It’s time once again for lovers of the spoken word to update their diaries for dates at the Seanchai Library SL, as storytellers there bring us a host of new tales to tell.
As always, all times SLT, and unless otherwise stated, events will be held on the Seanchai Library’s home on Imagination Island.
Sunday April 14th, 18:00: Magicland Storytime
Join Caledonia Skytower, as she again kisses the Blarney Stone and brings to life more tales from the Emerald Isle to mark St. Patrick’s Day at Magicland Park.
Monday April 15th, 19:00: Original Tales
Come join Freda Frostbite as she brings her own original tales to life!
Tuesday April 16th, 19:00: The Girl Who Married a Lion & Other Tales from Africa
Author Alexander McCall Smith (The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) brings together a beguiling selection of folktales from Zimbabwe and the Setswana-speaking people of Botswana.
A girl discovers that her young husband might actually be a lion in disguise, but not before they have two sons who might actually be cubs; a child made of wax follows his curiosity outside into the heat of daylight and melts, only for his siblings shape him into a bird with feathers made of leaves that enable him to fly into the light; tales of talking hyenas and milk-giving birds; stories of clever cannibals who nonetheless get their comeuppance, and mysterious forces that reside in the landscape. Rhodesian-born Alexander McCall Smith brings together a rich variety of tales from traditional African lore, as re-told by Shandon Loring.
Wednesday, April 17th, 19:00: “His Hollywood” & more adventures with Polar Bear the Cat
With Kaydon Oconnell and Caledonia Skytower.
Thursday, April 18th, 19:00: Myths and Legends of the Near East
In March and April Seanchai are inviting library guests to join them in supporting their featured real world charity Project Children! Have questions? IM or notecard Caledonia Skytower.
As regular readers will know, I love very natural and / or whimsical regions. I also love to see the amount of artistic expression store owners put into the region / parcel surrounding their store. It’s for this reason I was originally drawn to Cours, the home of Vitamingirl’s “🙂 BCC” – although I’m ashamed to admit that after my first visit, I didn’t actually get around to writing-up a post.
Well, now spring has arrived, and with it Cours has had something of a redesign which again demonstrates Vitamingirl’s creativity. The store now sits at the top of a hill and is reached by stone steps leading up from the arrival point. Heading off across a watery landscape is an old, broken railway track, inviting you to explore the region.
Follow the track across the watery landscape and you’ll find a locomotive, seemingly determined to make its way off across the Linden Sea. Elsewhere is a Romany caravan and a table set for tea where you can sit and chat or simply watch the world go by. Not far from the locomotive sits a windmill.
This is a minimalist build which is extraordinarily picturesque. The waterlogged areas, bright with yellow rapeseed-like flowers, both frame and separate the “islands” scattered across the region into a series of linked visual vignettes which beckon to the newly arrived traveller.
As well as the 🙂 BCC store itself, Cours is also home to the three house-like shops of Adelia, ADTL, and Honey Pang, all of which offer the window-shopper even more reason to drop into the region.
Back in October, I looked at the Machinima Open Studio Project (MOSP), a full sim environment on LEA20 created by Chic Aeon as a part of the 2012 Artist-in-Residence series and for use by machinima makers and photographer across Second Life. As noted at the time, I thought the installation was a superb idea, and was saddened to think it would be vanishing as the new Artist-in-Residence series got underway.
However, rather than vanish, MOSP has been moved to a new location and given an update. The new location at LEA7 features a revised ground-level layout and a host of new features which are again open for use. If you have any interest at all in machinima and / or photography, I can’t emphasise enough the value of this resource and the opportunities it presents for film-making and photographic work.
The most obvious updates brought to MOSP are at ground level – obvious, because that is where you arrive on teleporting. While the railway track from the original is still there, the landscape has been re-worked and Chic has added a number of buildings which can be used both independently of one another, and in combination to tell a story, film a promotional video or as sets for the photographer.
These aren’t the only changes either, so when you arrive, do spend time at the information area, where you can pick-up an introduction to MOSP and a folder of LMs to all of the facilities – you’ll need them! And if you’re concerned about the landing zone being smack in the middle of the scenery – always remember that the derender option in most TPVs can neatly hide it from the camera’s eye when filming.
Up in the sky, the sound stages are still available for studio-based work, as are the corporate offices, which again could be used for studio filming as well as offering other opportunities. Also in the sky are a number of new themed sets, including a desert complete with old fort and camels and a rural / farm scene. These sets are also mach larger than the sky sets from the original MOSP and provide even greater potential and flexibility of use when filming, either as standalone feature or in combination with other parts of the faculty. There’s also a viewing theatre where MachinimUWA, LEA and MoMac machinima can be watched in a unique three-into-one environment.
MOSP offers a 20-minute rez time for those who need to use props and the like, and as the environments are open to being revised or updated, it is best to contact Chic herself regarding any projects which may require the using the MOSP’s facilities over a period of time to ensure a set isn’t updated or revised if real life means that filming has to be broken-up over a period of time.
Chic went to great lengths to ensure the best possible filming experience could be enjoyed at the original MOSP, particularly with the placement of the studios and specialised scenes places well overhead to avoid as much lag as possible and thus ensure good frame rates. The same care has been exhibited here as well, and the sky scenes positioned such that all can be used independently of one another and (providing you adjust any high draw distance downwards sufficiently) at any time of day without shadows from those above interfering with any filming.
For those wishing teach others about machinima or photography (or indeed start out in either), MOSP also now has a dedicated classroom area, and there is an open invitation to those wishing to run classes to contact Chic and enroll in the MOSP group, where they can be given a teaching role and announce events.
Whether you’re looking to film you own romance, mystery or adventure story and need some additional locations or you want to have a number of ready-made sets for a photo shoot or are looking for studio-style or indoor sets to film a scene or two, the Machinima Open Studio Project more than likely has you covered. This was a superb resource when Chic first opened at on LEA20 last year; now, with the move to a new, permanent home at LEA20 MOSP stands to become a an outstanding and unique faculty for film-makers and photographers alike. Chic is to be commended for bringing it all together and working so hard to extend MOSP’s capabilities. Kudos as well to the LEA committee for ensuring MOSP has a home at the LEA following the end of the 2012 AIR series.
The Lab launched its latest Amazon offering to US residents on Friday April 12th: Trooble Pigs. The accompanying blog post gushes:
We’re happy to announce a new special offer for Second Life on Amazon – a pack of virtual pets!
The Troobles have arrived and are squeaking with excitement to be the stars of our third limited-time, special promotion on Amazon. From now to April 24, 2013, you can get the Pet Pack – The Troobles (a $9.95 value) for free.
The Pet Pack includes an adorable family of Trooble Pigs including Daddy, Mommy, baby sister, and baby brother. Each Trooble has their very own fashion accessories and special talents. Mommy Trooble offers customized greetings to your visitors, Daddy Trooble can go into guard mode and teleport trespassers, and the babies are always up for a cuddle.
This is the latest of “premium packs” and “special offers” being supplied to SL users / Amazon customers located in the USA through Amazon’s online game service, presumably as a means of promoting Second Life to the latter – something which didn’t exactly start off overly well when the original offer backfired and resulted in much amusement. Well, for me it did.
I’ve actually nothing against the Lab trying to reach out to new audiences and build new, engaged users. Rather the reverse; I believe it is more important they do so than it is for them to cut tier. As I’ve previously pointed out, tier cuts (for the foreseeable future) are liable to do more harm than good, whereas building an engaged user base can only be for SL’s betterment.
However, what I do feel – and continue to feel – is that offers like this tend to miss the point, and that if the Lab really is after attracting new users from the masses who use Amazon (even if only those located in the USA), then there is fair more they could do in which to make SL appear attractive and worth the investment.
As it is, the virtual pet / fashion accessory pigs are here and will remain “free” until Tuesday, April 24, after which they’ll presumably continue to be offer at $9.95. So if you’re of a mind and in the USA, you can hop over there and pick them up – dare I say – with no trooble at all.
As reported in the first part of this week’s update, there was no Main channel deployment on Tuesday April 9th, the result of issues arising with the previous week’s RC deployments, which LL wanted to fix rather than having them propagate across the grid
Magnum retained the same package as week 14 (Monty Linden’s next batch of HTTP updates) and a fix for a crash mode
Continuing issues in getting the anticipated updates for the BlueSteel and LeTigre deployment packages ready meant that on Wednesdays April 10th meant that these two channels received the same package as the Magnum RC channel.
The switch-out with the Magnum code being deployed to BlueSteel and LeTigre meant that those regions “lost” the new LSL Animation Override capabilities – existing scripts using the capabilities will still run, but new scripts using the functions cannot be compiled.
Materials Processing
Viewer Update and Documentation
Discussing the materials project at the Open-source Development meeting on Wednesday, April 10th, Oz Linden indicated that an updated version of the project viewer should be available shortly – possibly by the end of the week, as “lots of fixes are accumulating”. In the meantime, a mixture of Linden Moles and volunteer users are working on materials-focused updates to go into the Good Building Practices guide to help other users get to grips with materials processing and optimising things for SL use. In the meantime, the Materials Data information on the SL wiki continues to be updated.
As pointed out by Mona Eberhardt in the comments relating to materials in this blog, Laverne Donat has produced a very tidy and short demonstration of materials in SL, which I’m including here.
Alphas, Transparency and Costs
Laverne also asked, via Plurk, if and how a specular map can have transparency with the materials processing, before going on to comment (via my blog) that, “After some testing, it seems that you can get specularity with diffuse maps with alpha masking, but not with diffuse maps with alpha blending. I don’t know what the intended behaviour is, but that’s how it works at present.”
This prompted Geenz Spad to reply, “The intended behavior (eventually) is that alpha blended objects will be able to support both normal mapping and specular mapping. Currently this is a work in progress, and due to its current state, it hasn’t been added to the viewer just yet.”
As Alpha Blending is currently the Alpha Mode which is unaffected by the materials / LI accounting situation which has been reported by Qie Niangao, I asked Geenz if Alpha Blending was liable to “trip over” into the LI accounting system, rather than being “grandfathered” (as currently appears to be the case). He further clarified the situation by replying, “Only if you use other material parameters (such as specular mapping, normal mapping, etc.). The only reason why we didn’t add support for shiny on all semi-transparent surfaces, is because it would break content.”
Future Development
In terms of future development, it is unlikely that anything will be happening soon, other than enhancements / fixes for what is currently in the project viewer. While there is a roadmap for future features and additions to the materials system, the Lab is wisely not commenting on plans and direction at this time. Rather, they prefer to see what the overall take-up with the new system is over time and how people start using it (which may in turn affect how and what the Lab decides to do with regards to a “materials round 2”). However, one thing which does appear to be clear is that there are no plans within the current roadmap to extend materials processing to include avatar skins and clothing layers.
AO Capabilities Update
New server-side AO capabilities: updates delayed until week 16
Although it did not get deployed in week 15 (but should see the light of day in week 16, commencing Monday, April 15th), the update to the new AO capabilities which should have reached BlueSteel and LeTigre is intended improve compatibility between the new animation override system and other scripted objects that animate avatars (such as poseballs). The update was developed as a result of Code Violet raising a JIRA (BUG-2164) pointing out that the new capabilities did not “play nicely” with things like sit animations in poseballs / furniture.
Maestro Linden, speaking at the Best Server meeting on Thursday, April 11th, described the situation thus:
If a user had a custom ‘sit’ animation set, the seat wouldn’t be able to stop the animation properly because if the seat called llGetAnimationOverride(“Sitting”), it would get an empty string unless the exact animation also happened to be in the seat’s inventory. Kelly has a nice solution to this problem, which is to make ‘llStopAnimation(“sit”)’ stop your custom animation, if you had overridden your sit animation. Conveniently, this change means that existing poseballs won’t need any updates to play nicely with the new AO system.
The Beta Server meeting saw some discussion on the new AO capabilities, which enabled Maestro and Kelly Linden to offer further clarifications.
I was alerted to the Beguiled Art Gallery and Studio on the mainland region of Kakapo by Mona Eberhardt. Never one to miss a recommendation, even if Second Life decided not to play nice with me during the afternoon, I hopped over to take a look.
The parcel, occupying the greater part of the region, is operated by the Wanted Dead or Alive group / Jilla Lamar, and features the Beguiled Studio (somewhat in need of repair) and the Beguilded Gallery. Between and around them sit the most verdant of gardens, with paths, cobbled trails, gazebos, water, butterflies and more, populated by nymphs, children and Victorian gentlefolk out for a stroll or fiddling with those new-fangled photographical devices.
At the moment, and running through until May 4th, The Beguiled is featuring a Spring Art Walk, offering visitors the chance to follow the paths around the gardens and take-in artwork on display – and for sale – by a number of SL artists and photographers, with a stroll along the paths and trails allowing you to witness work by Skye Donardson, Alles Klaar, partners AugustaMary and WhisperAtNight, Sabbian Paine, Aelin Quan and Stephen Venkman. At the same time you can enjoy the scenic beauty of the gardens themselves, and the incredible wealth of detail Jilla has incorporated into The Beguiled.
And I do mean “wealth of detail”. This is not a place to be rushed; doing so means that while you may well catch all of the artwork on display along the sides of the paths, you’ll still miss out on a lot – such as the wonderful little scenes Jilla herself has put together and which are reached by short climbs up convenient ladders (although in most cases, I’d recommend camming up to them to fully appreciate them).
Jilla encourages people to not only visit the garden, but also to use it as a backdrop for their own photography. For those who do so – indeed, for any visitors – I would pass on a couple of words of advice. Unless you have a graphics card with serious Oomph, you might want to both ramp-down your draw distance (particularly if it is well up into the hundreds) and also think about not running in deferred and / or with shadows active (just turn them on to grab your photos). I found my Ge9800 GT (with a Gb of memory) was tossing textures out of its pram as fast as I could walk around the paths when in deferred.
Also, should you visit, make sure you take a little time to visit the Beguiled Gallery, where more of Jilla’s own work is on display.
The Beguiled is one of those wonderful mainland discoveries which can be hard to come by, but once found are always treasured. Very highly recommended, and my thanks to Mona for dropping me a line about it.
Author Alexander McCall Smith (The No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency) brings together a beguiling selection of folktales from Zimbabwe and the Setswana-speaking people of Botswana.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 