Tomorrow, Saturday 14th July, sees the start oF RFL of SL Relay Weekend. Events will commence at 10:00 SLT with the Opening Ceremony, after which the laps of the track will begin.
When visiting the RFL track, make sure you head for the Welcome Center when you first arrive. Here you can obtain the Pedometer and the Walk and Talk attachments by touching the Track Tools sign. These will measure your progress around the track and allow you to socialize while automatically walking around the track.
The RFL 2012 track
While at the Welcome Centre make sure you also click on the Luminaria sign and receive a reference to the colors of the Luminari and the Themed Laps sign for anotecard on the themed laps for the weekend.
Track Tools -credit: photo by Lyr Lobo
As well as the track walks, there will be a lot going on across all of the track regions. There are three music stages and there will be a wide range of activities throughout the weekend, including: an art show, flea market, silent auction, snail races, a breedables auction and water activities.
Pooky Amsterdam has tapped me about this, and I’m happy to slip-in this post for her.
This year marks the 5th annual Machinima Expo, a three day virtual machinima festival which bridges Second Life and the real world. The Expo will be held over the weekend of the 17th-18th November 2012, and submissions are now open for those wishing to participate.
There is no maximum running time for entries to the event, but a couple of rules must be adhered to:
Entries must comprise at least 50% machinima
Entrants must not have previously submitted the film to the Expo.
Note that films do not have to be filmed in Second Life (or any other virtual world – although entries created in any virtual world are obviously welcome), just so long as they are at least 50% machinima. The closing date for submissions is September 30th 2012, and you can find the entry form on the Expo website.
A look at a couple of entries from last year’s event
The Expo itself will take place largely inside Second Life during the weekend of the 17th-18th November (venue to be confirmed) and films will be simultaneously streamed in-world and to the Expo website. As well as showing this year’s entries, the Expo will comprise:
An awards ceremony featuring a grand prize, plus three Jury prizes. This year’s prizes include sound effects collections, a full license of Lightwave 10, copies of iClone5 Pro and much more
Panel discussions, live filmmaker interviews, a keynote address and live presentations on the craft/art of making machinima
Workshops.
Additional details on events and event streaming will be posted on the Expo website nearer the weekend.
I love Marcus Inkpen’s work. The Looking Glass is one of my favourite regions to visit, and I’m massively tempted by his Floating Victorian Home. In mid-June LEA opened a full sim installation featuring Marcus’ work, and I’ve finally managed to get myself over to see it.
The Returning is described as exploring “the spiritual connection we once experienced, as an integral part of life, now lost – but lying in wait for our return” – and it is simply enchanting.
There is a rich mix of cultural elements here, most of them seeming to come from Asia, but also with some European / Middle Eastern elements as well. You arrive at a wooden landing stage facing a lush rain forest-like environment, split by meandering waterways. Where you go from here is up to you – follow the wooden piers around the small lake to the woodlands, or take a row-boat. There are only two building here, and whichever route you take will eventually lead you to them.
The Returning
The main building carries echoes of many historical sites; some have compared it with Angkor Wat – and the similarity is strong. For me, and without wishing to sound like a cracked record, the building carries a strong Sri Lankan resonance, reminding me particularly of the great stupas and pools of Anuradhapura.
For me, the Sri Lankan element was certainly heightened by the fact the music stream accompanying the installation features pieces by Lakshman Joseph De Saram. Having the music stream on is not a vital part of a visit – if anything, I’d say that in parts it actually might detract from the overall atmosphere. However, I was curious as to what might be accompanying the installation and in what was undoubtedly a serendipitous moment, I turned media precisely as Beggar / Charles Is Dying from De Saram’s soundtrack for Bel Ami was playing – and so the mental association with Sri Lanka was cemented.
Inside the structure lay the deeper spiritual elements: manuscripts that appear to be from the Kabbalah, including what looks to be the Sēpher Yəṣîrâh; on the floor in the central chamber is a carving featuring the seven Chakras, adding a Hindu / Buddhist element, around which a pendulum slowly rotates.
The remaining building appears to be more western in style and design – almost a folly. It contains a device resembling an orrery, enticingly called Know Thyself. Around the walls are empty frames and pictures that appear to be from the 19th Century; perhaps another piritual echo – the memories of those who have passed before us.
Exploring the region will reveal strange incongruities. Alongside the “folly” run a set of power / telegraph wires; up on a hill you’ll find a US Postal Service mail box. Near the end of the reflecting pool at the front of the main building sits a pianola. Are these random placements, or do they carry meaning themselves? You’ll have to decide, as I’m saying nothing.
I’m not sure how long The Returning will remain open. If you haven’t visited already, I urge you to do so – and don’t be surprised if you find me sitting in quiet contemplation by the reflecting pool or among the trees.
Wednesday July 11th saw the release of Firestorm 4.1.1.28744. Using the Linden Lab 3.3.3 viewer code base and bringing RLVa support up to 1.4.6, the release includes and extensive range of updates, improvements and changes. I don’t propose covering all of these in detail – that’s what release notes are for – but will attempt to give a broad flavour of what are likely to be the more popular changes and outline where you can find them.
Download and Installation
The download is 32.9Mb in size for Windows, and installation threw out no surprises. As per usual, I did a completely clean install – something that is actually strongly recommended for the release. If you’ve not performed a clean install of a viewer before, the Firestorm team have some notes to help you.
Menus
There are a number of updates to the menus, which can be seen in the table below:
Firestorm 4.1.1.28744 menu updates (click to enlarge)
The World menu gets two brand new options, the Sound Explorer and Asset Blacklist:
The Sound Explorer displays all current sound sources within audible range. The list will continue to update as new sounds are played. Sounds can be located, played locally for you to hear and can be blacklisted. directly from the Sound Explorer. You can read more details in the Phoenix wiki
The Asset Blacklist works with an updated object de-render. With release 4.1.1, objects can now be “permanently” de-rendered (on previous releases, any object de-rendered would re-appear in your view following a teleport or re-log). With this release, all objects so treated are listed in the Asset Blacklist, from where they can be re-rendered if required. You can read more details on this in the Phoenix wiki
Vaalith Jinn’s Local Bitmap Browser has been removed from the Build menu because this release of Firestorm sees the incorporation of Vaalith’s Local Textures functionality, as contributed to Linden Lab (which is also available for clothing and skins uploads). However, all those who use Temporary Textures need not panic – that option is still available as well.
Preferences Changes
There has been further rationalisation of the various Preferences tabs. I’ve summarised the updates in a PDF file for ease of reference, and will focus on the notable changes here.
The most significant additions to Preferences are the new Crash Reports and OpenSim tabs.
New Crash Reports tab
The Crash Reports tab offers an enhanced means of supplying crash reports to the Firestorm team and includes a link to the team’s Privacy Policy.
The Firestorm team recently repeated their commitment to support of the OpenSim environment, and this tab can been seen as evidence of that. However, given Linden Lab’s requirements around the Havok sub-licence arrangement, this tab is liable to be vanishing from future “SL flavours” of Firestorm once the new sub-licencing comes into effect.
OpenSim Grid Manager
One important element in Preferences that needs additional emphasis is the option to Enable Lossy Texture Compression, found under GRAPHICS->HARDWARE SETTINGS. This enables texture compression during rendering, which can give improved performance and a smaller graphics memory footprint – but at the cost of lower quality rendered textures which may end up pixellated. As such, it is not recommended that this be enabled unless you have little video memory on your system.
Buttons
There are two new buttons making their début with this release:
Fly – a dedicated button to enable you to easily fly
Region/Estate button – provides access to the Region / Estate floater (WORLD->REGION DETAILS or ALT-R).
Additionally, buttons now display their keyboard shortcuts in their tool tips.
Floaters
In addition to the options that can be set for various floaters in the updated Preferences (see the PDF file linked-to above), a number of the floaters themselves have new or revised options:
AO floater: A new safeguard added to the DELETE THIS ANIMATION SET button so that everything that’s not an animation link is moved to “lost and found” to prevent accidental deletion
Appearance floater–>Edit Outfit – now includes the Local Textures picker (from the gears button) for testing self-made skins and clothes
Conversations floater
Contacts tab uses new coloured icons for options (Friends can see when you’re online, etc).
The informal content creation user group is into its 2nd week of meetings. I attended the first, but frequent Viewer crashes meant I lost a huge amount of context during the meeting (particularly as a non-specialist), and didn’t feel entirely comfortable providing a write-up based entirely on the transcript of the meeting. I also missed this week’s meeting due to working on other things.
However, Nalates Urriah provides an overview of the meeting and the core discussion on mesh clothing deformation, which I’m using, together with the meeting transcript, to provide a summary here.
As most people are aware two deformation options have been put forward: the parametric deformer first proposed by Max Graf and which Qarl Fizz has been developing (and versions of which have been made available through an SL Project Viewer), and recently the option presented by RedPoly Inventor.
An early video from Qarl on the parametric deformer
For content creators, both options have certain advantages and disadvantages, and opinion on both has been somewhat split. Of the two, however, the parametric deformer is furthest along in development and potentially offers the more direct means for creators to ensure mesh clothing fits. While RedPoly Inventor’s system offers the advantage of appearing to work with the existing shape sliders, in its current form it will be reliant on alpha layers to a far greater extent, adds complications to the process of weight painting mesh, and would likely require the development of a new set of avatar bones in order to fully work and meet consumer’s expectations.
During this week’s meeting, discussions continued around another “alternative”, that of using morph targets – a special shape that defines how a mesh should deform when a certain parameter is increased or decreased. Morph targets are widely used in 3D modelling and are in fact already employed in Second Life to some extent: they are activated when using the existing appearance sliders, However, in order for them to work in terms of mesh clothing, etc., would require updates to both the viewer and on the server-side and would be dependent upon additional data handling – so further support from Linden Lab would be required in order for this option to mature.
However, it does offer advantages:
It is theoretically far more flexible than either the parametric deformer or RedPoly’s proposal
It would leave content creators entirely in control as to how a mesh deforms
It would probably offer faster rendering than Qarl’s deformer
Morph targets might be used for animating mesh avatar facial features
For those interested in the more technical discussion on morph targets and SL, the transcript of the meeting is the place to visit, covering as it does such diverse aspects as LSL support for the approach, working with avatar physics and so on. In particular, there is detailed discussion on what needs to be put into any proposal relating to the use of morph targets that could be put to LL – a discussion liable to continue in next week’s meeting.
As Nalates points out in her article, there was also discussion on how to move things forward vis-a-vis Qarl’s deformer – Qarl has previously indicated via Metareality that he is more-or-less waiting for a consensus from “the community” (although it is doubtful any consensus can be reached without LL having a cast of the dice). This also involved debate as to whether things have to be an either / or solution, or whether things could move forward on more than one front.
To this end, Nalates has set-up a poll on her blog. If you understand all of the issues involved on the situation, and have a clear opinion on what you would like to see, please take a minute to complete the poll.
So, I log on to my You Tube account, take a look at my subscriptions, and what do I find?
A video from Torley!
I don’t seem to have the old SL video links box appearing on my SL account dashboard, so no idea if that has gone or the page simply isn’t loading correctly & whether the video is listed there.
But a video TuTORial from Torley! Yay!
Is this a resumption of Torley’s excellent work? And if so, and assuming the lack of video lists on my Dashboard isn’t a glitch – can was have them back on the Dashboard page as well as on the YouTube channel, please, LL?
Tomorrow, Saturday 14th July, sees the start oF RFL of SL Relay Weekend. Events will commence at 10:00 SLT with the Opening Ceremony, after which the laps of the track will begin.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 