo is from another outfit. (I also wish that the bustier came with a skirt that covers all the way up to the edge of the bustier; as it is from the back it resembles the horrid practice of having underwear visible above one's skirt or pants.)
Beautifully done, Tenyene; thank you.
UPDATE: Epic Proportions now has formal outfits. Pictures ASAP!
I decided to take a break from my usual mode of dress, starting with the hair. Off with Goldie Locks' elegant Aphrodite, on with a wonderfully outrageous mohawk from Digit Darkes, and so on. I couldn't resist half the Nanami outfit. (OTOH, my resistance for tops cropped way too short is very high indeed, so I went with a turtleneck and lace.)
I feel guilty about this photo on a couple of counts: first, it seems less than nice to take a picture in a store one hasn't bought anything from--but it was a great backdrop, and if you search for "city" or "urban", you'd be amazed at how full the results are of "dark urban roleplay", which I want to avoid, thanks... Second, I'd have sworn that I'd asked for high resolution. Are we back to those settings not being remembered? I hope not.
I visited the Mammatus sim again this morning. (That is in itself sad; I've been there far more frequently now that it is going away than I have for some time prior.) Very little remains, but now there is a far more appropriate tribute than the humble rose I left behind (since returned to my inventory).
I took a break from the dense and overwhelming SL7B sims and relaxed on the Born sim at the Born Museum of Fine Arts. On the first floor it's an airy, open space with lovely landscapes and still lifes, but if you want to relax, be sure to go up a floor to see the mandalas of Sheba Blitz.
If you've gone looking for the Emerald SL client lately, you've probably found it somewhat frustrating. They've moved, but the old links still show up at the top of Google searches.
So, to save those who read here the trouble, and, I hope, to move the current link further up the heap, here's where to go for Emerald, or at least, so it seems. I'm a bit puzzled, as the Linux download there is 1.23.5.1635, but OTOH, in the directory where I keep the various SL clients I've fetched, I see a 1.4.0.2164 that I fetched last Saturday, and I don't recall where I retrieved it from.
UPDATE: Thanks to Nalates; by all means take the advice from the comment, and head for http://blog.modularsystems.sl/.
Maggie's got a new web site, and it's very much worth your perusal. It's filled with her excellent fashion photography, selectable by various categories. Also, it has many SLURLs of interest, especially to the prim breast user.
...and I know it's partly my fault. RL gets busy, it gets to be far too easy to put off going there--but I will be forever grateful for the many friends I made there and at Big'Uns's previous locations.
I hope the rose I placed there is not too much of a bother.
(If you don't recognize the Night Gallery reference, track it down and watch. It'll rip your heart out and stomp that sucker flat.)
SLOG has a post about a brief raising of the NDA veil over meshes for SL, and just what was revealed during that interval. Get the details there; I don't want to spread bad data based on a misinterpretation I might make. That said, it sounds very exciting.
UPDATE: Be sure to watch at least the first video there, of the creature playing Paganini. It looks like it's an example of something the blog post mentions, "rigging", which allows actual wearable clothing rather than body paint.
UPDATE: I'm kicking myself, remembering the first mesh demo video which showed a mesh figure of the Hulk. It just begs for a filk... "I was there at Linden Lab late one night, when my eyes beheld an eerie sight... (it was a mesh!) It was a Monster Mesh..."
So I had spare time today... I can wander about the grid to my heart's content, right? Well, sort of.
Early on things worked and I got some nice photos. But then I thought, "Gee, why not try SL on the computer connected to the nifty big LCD TV?" So I did... and I saw something that I've noticed here lately. Try a new client and the first time or two you get Caspered. I signed on again, or rather, the client crashed and I signed on again... and there I was, a swirling white cloud.
Back to my main computer, and still the cloud. Then I noticed something really strange: I was Caspered, but the client (Kirsten's 2.0 flavored client, build 24 I think) was able to correctly render my avatar's shadow--not the attachments, just the avatar. Then I visited with friends, a long overdue and joyous meeting, and I found that everyone else could see me. I was only Casper to myself, and here's the proof:
If it's across multiple clients, it's either code common to the clients or on the server side. I saw one claim that it's a known 2.1 code problem, and that the fix is to load one of the default avatars (do they mean the shapes?) and then switch back. I tried that, with no luck.
I hope this is fixed soon.
UPDATE: It's consistent across Kirsten's client, Emerald, and LL's 2.1 alpha and 2.0 clients, and continues despite cache clears and even "mv ~/.secondlife ~/.secondlife.bak".
UPDATE: If I were an English major, I would probably have worked in a line about how "I wandered lonely as a cloud". Ah, well...
UPDATE: Just after posting that, poof! Back I came. I hope that I'll stay.
I have a computer connected to the TV now... a nice 32" LCD HDTV. Download KirstenLee Cinquetti's latest Linux client, install, fire it up, and... OK, well, it seems every time I try out a new client with no cached textures and stuff, I take forever to rez, at least to myself. Then I try to move and look around...
...and have to force myself not to scream with frustration. I have a wireless keyboard/trackball combo; it is essentially the Adesso WKB-3000UB. I ended up having to play Twister with my left hand to hold down ctrl-alt and the left mouse button and fiddle with the trackball with my right, and I don't have a good surface to set the thing on. I ended up apologizing to all and signing off.
It looks like there is a right-hand reachable left mouse button, so I'll give it one more try, but does anyone else use an HTPC for Second Life, and if you do, what do you use for a keyboard and pointing device?
Newspapers are fading out, and it's about time. At a local grocery store, the local newspaper has been giving away issues and trying to sell subscriptions. The first time, I accepted a Sunday paper; it sat unexamined for a week until I finally got rid of it. News is available from other sources, including the paper's own web site; store coupons and machine readable versions of their Sunday ads are available online, and I wouldn't be surprised if you can get coupons fed to your smartphone. Physical newspapers are not worth the hassle to recycle them.
That said, I happened upon a stray issue yesterday and looked through it. Alongside the (very shrunken... and Bill Watterson thought newspapers were shrinking comics back when he did Calvin and Hobbes!) comics was "Goren on Bridge". For a second, I misread it as "Gorean on Bridge", and suddenly this mental image of a pseudo-Frazetta portrait of four Goreans sitting around a table studying their cards, kajirae at their feet, went through my head.
...and to gently nudge LL about VWR-17063, we're changing the masthead for a day. Wish I could've found Sandy. ("Arf!" Yes, I know, but I didn't have time...)
The 2.1 alpha SL client is out, and it supports voice morphing. With it, you can rent any of several "packs" of five voices, L$750 per month per pack. The packs that exist are "Scary", "Feminine", "Masculine", "Tiny", and "Techie".There's a page with a link to "Voice Island" and a video demonstrating some of the voices. I watched the video; it doesn't demonstrate all of them, just a selection.
I guess there's an "uncanny valley" effect for voice, too; the scary, tiny, and techie voices don't fall in, but the feminine ones in the video certainly do--they sound metallic and phony. I hope the voices improve.
UPDATE: Upon reflection, that metallic sound reminds me of an inexpensive pitch shifter I once played with. If that's all that's being done, it can be easily reversed, and in any case the effect has a distinctive sound, easily recognized. It will carry as much stigma as not using voice does now.
UPDATE: Prad Prathvi put up a post embedding a video that goes through all the voices, and listening to it I realize that people are going to want to stack them. If they've found some voice that they like, they may well wish to modify it further with "radio" or "intercom" to get that effect on their preferred voice. I wonder whether that will be possible.
YET ANOTHER UPDATE: I've submitted JIRA entry VWR-19885 to request the ability to apply multiple voice modifications. If you'd like that ability, you may wish to vote for it.
LL has laid off 30% of its employees, and some are saying more layoffs are coming. The virtual village idiot is busy gloating, while others mourn.
Some fear the end is near, others look forward to SL access via the web. (If Hamlet's right, that will happen via WebGL, a way for web pages to get to OpenGL, so this does not necessarily mean smartphones and netbooks will be able to get to SL.)
All I can say is, thank goodness for OpenSim. One of the virtues of Open Source is that you're not held hostage by a sole source, and if worse comes to worst I think we'll appreciate that greatly.
Cheyenne and Sweetie's Robot Sanitorium is Editor's Pick on the Linden Showcase. It's long overdue. Visit the Sanitorium, and stay to see Whimsy and its surroundings. You'll be glad you did.
All I wanted to do was get the sun to shine as it did the last time I took a photo in caLLie cLine's store on the beautiful stairway... and I could not do it! It makes me wonder whether SL mimics the way the sun's path through the sky changes over the year.
So, good work, you folks who built Stonehenge; you have me beat.
I'm very sorry to report that the Mammatus sim will close at the end of June. The stores in the Mall, as far as I know, all have other locations, but I fear for the other businesses and features on the sim.
Long, long overdue thanks to Aspen Normandy for his friendship and all he's done for prim breasts and prim breast users.
P.S. Any resemblance between the title and that of a Philip Roth novella or the movie made from it is purely coincidental.
Check out this post in Technology Review's blog. It deescribes a setup to let one create a virtual hairdo by... hairdressing! I hope that someday SL hairdos can be created with this user interface.
Whew! I've saved 15 GB of disk space by converting old .bmp SL photos to .png, and I haven't even gotten through all of them yet!
How to do it? I used Image Magick (in particular the "convert" program) to do the conversion, iterating over the images. I was not smart; I didn't use touch to preserve the time stamp, but I have a backup that I can use for that purpose.
png compresses, and unlike JPEG doesn't use lossy compression, so there's nothing to lose save maybe an excuse to get a bigger hard drive. :)
New World Notes has had a lot of really good items lately... but this machinima, I think, tops them all. (The NWN post includes SLURLs for all the featured sites.)
It's a reminder of what SL can be, and I hope that while LL tries to increase its retention factor and make things easier for new residents, it doesn't forget that.
After you watch the video, be sure to read Cheyenne's latest, at least slightly tongue in cheek (I hope!) commentary about the matter.
UPDATE: The finalists for this year's Linden Prize have been announced. One of them is, I kid you not, Sion Chickens. What a joke, and I fear my aforementioned hope is, if not dashed, near the rocky shore with no functioning lighthouses.
My sincere apologies to all, as I forgot that going to a new client seems to require setting various preferences again--particularly the one that causes IMs sent to one while one is offline to be emailed. I've gone a long while without SL, and because of my oversight been relatively incommunicado. Please forgive me.
When the SL client started displaying a swirly white mist for unrezzed avatars, some waxed nostalgic for Ruth, the ancient default avatar that the client would use if it couldn't retrieve an avatar's shape, skin, or hair.
They needn't have worried. Something about the 2.0 client makes it Ruthify you the first time around. Each time I've tried a new LL 2.0 client lately, I've started out as the mist, and the client would, one after the other, say "can't load shape, can't load shirt, can't load..." and use a new piece of white clothing, a default shape and skin... and poof! There I stand, Ruthified save for perhaps a hat or hairdo that it managed to load somehow.
I did not see this as it originally appeared in NWN, so I am especially grateful to Hamlet Au for seeing it and making sure it receives appropriate notice by making it a post unto itself. Tabitha Eichel makes an eloquent case for SL identity not being tied to RL identity. I strongly urge you to read it.
Back in November, I described something I wish SL would support, namely a landmark that really just points at another landmark which the creator could update when the site/store/etc. the landmark points at moves.
Shame on me; I did no more than kvetch in my blog. Ann Otoole, OTOH, has proposed said feature in a JIRA entry, VWR-11679. Thank you, Ms. Otoole, and I hope that all of you reading this will consider voting for it. (Think for a minute about just how many out of date landmarks clutter your inventory... that should motivate you.)
My sister in eyelessness (at least with the 2.0 SL client), Little Orphan Annie, will disappear from newspapers in June of this year. June 13th is the date of the last strip. Ave et vale, or, to translate from the Latin, "Arf!"
UPDATE: Hey, that's a thought. On June 13th, take a self-portrait using the 2.0 client with shadows activated, dressed up as Little Orphan Annie. (Does anyone have that hairdo?)
UPDATE: Gee whiskers, there is a Little Orphan Annie avatar! Perhaps having a goal and a deadline will induce me to do my first serious texturing; that dress will require a special prim breast texture...
One of the things flickr lets you see is how many people have viewed each of your photos, along with a graph of total views per day for the past few days. For serious photographers, it's probably useful information. For me, it's just interesting, much as Google Analytics data are interesting... and the photo that seems to be the most viewed of all I've put up, getting views just about every day, is the one above, Apollo_009.
My photo nomenclature is pretty mundane; rarely do I come up with creative titles for them--just the name of the sim and a sequence number, so, as I'm sure you recognize if you've been around SL for very long, you know that this is the ninth photo I took in the Lost Gardens of Apollo. (And if you haven't been there, by all means go. I believe it's one of the longest-lived scenic areas in SL--the New World Notes post about it is over four years old.)
So this photo has been viewed 2,781 times since it was posted in March 2007. It obviously predates Windlight; the background is flat. Why has it been viewed so many times, I wonder? It's probably not that people trip over it while searching for images of the Greek god or the moon missions; I have a bunch of other photos taken on that sim, viewed nowhere near as many times. I know that when I changed the classification of my images, trying to accurately categorize them, viewership plummeted. It's a rare photo since then that has as many as a hundred views. It is a puzzlement.
...because I want to make sure the word is spread: a new magazine, BUSTed, is coming out. It will be of interest to all those who use prim breasts, and those who appreciate them. More info at Pectoral Virtual Fashion.
Back when the whole CSI:NY/Second Life crossover happened, the general opinion was that it fizzled out.
Perhaps it didn't result in a huge influx of people into SL, but I respectfully submit that any action that has the results that Sarra Foggerty describes is in an important sense as far from failure as you can get.
Sigh. Kirsten's SL client doesn't have the SL 2.0 client bug in which enabling shadows stops your eyes from rendering... but it's become unusable for another reason. A minute or so after I start it, it consumes all available RAM and slows to a crawl. I hope that's fixed soon.
If you use Linux (and GNOME), open up a directory you have RL photos in and right click on one of them. Choose the "Image" tab, and there you will see a lot of information: I was taken on a Mumbleflex BS9000, so and so f-stop, 1/120th second exposure, ISO 400, on March 25th 2009 at 3:15 p.m., and I'm X pixels wide and Y pixels high I bet that someday there will be cameras with GPSs that record where you were when the photo was taken..
Right click on an SL snapshot. You'll see the image size.
Many are the times that I wish I could remember where I took a picture in SL , the camera's orientation, what Windlight preset I was using, what my graphics settings were, the draw distance, the pseudo-time of day on the sim... but that data isn't there. I expect that just about anybody who's taken a picture in SL has wished that as well.
Please consider voting for VWR-19178, which asks that such information be stored in the metadata for SL snapshots.
UPDATE: Sorry! I fixed the link to the JIRA entry; it now takes you directly there.
UPDATE: I rummaged around my cell phone's settings, and it can store the location as determined by GPS with the pictures it takes. How much easier it would be to do in SL!
I just crashed out of a dance held by the SL Bloggers group for the second time. I had a wonderful time, and met lots of great people. Thank you, Cheyenne, for inviting me there, and I apologize to everyone for dropping out so unceremoniously.
So, FarmVille is a "casual game", Flash-based, that has drawn in a huge number of players. It has a system of rewards and levels, something that Hamlet Au really, really thinks that SL should have in order to cut down SL's high initial attrition rate. It's casual because it doesn't require great skill to advance, just grinding away. One can, though, select crops and fit the varying rates of crop ripening around one's schedule to optimize one's rate of advancement, or take advantage of game features, e.g. confining one's avatar in a tiny space so that you can harvest and plow without waiting for your avatar to walk around.
I have friends who play FarmVille. (I can't play it--to really play it requires a Facebook account, and we all know Facebook's attitude towards avatars.) What do they talk about? About FarmVille forgetting about their last however many minutes of work, having difficulty signing on, ignoring one's attempts to purchase items, not being able to rotate buildings, and so forth. Sounds kind of like complaints about Second Life, only more so... and in FarmVille, all you have is a square plot of ground in not particularly realistic isometric projection. There's a half-hearted attempt to show "neighbors'" farms as being next to yours, but each farm is really like a "room" that one teleports to or from. No notion of geography at all.
Ubuntu 10.04 is getting very close. The Release Candidate version is now downloadable. Give it a try; you can do it without touching your computer's hard drive.
On Monday, April 26th, I will wear the most cleavage-showing shirt I own. Yes, the one usually reserved for a night on the town. I encourage other female skeptics to join me and embrace the supposed supernatural power of their breasts. Or short shorts, if that's your preferred form of immodesty.
Perhaps we in Second Life should join in the experiment—or would that introduce an extra variable that might skew the results? Perhaps it's the reaction of the viewer that moves those tectonic plates, in which case virtual immodesty should add to the effect, or perhaps not.
SL Fashion Police and What the Fug? seem to be fading out. The former hasn't had a new article since mid-December 2009 (enough to get it on Cheyenne's list of "Dead (and Missed) Blogs"), and the latter has only run four articles this year.
Perhaps there's only so many things one can make fun of.
...when you see email with the subject line "Got Big, Ugly Carbon Feet? Fly into Second Life for Help!" and you have an urge to check your appearance and wonder if you have the right skin on.
Many thanks to Athy for pointing out in a comment that KirstenLee Cinquetti is once again making a version of her SL client for Linux.
I've given it a short trial run, and... I like it, but I'll have to read the instructions to find out how to make go away what in LL's 2.0 client has a little >> thing to click on to make go away--and after reading about how this client has solved the problems that shadows (aka deferred rendering) have had in the past, it's kind of frustrating to find that, after twisting all the knobs to turn shadows on, they doggedly refused to appear for me.
UPDATE: I found the sequence to close the sidebar. Unfortunately, if an IM window is also open, it makes it go away too.
UPDATE: I managed to miss something, I guess--shadows are now enabled, and I can see my eyes, so Kirsten's managed to do something that has escaped LL. So... back to photography, thank goodness. I have photos to do for Pectoral Virtual Fashion articles.
I blush to think that I didn't notice when it actually happened, but the countdown to Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx", is underway. (10.10 already has its nickname, Maverick Meerkat.)
Back when I could see my eyes, there was one thing that kind of killed verisimilitude: if anyone was waiting to shoot until they saw the whites of my eyes, they didn't have to wait long. They positively glow in the dark!
I'll check the textures next time I'm on the grid. Meanwhile, does anyone know of a good source of emerald-green eyes with non-phosphorescent whites?
What's up with the Alphaville, née Second Life, Herald? It seems to have become worth reading. Someone must've read Strunk & White and paid attention to the "Do not affect a breezy manner" section... or perhaps it's just that whoever currently holds the reins has ditched the "too cool to care" attitude. Whatever the cause, I applaud the result.
So I was back in the grid last night, getting my rent in at the last minute, when a dear friend IMed me, saying hello, and asking whether I wished to dance. Alas, I had to pass the chance for dancing and delightful conversation by--and ironically. it was because in RL, my left knee was complaining about my having sat too long in one position.
I'm away from home, and SL 2.0 Beta doesn't work and play well with the computer I have access to for some reason. It crashes in pretty short order with unfortunate regularity. (Apologies to friends I've been talking to and then abruptly leaving--this is why that's happened.)
I hope that LL can find and correct the problem--I do send the dump information in.
UPDATE: I'm back home, and just crashed immediately after IMing a dear friend--I'm so sorry, Susyn! I hope this doesn't become common.
I zoomed out on the map, picked a place at random that had a number of people present, and teleported there. I found myself in a campfire (eek!), but got out and went exploring where I ended up, a sim called Nuba. I forgot all about seeing what all the people were doing—with that many, it was probably a place I wouldn't want to go anyway—when I saw this wonderful scene, and I had to take a picture.
Just for a comparison, I should've turned off shadows and taken another picture, same POV, same time of day, same Windlight setting. I'm sure it would be far less immersive.
OK, so we have a lovely landscape photo. (Hey, if you take enough pictures, some of them have to turn out good, right?) The only problem is... if I put a person in, thanks to VWR-17063, it would turn into an instant horror show, because the subject's eyes wouldn't rez. Unfortunately, shadows (technically "deferred rendering") is officially an experimental feature in the SL 2.0 client—nearly two years after work started on it—and I fear that the JIRA entry will be marked "resolved--wontfix". Take a look at what can be done in SL with shadows (e.g. Dirk Schooner's gorgeous video of a matsuri in Hosoi Ichiba), and if you are so inclined, please vote for the JIRA entry.
On March 18th, there will be reason to celebrate after St. Patrick's Day, because the beta release of Ubuntu 10.04, "Lucid Lynx", will be available. You'll know when it happens because the Ubuntu graphic in the right-hand column of the blog will change over to a countdown to the official release, scheduled for April 29th.
I've been running Alpha 3 (not, as they say, on a production machine), and it looks nice. If you're tired of brown, you'll be happy. :)
UPDATE (March 19th): the beta was held back a day to get fixes for a couple of nasty bugs in; expect the beta some time today.
From back in the old days, i.e. about five weeks ago, when I had to do screen captures to get images with shadows turned on, and trees and arches and windows flickered in and out of existence as I moved my POV around, but at least I could see my eyes!
Seriously, even if you aren't interested in clothing, go to caLLie cLine's store in caLLiefornia just to admire the glorious architecture and decor. (You'll be interested in the clothing soon enough.)
Yes, there were harsh shadows in it--my face was in the shadow of my hat.
That's a bad thing, or it would be if the photo were taken for a reason other than to provide evidence for a JIRA entry. But where SL is concerned, it's a good thing, because it means that SL is a better environment.
Consider the musical analogy.
A sampling-based musical instrument, when you do whatever it takes to play a note on it, plays back a recording, possibly modifying the gain or picking one of several samples based on how hard you strike the key or blow into a breath controller or whatever. The person who has the most control over that note, though, is the nameless person actually played the instrument that got sampled.
There's another kind of instrument, though--it does what is called "physical modeling." It actually solves the differential equations that describe the behavior of the instrument in real time, and it takes the same inputs that the instrument being modeled takes. That means it's possible to play it badly!
Oh, you can play a sampling instrument badly--you can hit the wrong notes at the right time, or the right notes at the wrong time. But the individual notes will be exemplary notes of their kind as played by a good instrumentalist. You can't play a sampling instrument badly in all the ways you can play the real instrument badly--but you have full control over the physical modeling instrument, so you can play it badly.
So my ability to take a bad picture in SL means that SL itself is improving!
I would've sworn I saw it the other day, but I was on a wildly gyrating hovering dancing disk. Now I have proof. For some reason, now I can see other people's eyes, but not my own using the 2.0 Beta with shadows enabled. *scratches virtual head*
P.S. This suddenly reminded me of Jonathan Coulton's classic "Re: Your Brains"; is LL more unreasonable than the zombie coworkers of that song? :)
WOW.com reports "If you're using an Nvidia graphics card you should check your drivers, as there is a chance the newest drivers could cause your card to overheat during World of Warcraft, the Starcraft II Beta, or even Warcraft III." They link to BlizzPlanet, which in turn refers to threads on the nVidia forums. The (Windows) driver they refer to is 196.75. The latest version available in a PPA for Ubuntu is 195.36; I am very hesitant to try it now.
P.S. How much sooner might this have been found and fixed were the nvidia driver open source!
Other people have found that the 2.0 beta doesn't render eyes if shadows are turned on.
I hope this is corrected soon. I'm right on the edge of being able to take pictures with shadows enabled, without having to worry about parts of buildings or trees vanishing...
UPDATE: Oh, yes. If you have anything to add that might be of help in diagnosing the problem, please add it to VWR-17063.
Just to show it works: I took this photo with the 2.0 beta client. The shadows are there to hide the problem of the disappearing eyes. The subject, of course, is the beautiful and talented Foxbean Liebknecht.
