Flexi Sculpts: Video

I tried the Imprudence viewer mentioned in this post and turned the Mechatiki glassware department to jelly:

On some sculpts the rendering quality decreases wildly after flexi is turned on, but I have confirmed I'm strongly looking forward to having this as a standard feature.

3D Photoshop which the users live inside.

"Essentially, Second Life is a 3D version of Photoshop which the users live inside."

Best one-sentence characterisation of Second Life ever. By Hamlet Au in NewWorldNotes, where he discusses Second Life After The Hype, and the Future of SL Media Coverage.

Here's my pic of the day:

(me standing on version 0.2 of Creature)

New Viewer brings Flexible Sculpts!

Flexi Sculpts, here they come ... a patch that was recently publicised on the Jira enabled early adopters with the appropriate skills to compile their own viewer to experience flexible sculpted prims - Now Imprudence came out with a ready-to-run client for us ordinary builder folks to be able to play with flexi sculpts too!

Download

"Note that this viewer is NOT OFFICIALLY SUPPORTED. It’s just for testing/fun, so if you crash, well, you crash. Don’t expect this feature in Imprudence until the performance issues can be sorted out." 

Tinkering

I can see a multi-functional creature growing there ...

After a ladder, a table and a computer monitor this organic structure was a nice conclusion of a tinkering sunday!

Need a Flatscreen?

... For your 2nd office or living room? Then be quick and reply to this Plurk (within the next 24h or so)! 

I'm giving away this ~33prim rolling flatscreen plus test pattern texture to use as media texture in land settings to anyone who says they'd like one in a reply on Plurk. (If you tell me three reasons why you don't want to open a Plurk account in a reply on this blog, I'll send you one too.)

Is Land too expensive in Second Life?

... The monthly tiered fees to Linden Labs, that is, I am not going to go into any land market discussion ...

Considering that SL is a unique service (all the open source clones don't offer anything near the quality of SL in any respect and in that light land-prices have to be considered even more expensive in alternative grids) the answer is clearly no, otherwise the demand would not hold up in the way it does.

But what about the creator's perspective? Once you got used to detailed building - maybe fell addicted when playing around in a standalone Opensim, where prim count doesn't play ANY role at all ... it's hard to keep up with land purchases if one wants to make and use prim intensive creations in THE main grid.

Since my new installation of standalone OS isn't running as desired anyway, I was going through a bit of a prim turkey, so the fresh construction site mentioned in my last post comes as a welcome opportunity to tinker with some stuffs I hope Pinkpink is going to find useful and/or inspiring in her efforts. ... I am not so sure about that 300 prim truss I built today though ... But it turns out to be easy to prove to her that 1/8th of a sim is NOT actually really BIG for a project like a gallery ... some truss here, some fish there, and half the prims are a gone. LOL? or WTF?

While not surprising me in itself, it still reminds me of my own chronic shortage on prim allowance and also brings to mind Ann Otoole's blog-post in which she compares SL to RL costs. 

So, do I wish monthly land fees would be lowered? YES? But do I also want LL to invest in modern servers and other infrastructure that will keep the grid running and improve on it? Um, yes too! That means I cannot answer my question "Is Land too expensive in Second Life?" myself ... I politely pass it on to Linden Labs then ...

Mainland Routine

Today I came across a classic example of the landcutting and extortion that was addressed in a recent Linden Lab policy update ...
In a first step in the development of a video gallery of sorts for the russian RL gallery Cyland, Pinkpink Sorbet was about to buy a ca. 1/8sim parcel in Chronocules, when I incidentally discovered a 16sqm parcel hiding on the map under a for sale icon (which I have kinda always on) in the few seconds the map was loading and the icon not yet displaying. Over this 16sqm parcel was hovering a rotating for sale sign, which was reported for visual spam and promptly removed by LL within hours and which Pinkpink had originally thought was for the >8000sqm parcel.
Remains the fact the parcel is set for sale for a whopping 7.500L$, and that the owner has banlines up which hinders passage up to 50m altitude!
It will be interesting to see how this works out and how the policy update will affect this particular parcel ...
Updates on the Cyland project will be posted as it progresses.

Quoted for Truth: Laws of SL

Crap Mariner plurked a link to Prad Prathivi's blog post Sod's (Murphy’s) Laws of Second Life ...
which begins:
"1. When scripting, pretend it was *supposed* to do that.
2. Nothing you’ll make in Second Life is fool-proof, because they’re your only target audience."
and continues with gems like
"8. If you think nothing can go wrong, you’re a noob."
and
"12. Tell an avatar that there are over 75,000 people on SL concurrently, and they’ll believe you. Tell an avatar that a wall is phantom, and they’ll have to walk through it just to be sure."
or
"13. An error in a product you make will not become evident until you’ve started selling it in your store."

... I'm sure you'll find some you can relate to too ;)

EDITed to add a law that frequently mocks me: "Your prim allowance is always too low, no matter how often you add parcels of land to raise it."

I can has tier raise?

Historic Documentation pulled from Youtube

A documentation video about the world's first virtual strike, held by IBM workers around the globe inside Second Life, has been pulled from youtube citing copyright claims - "This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by WMG."

This is another sad brick in the wall the music industry is building between them and their customers.

You can spot a few seconds of the video, played in the background in the video I embedded in this post. (EDIT: actually only like one screenshot, the longer sequence I remembered is obviously hidden in one of the clips that one is the trailer for)

Shadows over Second Life

Yesterday I finally tried out Kirsten Lee's shadow viewer SD5-R1, which I had downloaded just shortly before Kirsten decided to pull all her viewers from the public.

After installing the viewer there are a few settings to check in the advanced debug menu ... and then, if one is lucky, there are rendered shadows, and little side-effects. In my case there was a certain unnatural glow that hurt the eye, which makes this viewer not the standard choice.
But as you can see in the video above (focus on the large cocktail glass!), the shadows cast are indeed amazing.

SALT HUD FTW!

Don't ask what SALT stands for, don't ask where I overheard or read that it was a convenient ressource for megaprims of any size ... All I can tell you is it is a HUD attachment that is miraculously able to find and deliver almost all conceivable dimensions of over-sized prims - and if the exact dimension isn't in the repository you are presented with a list of similarly dimensioned prims to choose from.

As you can see in the image above I found the right mega-prim to finally support the Skyloft and thus prevent it from magically floating at 250m altitude. (Roboexotica office got also anchored to it.) Even if this may still not be physically convincing, I consider it a psychologically useful grounding ... The platforms up there are no longer "hidden somewhere in the sky" but "at the other end of that pole, beyond the clouds". Or whatever.

Get SALT HUD for free here.