[Second Life Pic of the Day 08/31/2012]

I want one! Where did you get it?

[SL Flickr Pic of the Day]

Looks smooth. Has this been made with Second Life at all? Any Photoshop over-dubs?

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

If this means anything to you: when I was a bloody newbie in SL 4 years ago, I needed about 2 weeks to get accustomed to the viewer. A viewer of a "game" I had never seen before that is. Now Viewer 2 is up about a year, and I still haven't got accustomed to it. And I bet I'm not the only one. So much for your humans don't like change-point. I am glad there are 3rd party viewers like Phoenix to give me an enjoyable experience like the one that made me become an SL addict. And I pray that the good people at Phoenix continue working on their viewer and give it MOAP and meshes eventually. No need to hurry though, because from all what I hear, the mesh beta viewer doesn't work yet at all. I tried it the day before yesterday and at no point my avatar would even rezz, let alone anything else. After crossing the first border I was frozen into a cloud flight to eternity. Bye!

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

Quite interesting how diverse the expectations are, that people have in SL. To me "back to the roots" means among other things, that the common user can share a similar experience as the building and scripting pro. To me collaboration is the key figure for SL, not buying and selling. Although I would not want talented people to be stopped making incredible things, I see a certain danger to the original idea of SL if the gap between the different user skills is getting wider and wider, until nothing a new user makes can compete at all with what s/he meets inworld. I do not have a patented solution to this problem, but certainly viewer embedded tools help closing the gap rather than more and more things that can only be achieved by outworld programs. Tricky thing actually.

My comment on using Google SketchUp for making meshes has disappeared. Why?

Someone suggested that program is worthless for making meshes for SL although it supports Collada. Why?

That person said, those meshes would cause more lag than "optimized" meshes made in other programs. Why? SketchUp so far is my only hope to get into the league of mesh makers. Blender is far too not-self-explaining to me! Do not tell me SketchUp can't be used!

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

I don't use groups for shopping at all, as you insinuate. And I do not sell my stuff via groups either. It's all socializing and common interest. Still I'd not know what to do with 40 groups. But unless a change in that policy doesn't create more lag for everybody, I guess I won't have to worry.

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

I see a lot of people here embracing the increase in group numbers. I have a hard time to understand that. The current 5 groups I am in, that regulary send out "informations" and notifications, already consume so much of my time to react to their offers, that I already plan to leave most of them. But 40???? I'd need a third life to handle that.

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

I seriously hope meshes will be more precise and detailed than those chunky sculpts. Especially fitting textures on them was a pain-in-the ass.

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

I guess you are right. Maybe I simply just didn't find a program that suits me. Actually I am glad I never wasted much time getting into sculpts now that their days seem to be numbered. Just last night I discovered Google SketchUp... perhaps that'll work for me making meshes. It's a s simple as the prim tool in SL.

[Back to Basics Technology Improvements]

Obviously SL has always emphasized its very nature of a world with strictly user-created content and I'm sure a big deal of its succes owes to that really. With the introduction of sculpts a step was taken into a different direction. You needed to use external programs to actually make sculpts. I am wondering if there are any plans to implement a viewer-based function that allows you to make meshes just like you can make prims. The more basic tools for the SL experiences are not within SL, the more it moves away from its basics. So if the new company slogan is "back to the basics" I expect it means back to all user-created content! Meshes....