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It’s a slim messenger, that’s all, baby

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

The new rumored thing about Second Life just turns out to be a another messenger. It mixes instant messages and the usage of voice, so you can remain online and reachable for all of your friends while not logged in using the normal, big fat client.

This has been a logical step in my opinion if you want to play in the field of big business and be reachable. There have been alternatives around, for quite some time, which play in the thin client business, like Ajaxlife or Slinked, but this is now the first one coming directly from Linden Lab and the only one which uses the voice capabilites of Second Life, too.

Well… how is this thing going to be adopted? I guess, it’s use will be not going to be so widespread, since if people really wanted to have something like that, they could have already used existing thingies like Skype for a long time and they have done that.

So the audience of this is going to be people who want to stay in touch with Second Life while being at work or whereever and who are afraid to give out other contact possibilities. That’s all.

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Building

Missing feature: external backup of a whole sim

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

This is a feature that’s been missing since ever: the ability to backup the content of a whole sim externally.

For example, if you are a builder and building a whole sim from scratch (or with other stuff) and a forced to put the sim down, since you don’t have the money anymore to sustain it – or your customer, whatever – taking down the sim means taking down all the labour cost, all the work. If you want to put the work up later, again, you’ve got to start more or less from scratch.

In this case it would be very nice to have the ability to backup a whole sim and store it somewhere for possible future use. At the moment this isn’t possible, to this is a big, missing feature in the portfolio of Second Life.

Building

About megaprims

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

The official Second Life blog has today an entry about so called megaprims (greater than 10m at one side at least). Megaprims where never intended to be, but they happened some while ago and they are in use in different buildings, you can either get them just so or buy them at stores.

They are rumored to have a negative impact on the physics engine and to cause lags and such, but none the less many builders have adopted them very fast and used them in their buildings.

So there’s a discussion about it they should stay or not; at the moment they are only tolerated by Lindenlab, but they don’t really like them.

So what’s the sensible approach? Are they needed or not? I guess they are needed, because they fit into a gap. I mean, why would you use for example 9 prims (10x10m) to make a floor that’s 30x30m wide when you just can use one prim? Because they are needed, they’ve been used and there’s a market around it.

But of course too big megaprims are not right, so they should not be bigger than a whole sim, meaning 256x256x256m. In those parameters they could really enrich the building experience.

Building

From PDF to Second Life

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

Over at Sleeds.org is an interesting movie how they made a building, the process started with PDF, exporting it with Adobe Illustrator into SVG, this was processed by a script to get LSL snippets posted into a notecard and then got finally rezzed in SL.

This looks much like e.g. blender to prim, but it’s impressive, none the less, though I guess if you really want to build good things you need so stuck up with the client. Period.

Building

Nice beginner’s tutorial about making clothes

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

There’s a nice beginner’s tutorial in Natalia’s Second Life Diary Blog about how to make clothes with The Gimp! It shows some of the underlying principles in a very convenient Howto manner and the Gimp is open source. So, if you ever wanted to give this a try, you should definitely check it out and give it a try!

Ok, more advanced topics like working with the alpha channel are not mentioned there, but that’s ok.

Building

Two buildings utilities

Bartholomew Gallacher 0Kommentar

I’ve found two tools which can help you in the respect of building things in SL:

  • A terrain file editor for OS X only named Backhoe. Looks pretty good and snappy to me on the screenshots and if you ever get your own island it looks like a very good way to make a terrain file to give to the Lindens.
  • A script to be able to rez objects made in Maya in Second Life called „Maya -> Second Life: Beta version.“ Maya is one of the best professional 3d editors around there, for many in the industry the 1st choice actually. So how does itwork? It gives you in Maya a new tool box with the prims of SL and the same options. You basically built your shapes in Maya, when you’re finished with it, you export it to your clipboard. Then you login to SL, equip one object with the rezzing script, load the clipboard’s content on a notecard into that object and let it rez the imported structure for you. Then you can texture it and so on and on. That’s it, basically.

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