This week we discuss an alternative Second Life mesh clothing deformer solution being proposed, what that will mean for qarl’s deformer, Cloud Party and more!
This week’s topics include:
- RedPoly Mesh Clothing Deformer
- Avastar Plugin
- Update on qarl’s Deformer
- Mesh Deformer Limits
- Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group
- How Second Life Lost Its ‘Old Frontier Feel’
- 7 Things You Need to Know About Cloud Party
- Not Yet a Party But Soon?
- Facebook Knows What You’re Doing (Even If You Don’t)
- Design Gearz
- Starstruck SL
- Content Creation Improvement Informal User Group
- The status of qarl’s deformer and what happens now
Guests:
Cyclic Gearz is a avid Second Life user and content. She is best known as the owner of Starstruck SL where she sells furniture and houses. She is also an active plurker.
Geenz Spad is the graphics guy for the Exodus Viewer. He is also responsible for the slick shiny Rubber Infusions range of avatar modifications.
Karl Stiefvater (Qarl Fizz, formerly Qarl Linden) is visual effects artist, software developer, and interactive designer extraordinaire.
Thank you to our sponsors, Botgirl’s Identity Circus and Pretty Feet!
Yep, Cyclic got it. Cloud Party onboards new users with a fast and friendly tutorial while Linden Lab dumps people in-world confused. Within minutes, I was walking around, chatting, and spelling my name in front of my brand new house out of sofas.
I look forward to seeing what they end up doing with content creation tutorials/guides.
I still hear “Destination Islands are a work in progress” but the longer SL goes without a functional onboarding process beyond emails telling people to go premium or buy stuff, it demonstrates a bizarre contempt for new users by the Lab.
And we wackadoodle “veterans” think they just want US to go away… perhaps the Lab’s running out of us to the point where they need all new people to treat with contempt and drive off?
Oh well. Maybe the Labbies will see how great the onboarding process is at Cloud Party is and take a lesson from it. (There sure have been enough of them in Cloud Party sniffing around, right?)
-ls/cm
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I would say it feels like the frontier days are over, because innovation has been non existent from the Lab themselves, and added to that their policies have only added limitations on innovation. Third party viewer policies, ridiculous terms to even submit code from what I understand. Just take the insane nitpicking and time it has taken to get Qarl’s mesh deformer added.
I guess its too risky for them to innovate? Too expensive? I have no idea. The thing that would save them would be a complete reverse course in policy. Open up the hood, and say have at it boys. That’s when you will see real innovation, and especially free features added by the community, and insane viral uses of Second Life platform that the closed minded people at Linden Lab could never dream.
Won’t hold my breath.
Great show Kim! Great guests as well!
Qarl I have kissed your butt enough. You know you are great.
If we only get to have one deformer I definitely would choose Qarl’s. With the advent of alternate basis and with hopefully deformer 2.0 my idea of deformer underwear it would be a much much more adaptable system.
I know with Qarl’s deformer, because I have done it, you can replace just parts of an avatar’s mesh and have it match up perfectly with no seams. You can replace just the head of your avatar if you wish and have the new mesh head attach to your old avatar body. No need for any sort of clothing or jewelry to hide where the two meet. You won’t be able to do anything like that using the RedPoly deformer.
Because Kimberly asked me to chime in on the Cloud Party debate I will put my two cents in. While I don’t think CP will kill SL, if done right, it will draw a lot of SL residents to it and will have far more active people in it than SL ever has. On a daily basis IMVU already has nearly twice as many people logged on as SL and as far as I know there are no bots in IMVU. As I write this Friday afternoon 3PM Pacific time IMVU has 102,270 and SL has 58,284 logged on. Now a year ago IMVU always had more than double so its popularity is either slipping a bit or SL has increased.
While IMVU has more people the exchange rate from their “Credits” to USD is horrible. Basically 2560 credits to 1 U.S. dollar. With Linden dollars exchanging at L$248 to 1 U.S. dollar. Basically you get L$1 lindens for 10 IMVU credits.
Now this wouldn’t be so bad except that the average price for just about anything on IMVU goes for between 300 and 1700 credits. A pair of mesh shoes or boots 600 credits. A house or apartment 1700 credits. So for those things that took content creators days to weeks to create basically sell for L$60 for the boots and L$170 for a house or apartment. Then IMVU takes its cut of like 300 credits off the top and 10% percentage of the sale leaving the creator with a whopping 240 credits for those 600 credit boot. In SL terms that is L$24.
I will be watching CP very closely to see the exchange rate and to see what the land prices will be. Personally I think what LL charges for a sim island of $1,000 USD to buy and $295 USD to keep it is outrageous. If CP does a floating island for $25 a month LL will be in for a virtual world of hurt.
Despite what Philip told Kimberly CP is very expandable. Right now an island can hold 25 avatars but what happens when an island is full and a 26th avatar wants to go there is another island identical to the first is spawned and the avatar automatically arrives there. This will mean if you have a store or event on your island and hundreds or even thousands of people want to attend they will be able to do so.
If CP keeps their land costs down and has a good exchange rate and doesn’t bleed content creators dry like IMVU with fees and commissions. I can very well easily see that CP could out strip SL in popularity and usage. If CP doesn’t allow adult content that may be the very thing that keeps SL alive.
Lastly I must defend sculpties. As with most issues with SL it is more of an educational problem than with the technology itself. Yes your average sculptie made with a 64 by 64 pixel sculptie map has 1024 vertex and not used properly can be a big waste of vertices. But you can also use 32 by 32 pixel sculptie maps that only use 256 vertex or even a 16 by 16 pixel map that only has 64 vertex. It is not just the square maps you can use or reduce in this way but oblongs as well. It is just the uneducated masses of builders out there that always use too big of sculptie map for the things they build.
I am by no means perfect. I use way to big of textures than I perhaps should use. My older stuff was made with all 64 x 64 sculptie maps.
If you like to see what is perhaps the biggest most complex sculptie build in SL go to http://slurl.com/secondlife/Queue/225/135/2167
Be sure to be flying before you TP and set your draw distance to at lease 300 meters. It is made up of about 300 sculpties. 256 metes wide by about a sim and a half long. The edges of each sculptie match up perfectly to its neighbors. You can see the seams where they do but I could have made them invisible if I wanted to. It will be behind you so you will have to turn around. Also you might want to turn off “basic shaders” in newer viewers. The build just looks better in my opinion. Keep bump map and shiny on. Yes I love Shine and Glow!
Some of CP questions have been answered. A 100 by 100 meter island is now $14.95 USD per month to rent. No deposit or setup fees!
:D:D:D
A 500 by 500 meter island is $99.95 per month!
That’s nearly four times the area that LL sims gives you for $1,000 USD setup fee and $295 USD per month to keep it!
You can pay in Cloud Coins (CC) as well. 299 Cloud coins per month for the 100 by 100 island. 1999 Cloud Coins for the 500 by 500 island. You can purchase 20 CC for $1 USD. So my guess is that the exchange rate will be a bit higher than 20 to $1 USD when cashing out.
A 100 by 100 island gets 300,000 triangles. The 500 by 500 gets 1,000,000 triangles. Here is a link for more details. http://www.cloudpartytime.com/faq.html#islands
I am super excited!!! I will definitely at least be getting the 100 by 100 and if in the near future I can swing it get the 500 by 500 island!
Great show as always. I am not a big fan of the whole “killer service” idea. However, I do think that Cloud Party is very compelling and works very, very well out of the gate. I am awaiting the “marketplace” for CP to see what kind of content I will be able to buy (I am not a creator by any means). But the pricing they announced for islands is quite reasonable. If CP gets LL to evaluate anything my hope is it is land prices. I own a lot of land in SL, both on private islands and on the mainland. I get that land for fun, I use it and then I try to sell it. The ability to sell though really needs to be setting the market and it is not. I just sold a private region for basically nothing. The $1000 for a region just doesnt make sense. The fact is they sell for less than a couple hundred dollars.
Anyway, I will definitely be checking into this mesh creation training. Perhaps I can make myself enough of a creator to be able to build what I need in CP.
Let me talk about CP, intially here. Cloud Party needs to market to the creators first, because all the things centered the avatar are made by them. So, yeah, right now, there is not real avatar customization, but once the creators make enough content, then it is time to market to the masses.
The deformer is an issue that should totally be made with the future in mind. With Qarl’s deformer, there is room to code in other aspects that will make more versatile. The future of SL will be 1 of fewer and fewer default avatars. So, if any other concept around deforming clothing can’t include mesh avatars, at some point, then it is useless to keep considering it.
When we talk about old computer and why SL gets problematic, you have to talk about the total amount of assets that are continuously streaming and downloading. Besides the specific technical reason on some ancient pc’s mesh will massively improve speed for every1. The whole reason has almost nothing to do with polygon counts, and everything to do with textures. I figured out a long time ago that the major reason most are seeing any lag at all was because of all the texture downloading and processing. With prim builds, you are going to have many more textures, than any mesh equivalent build. When you add in that people can go completely nuts with the total amount of texture they use on their builds, some old pc is struggling just to keep up with the processing and downloading. Plus, you add in how small the default cache sizes are, a normal pc is always going to struggle. And, we have ISPs throttling data when it goes over a certain limit. Most mesh are only 1 texture, and even a whole castle could be done on 1 texture. LL just posted a blog about this very issue just a few days ago.
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