Kategorie: General

The newest eye candy: Windlight

Today I got my hands on the latest and greatest addition of Second
Life, Windlight. Lindenlabs bought the company behind it – good to see
that LL has some money – and there’s already a Firstlook viewer
available to get the first impressions of how it might look like.

It’s
available for all platforms unlike voice and you can play around with
it. Of course you need a somewhat decent graphics card to see the
effects in action, seems it is programmed with vertex shaders, which
means that most of the stuff actually runs on the hardware of the
graphics card itself.

So, if you’ve got decent enough hardware and you play around with it, you might make pictures in game like this:

This shows a typical, default sunset at the sea. Note that this is no mockup picture, but taken in world, click on it for the larger version. Well, and here is another picture.

This is the default setting "midday". Looks also interesting, the clouds are rendered in real time and you can see them wandering around. Last picture for the moment is this:

Never looked a night more darker in Second Life than on this picture. Well, it still needs polishing, of course, the animation goes way too fast – it’s more actually screaming "Hey, I am here!" at the moment to all of us, but when it is finished, this is for sure going to be a very good addition to the whole gameplay, even if the guys at the Second Life Herald disagree with me.

Howto find out object creators without the owner noticing it

Well, have you ever wondered from where your friend has this nifty new hair, shoes, skirt, whatever (s)he’s wearing, but (s)he’s not telling you from where this stuff comes? There’s a simple, builtin mechanism into the client to find it out without the owner noticing it at all.

First, let’s take a look at an typical, advanced Second Life avatar – me. Here is a recent picture of myself:

Ok, what are you seeing on this picture? I am wearing some kind of hair, that’s made out of prims and attached to my head. My shoes are in reality attachments made out of prims, too. This technic I am describing only works with attached objects to the avatar, be it hair, necklaces, rings, shoes, flexi skirts, weapons and other stuff, even when the attachments are phantom. So it is not going to work just on clothes and other stuff without attached prims to the avatar.

First, let’s take a look at our example picture:

In this tutorial we want to locate the creator of the shoe being displayed at this picture. It would also work with the flexi part surrounding the leg, by the way.

The first necessary step is to right click the object of desire, here the white shoe. Your screen should now look something like this:

The selected object is being displayed highlighted and a pie menu is showing up. Select "More >" on the pie menu and left click it. Now you should have something like that:

A second pie menu with just four options; select "Inspect" this time and left click on it. When you’ve done it right, there‘ going to be a new window named "Inspect Objects" on your screen which looks something like this:

This window is the object inspection window, showing you the owner of the object being inspected (which is here grayed out on purpose) and the creator of the object. The name of the object is being displayed in the first line of the inspection window, here something like "SILVER/WHT Legacy". This is important to remember if you want to get a copy on your own of this object, later. Left click on the button "See Creator Profile…", then you should see the profile of the object’s creator coming up, in this case this profile here:

Voila, we are finished and we’ve successfully investigated the creator of this object. Normally the store of the object should be available under the Classifieds or Picks of the creator. Go to the store, look for object whose name you’ve inspected earlier and you’re done without the other avatar knowing at all that you’ve investigated the object’s name and creator on him.

A feature I’d like to see: Mute a certain group

We all are members of more or less big groups, some are really spammy in the time being. I’d like to be able to mute all or certain groups e.g. during a meeting, so that I am not disturbed by them at all. When the meeting is over, I want to be able to unmute them, so that I can hear again, what’s happening on it and attend them, too. So, deal? 

Things to come

A few things to come in the future in my opinion, sooner or later:

  • income tax paid to your national government on virtual earned revenues,
  • more CAD tools like now this exporter named Henshin (AutoCAD to SL),
  • strict enforcing of this adult flag,
  • a 3rd party API to extend the client with plugins like importers, adding client side scripts etc.,
  • saving contents with LSL to notecards,
  • some sort of external backup,
  • regulation of the Linden Dollars, perhaps by the Fed, if it becomes popular enough,
  • some kind of interests on credits, defined by whomever,
  • more law rushing into SL (it has never been out of SL),
  • some kind of external grid/corporate grid, well new grids anyway,
  • the sale or IPO of Lindenlabs,
  • some bridge to existing instant messaging networks like ICQ, MSN or Jabber.