Gavin Hird

It did not yield many results either (1052) and only 78 when narrowed down to full perm. But it is good to know it is searchable. Thanks!

Darren Scorpio wrote: By the way regarding the "Mesh" checkbox that was suggested, there is one already. When you create a listing you are now asked whether the item is 100% Mesh or contains Mesh objects. But that is not searchable?

Not sure the marketplace should have a mesh section as such, but rather a search option to search for items that are 100% mesh.

You can make animation in DAZ Studio 4 and export as bvh to SecondLife, but you must use the SecondLife avatar with the SL rigging. Although you can make animations with Genesis first, be prepared for major adjustments for the SL avtar before output to bvh. When it comes to exporting DAZ Studio models to FBX and DAE, you are not allowed to do that unless you have purchased a gaming license and I am not even sure they would sell you that for use in SecondLife.

Cool as a technology demo and proof of concept. I look forward to study and understand the technology behind and how it can be used. ...but, maybe it is just me, but is not this theme a little bit on the childish side for an audience that is predominantly 18+ ?

No, the SLURL should not be maintained only at the store level, because there is not neccessarily a one-to-one relationship between the marketplace and the in-world location the item is sold at. Obvious example is different product lines selling in different locations in-world, but is mashed up in one here as one account can only have one SLM store. So this is NOT a bug.

I purchased a couple items from the test marketplace, the delivery allerts were displayed, but the Received Items folder was missing in Inventoy so I never found the deliveries. I guess we are waiting for server side to be updated to actually create those folders?

> LL built a business model whereby its Target Customer is not focused. i.e. the people paying LL's bills is so wide ranging and varied that even for the most mature and amazingly talented business management, this would be a steep challenge to provide a competitive product to such a wide variety of target customers. This is the core of the pains SecondLife is going through and the reason why it is virtually impossible to scale the current business model unless you alienate a large customer set. The solution is horizontal scaling through connected grids, but with different owners and where the grids have different target customers and different TOS adapted to their focus and the legislation they are incorporated in. In this model LL's business will shift to the platform, technology development and provisioning of core services.

I don't think the oportunity is lost - yet. There is a window of oportunity. My experience with opensim so far is that they are in catch-up mode (I have a small 5 sim test grid humming in my backyard.) The advantage LL can use is the large registered user base and content. Content is currently largely a pain to move to opensim.

Did I say it was to be open? :matte-motes-big-grin: I am talking about Linden Lab licensing their product – which is not open, so the only committee they need is to haggle with themselves. I believe the core gird functionality (give or take) is compelling enough for anyone interested to create new grids would take it as is. Competition? Well, yes and no. Obviously LL would sell a license and maintenance, so there you have additinal revenue. They could possibly also sell the backend as a service. LL's current problem is a scalability one - their business model for a single grid does not scale very much larger given constraints in their gird technology, but scaling by horizontal replication would work. Their second problem is a reputational one where SecondLife in many cases = smut. Horizontal scaling through other players would help proliferate their technology significantly faster than they could manage on their own. Their third problem is that they are incorporated in a legislative environment that imposes constraints on what can be hosted (gambling is one example) in addition to imposing (double) standards that people in other parts of the world find ridiculous or constraining. Horizontal replication through companies incorporated in other geos and therefore different legislations would rid them of this constraint and overall produce greater diversity and proliferation of their technology. LL themselves cannot do this by subsidiaries, so a licensing model would work here. Companies hosting grids in other geos closer to their home market could also target their marketing much more in tune with their customers than the "shoot Halloween at the world" type approach that now comes out of LL communication. (Halloween is totally irrelevant in my part of the world as is zombies just to give an example.) When it comes to mandatory alt registration with a primary, it is not difficult to implement or enforce. I can see that the transition could be bumpy though.

No, it does not have to be by committe model, simply because the licensed product requires a grid to be member of a common name space or the software will not work. The common namespace would at a minimum consist of: common UUIDs for user agents common GUIDs for groups so that group ownership could be preserved across grids all assets being registered in a common asset store For user agents one could make the architectural change that it is not possible to register alts unless they are parented in a primary. The advantage of this is that it will significantly reduce the scope for fraud by alts as their real indentities will be known, but it will also facilitate a consolidated inventory for alts shared with the primary. This could lead to significant reduction of duplicated inventory that currently must exist in SL's asset store. It also removes the need for alts to re-purchase indentical objects as often happens. Further a common currency across grids could be established to promote interaction and cross grid trade. I don't see how content theft in such a setup would be much more of an issue than what it is in SecondLife today, simply because the core mechanisms for moving between a sim on a grid, would be be the same as moving to a sim on another grid. In both cases the asset store sends inventory to a server which agains sends it to a client for rendering. The key here is again common asset store/registry for all participating grids. it would also be a product with a price tag, so not everyone would set up a server at home as can be done with opensim.

SecondLife is not a game. Period! By using game and players you introduce substantial flaws and limitations in your analysis. SecondLife is at the outset a general purpose infrastructure platform for building virtual realities. The platform consisting of the sim server backend, asset store, utilities, the client and the content development tools incorporated in the viewer and server backend. The platform can be utilized for anything from building architectural models, education, training, planning, personal interaction, art to gaming. As a gaming platform it is not particularly well suited. SecondLife as we know it also contains games and gaming, but it is not a game. What Linden lab completely fails at is working closely with and empowering their developers to deliver the most compelling experience to attract new users and keep long term customers. A good parallel is Apple, the iOS hardware and the App Store. Apple delivers a client hardware platform with operating systems and developer tools. As part of the package Apple delivers a few applications installed on their clients in addition to market a select few applications like iWorks, iMovie, Garage band ad so on. However, the bulk of the user experience is delivered by content providers in a very large and well managed developer eco system where Apple makes (for many) a compelling business proposal to make money out of their content. Per the company revenue to their App Store developers have so far been close to 3 billion USD. Contrary to what many believe, Apple listens closely to their devlopers and their needs. They also provide them with timely information for their developer community to be able to deliver the best and most compelling experience at any time in their applications and content spanning from business to games. This is in stark contrast to what Linden lab most of the time does where is seems to prefer to displace content provider business with their own, in addition to be very secretive on their development plans to the extent new versions of the software often introduce major disruption to developers. A good example of not listening to developers are that mesh are being introduced void of facilities to fit a clothes item to the avatar without substantial effort from a developer when this could largely have been built into the platform. Another example is viewer 2 (and the version 3 sibling) which significantly hamper developer productivity having put off or discouraged content providers. Another example is the implementation of the marketplace which, as Steve Jobs would have put it, simply sucks. As per my other post, I think Linden Labs would do substantially better in licensing the platform to many capable providers and get out of the business of trying to micro manage a business model that has little scalablilty as it is currently employed.

I am sure careful engineering of the asset store in a licensed scenario would get around too much content leaking out of the platform. It was kind off the same arguments the music industry used for applying DRM on music sold online, but Apple showed them that selling non DRM-ed music on iTunes actually increased their revenue substantially. So I am not super worried about it.

Some interesting and good points being made here. My 5 cents for LL and SecondLife to re-invent itself: LL must get out of the business of eroding on resident business; the marketplace is a prime example Their focus must be to facilitate transactions to stay in-world and not being diverted to web sites that slowly makes it less and less interesting to log in and stay Their focus must be for resident interaction to stay in-world and not on their web sites or even 3rd party social media like twitter and Facebook. They urgently need to get a mobile viewer out that is compelling enough to make residents stay connected to SecondLife throughout their day. They siginficantly need to raise the relevancy bar in competition with the other offerings out there The need to stop making gettos like Linden Homes - essentially making hundreds of servers running idle 24/7. Linden Homes should be merged into vacant mainland sims and parcels to act like small nucleuses that would encourage business and leasure offerings to spring to life next to them. Finally, they need to start offering the server backend as a licensed product to creators who want to make competing grids. The reason is that the legislative environment in which LL is incorprated (CA, USA) has become a liability as far as creativity goes. It also impose a very US centric view of the world that is fine when expressed as Hollywood movies, but simply does not fit people outside of the US very well. A good example is the adult policy which most Europeans will find very prudish in comparison to their RL experiences. We see Apple is running into the same type of issues in Europe when trying to impose CA legislation and world views on content in the App store. To complement the licensing of the platform, they need to facilitate portable directories and teleportation between grids based on their platform. EDIT: This point about the legislative enviroment and the Linden Lab policies that follows is important because nobody wants to pursue a "life" or hobby that allows less freedom for self expression than one experience in real life. This is possibly one of the main causes for the stagnation of the environment and why newbees don't stay. You can also transfer this to the viewer which has made it much less intuitive and attractive to build and design in-world. Mesh adds to that.

IDK, I still use google most of the time, as I have other sources of information that can steer me for things I am interested in. There was a study published just a few days ago that concluded that users of Bing and Yahoo search often ended up with both a faster and more accurate result from the query than users of google, but I have not researched the origin of that story. It could very well have been seeded by the owner of the search engine used by both Bing and Yahoo; Microsoft. Aparently there is a Russian search engine, Yandex http://www.yandex.com/ some people think are pretty good. I have not researched it. Cheers, ;-)

I happen to follow some of these stories quite closely since I have worked in Apple product managment, and recognize when some of these stories goes viral. In this case, the information originated from a Fandriod blog posting. The information about faked photos where available to the German court when it upheld its original decision, and obviously did not impress the court. Google has a vested interet in this case, as the operating system used on the Samsung devices is Google's Adroid tweaked by Samsung to look like iOS. You should not be suprised if google searches produce results that present their product in a favorable view. Also, google use links as perhaps the most important ranking factor, so any Apple story, and they tend to get massive press, will rank very high. Negative or rumor type Apple stories are very popular with the media as they produce very high hit rates and usually rank highest.

Yes, that is what you have been led the believe if you only refer to the Fandroid blogs. The legal team of Apple are not amateurs... The main point here is that the legisation around this is very different around the world, and failure to comply with legislation can block access to a market. This also means that creators needs to act according to the legisaltion in their country of residence and protect their IP there too, and not only rely on US legislation just because LL is incorporated there.

Apple is winning in Gerrmany and Australia where the legislation is different from the US. Samsung has withdrawn their tablet product from the Australian market and they have been blocked from marketing the same products in Germany. As someone said above, LL will probably be taken to court directly rather than the individual if major players starts to see this as a threath. Now, for the individual resident, they are liable to the local legislation in your country of residence where legilsaion may or may not be in support of LL's TOS.

We finally figured it out this morning and the key is to have the skeleton rotated to a horisontal configuration along the x-axis and align and scale the model to the skeleton. You must then, with the model selected, from the Tools menu select the Coord System tool and then Burn Transformation. This will reset the coordination system of the model to be identical to the skeleton. After that you can apply the skeleton to the model and bind it. I found the heat weight map method works pretty well. Now for the export, there is a catch right now as version 5.8 of C3D updated the export to be per standard and in compliance with what works OS X 10.7 QuickLook and Preview app. Unfortunately that broke the import to SL as the joint names are no longer written to the Name_array block in the collada file. This is required by the SL viewer for successful import of the joints and weight map. It is possible to edit the block manually in an editor and replace the 26 IDs with the joint names in the same order as they appear in the skeleton in C3D. After that, it is smooth sailing into SL. Hopefully there will be an "SL friendly" export option for collada, so this will be fixed. It is possible to export to FBX, run it through Autodesk's FBXConverter with collada as output, but I have found it garbles the weight-map but the joints are fine. There might be version issues that comes into play here... So yes, it is possible. Right now it requires manual editing of the collada file (which is really just a copy and paste after you have done it once), and hopefully we will have a fix in a few days.

There is, as you say some odd rotation issues when setting up a rigged mesh based on avatar.blend or simplebot.blend. I get the model to import, but the weight map and the joints are not able to be included (if selected in the Modifier tab the upload button disappears.) I can see the weight map in preview but it is rotated 90 deg on the model. The joints are also visible in preview, but look odd (bigger and displaced.) I will try two venues; create a skeleton from the ground up in C3D, and do the same in DAZ Studio 4 with the content creator tools and see where that leads me. In DAZ Studio there is a rigged SL avatar, but the bone names are different from the standards document I found in the wiki. I'll try and import the one from DAZ as is and see how that goes.

I have found that models made in the Mac appliction Cheetah 3D and exported to COLLADA loads very nicely into SecondLife (and opensim). Even if there is a learning curve, it is significantly less convoluted than Blender, and Mac users should faster feel at home and be productive. It is available from the Mac App store, but I found it was much cheaper getting it directly from the developer web pages. The developer is also fast to respond to requests, and the collada models exported now displays and opens in OS X 10.7 Finder and Preview. An in-world example of a model made and exported in Cheetah 3D can be seen outside my store in Concinna (the Boötes logo.) I am working on creating a rigged mesh for Cheetah 3D based on the simplebot rigging. One shortcomming is that it can't open other collada models, but it supports a number of other commonly used formats.

Oscar, Can you confirm if mesh has also been rolled to the BlueSteel RC sims? I can't upload mesh models to my home sim (Concinna) after today's roll.

Well, there is a different aspect of this which is not avatar related necessarily, and that is that DAZ 3D has an application called Hexagon that can create models from scratch, and via the Hexagon bridge to DAZ Studio can export these models to collada. Hexagon can also open a number of standard formats including SL sculpt files (which it also can write), apply morphs to them and via the bridge spit them out as collada.

Thalia Heckroth wrote: Anyone noticed if location for chat logs has changed with Lion? It used to be ~/Library/Application Support/Second Life/ today i don't see the Second Life folder there anymore. Any ideas? Thanks By default the ~Library folder is hidden in Lion. The chat logs are still in ~Library/Applcation Support/SecondLife/your_avatar_name There is a small free utility that can be used to unhide the ~Library folder. It is called Lion Tweaks.

80 deg C is quite normal for a MBP when running graphics full tilt like the SL viewer makes it do. Air for cooling the MBP is drawn in through the space between the metal and the keys on the keyboard and vented out at the hinge between the main body and the display. You can always try and apply compressed air to clear the path if you feel there is a lot of dust there, but I doubt hit makes much of a difference. What I find is that putting the machine on a laptop holder that allows air to circulate under it (even passive helps), and the most efficient ones are those with built in fans. As you may have noticed, the metal housing gets quite hot under the machine, and raising it will help cool off that heat faster.