Wireframe

Tinkering with settings and controls is always a good idea! *laughs* Well, often enough it actually IS. 

I'm not quite sure when the wireframe rendering option (in the Advanced menu, activated by Ctrl+Alt+D) will be useful ... but now I know it is there:

Makes for a nice retro 80s look, doesn't it? 

Siriwhatwasthat?

A new name popped up on my new-worlds-radar: Sirikata.

"Sirikata is an BSD licensed open source platform for virtual worlds. We aim to provide a set of libraries and protocols which can be used to deploy a virtual world, as well as fully featured sample implementations of services for hosting and deploying these worlds."

When I looked around on their site and subcribed to one of their lists, I recognized a name among the subscribers - Kyle Machulis of teledildonic fame and ex-LL-employee, who I had met 2007 at a dorkbotSF at San Francisco's Porn Palace where he presented some of his dildonic equipment, while I was there helping present the Mind Reading Martini Maker.

Says Kyle about Sirikata: "Turns out the sortof-project manager of sirikata was an ex-coworker from Linden, and contacted me about it. I've pretty much just been lurking on the list, haven't had much time to interact, but I've got high hopes for the platform, as there were lots of things I wanted to do at Linden/SL that never happened."

All I want to add is that listening to artist Chris Platz in that video above makes me feel like I spend my days playing in the sandbox. .. Wait, that can be a good thing actually!

Shamrock Hunt at Jabberwocky

I am happy to announce Mechatiki Research are participating in this year's St. Patrick's Shamrock Hunt at Jabberwocky (March 14-17)!

We wrapped the non-animated version of our new mechanic left hand prosthesis in one of Ona Ra's beautiful sculpty shamrocks and set them for 1L. And then I carefully hid it near our local outlet (for spoiler click image above to visit flickr).

Make sure to continue the search after picking up our hand - additionally to the many high quality items that will be provided, there will be a cash prize in one of the shamrocks that are hidden around the market place.

Filth Is Here To Stay

- but it's going to be segregated.
NWN's Hamlet sums up the just-announced Upcoming Changes for Adult Content like this: "In summary, content designated as "Adult" will be forced off the main continents, and resettled in a Linden-managed "Adult Continent"."

"There’s obviously a lot to discuss, " Linden Labs are aware, so they opened a total of 5 (five!) forum threads for residentsto discuss this mother of all policy changes.
This is also the first time in a long while that we hear of Age Verification again, which is mentioned as ONE of several means to ensure that prude residents (who still have all to be over 18) don't encounter things too exciting for them.

It will be interesting to watch A) the uproar of panicking residents jumping to conclusions B) how in the end the classification of content will actually be done. And of course the handling of moving residents and businesses onto a yet to be created (and named) continent.

More Critter Videos

Marsdog, a bubbly quadru-ped, I have to admit, actually moved backwards. I reversed the video. So, there, it's out.
I like Marsdog, it's one of the more harmless animated and physical creatures.

Hupfi III is a little less harmless. It tends to jump away to annoy neighbors or end up on empty parcels or stuck mid-air on the border to a no-object-entry land.
But worst so far has been the arm counterpart to Walkies II - it had been peacefully twitching for over a day before I happened to be present to see it, suddenly and without apparent provocation, take off towards the sky. Not to be seen to this day, despite several region restarts, a support ticket, a live chat session with someone who claimed an object with the name given did not exist in the region. Um, t's stil taking up prims in the prim-count, thank you very much.

Animation Goodness

Two new videos of Todd Borst's animation tool Puppeteer in action:
Mechanic Hand, a mechanic left hand with subtle animated finger movement.

And Walkies II, an animated sculpture in Second Life. being turned to physical it falls over and displays it's inability to get up again.

UPDATE: Patsy Linden just picked up Walkies II from the Mechatiki Skyloft where I have marooned it for now (until I need those 24 prims for renovation, bummer)! (And bought two hats, yay!)

BOO: Ghost Prims

It all started with the realization that the glassware sculpties I had turned to flexi were displayed as flexi non-sculpt prims in the regular viewer. (I had left them that way thinking that in the regular client they would show as regular, non-flexi sculpts as usual.)
In the edit window I noticed the flexi option not greyed out so I un-checked it right away on a few prims - and now the fact that they vanished from my view at that point didn't bother me, because I was editing from a distance and prims often are not visible from a distance.
Only after I had changed a couple glasses to ghosted prims I realized what I had done! The prims were still "there" but invisible, for any avatar and any viewer. They were accounted for in the land's prim count, and one bumped into them. But they were also not selectable, so they were not just normally invisible but ... ghosted.
... So off I sent a support ticket requesting a region restart.
Which didn't help.
It took me a few days to come up with a way to remove those prims: I logged in with the non-graphical SL client metabolt ... which has a feature showing a list of all objects nearby - this way I could find the items turned ghost and remove them. Phew!
I closed the re-opened support ticket, sharing my solution, LL didn't have any further ideas to help me anyway it seemed.