Recently I was reminded that Second Life …

Recently I was reminded that Second Life is still the best first experience for any teen or adult coming to virtual worlds for the first time. It came after speaking with new virtual worlders who came to OpenSim before Second Life. From their description I realized OpenSim is still far from being suitable for anyone’s first virtual world experience, unless of course that person is too young to participate in Second Life.

As long as it remains free, Second Life, even with its steep learning curve, offers more return on a beginner’s time and learning investment. Both offer about the same in terms of creativity. But Second Life offers more potential for most to make that essential connection with a real life community or interest that will hold their interest. Second Life is the yard-stick against which everything else is measured. Anyone becoming involved with virtual worlds must understand and participate in Second Life and so might as well start there.

Combine these realities with a personal goal to help the most people get the most out of their first virtual world experience and a recent influx of newcomers to SL, from work and elsewhere, as well as word of Nebraska and Linden Lab’s renewed efforts to connect with and help beginners and you will understand my decision to redirect my limited free and volunteer time from OpenSim to Second Life initiatives, more to VUC greeting, mentoring, community building, and development. Introduce Second Life first then OpenSim later for those who are ready for it.

OpenSim remains my favorite way to preview content from my desktop and participating with my kids, but Second Life has already given me years of creative outlet, real friendship, and community involvement any OpenSim could not match for some time to come, perhaps in the next few years, but even then SL will remain the best experience for any beginner provided it is a guided entry, which happens to be the focus of the renewed VUC Greeters effort.

Just completed another weekly discussion …

Just completed another weekly discussion/office hour for Mo’s Mentored (name still sounds pretentious now–especially since I usually learn as much as I share–but too late to change). Lots of discussion about LSL’s llEmail() and other related email functions, such as sending a snapshot as a photo, not working and if it can even work. IRC friends (thanks sinuc) answered that SMTP can be activated in some sense in the OpenSim.ini configuration file with a wrapper to actually send the email. Sounded too complicated for my friend asking the question. Something to research. I passed on the tip to get involved with http://opensimulator.org and the #opensim and #opensim-dev IRC channels on freenode using my preferred IRC client, Xchat.org.

A friend, with superior pipes, and I will likely work on getting some decent default gestures with voice, like /laugh and /cry and /hey into the default stock content for the OpenSim code base. We talked about that a little during office hours.

Combine that with a good long time ranting about Second Inventory and I think I have another mentoring block. What I really need to do is get back to skinning as soon as MoPose is finished to help the internal OpenSim team get those default avatars finished up. So little time–especially during holidays and while holding down the fort while the rest of ‘day job’ team are away.

Finished adding ’set sittarget’ to the …

Finished adding ’set sittarget’ to the offset finder and a new sittarget finder tool that can be placed into cushions and other prims directly (rather than in a poseball) to get and set values for llSitTarget(). It turns out the actual avatar position is off from the position as reported with llGetPos() even after adjustment for the sit target. It has to be further adjusted <0,0,0.196>/llGetRot() – <0,0,0.4>, very annoying but made me feel better after I thought I was going mad messing with the positional and rotational math without it lining up.

I also spent quite a lot of time helping friends and a few customers including a new quick video tutorial about how not to be a sim hog. I did that after realizing that your overall CPU cost is added to the cost cost of ‘top offender’ scripts reported from the Estate Tools. This makes a huge difference when sitting on a scripted object since it immediately jumps to the top of the list if you have a lot of scripted stuff on. Take it all off, and you see the true performance cost of the scripted object while sat upon.

Office hours on Fridays at 8-9 SL time are turning out to be a great way to consolidate all the technical help conversations and I learn a lot there as well.

Although I was on a mountain unable to attend, I heard good things about the Tribe Big Bounce event.

Oh, and boxed up a couple free avatars, Haley and Paul for our OpenSim grid that have been rendered ‘corporate friendly.’ I will need to get those into OpenLife grid as well but I might wait until I can outfit them a little better and make some prim hair.

While I was working on the skins, and having recently done a lot (for me) of UV work in Blender it occurred to me that I could import the OBJ standard avatar meshes and create my own UV maps with seams down the sides instead of directly through waist. Then, I could use the ‘Bake Render Textures’ against the official UV map to get perfectly matching clothing and skins at the normally troublesome front and back waist areas. I also cannot forget to try to pull in a GLintercepted mesh of a shaped avatar to attempt similar skinning approaches on avatars of specific dimensions, not just the defaults.

So I think although I am not blogging it until now, I have earned a programming (lsl), mentoring, and skinning block last week.

Discovered you can stack gestures on a s …

Discovered you can stack gestures on a single quick key during last Friday’s Mo’s Mentored office hours. Debbie Rau, an old and great friend, noticed this and mentioned. These have been great hours discussing things and reconnecting from 8-9 Second Life time. That tip prompted another series called “Did you know …” for which I made a break out page.

From 7-8 SL time had a great time helping welcome and answer questions for our internal OpenSim grid at work. More and more people are coming, many of them new to _any_ virtual world that need the basics. Our internal sim is coming along. I will be focusing on default avatars, without elaborate skins or clothing just yet, to be available by next Monday hopefully. Later, will gradually improve them with stock-content contributed original skins and clothing, which I keep putting off but need to finish up and commit.

This time and a little more to answer informal questions and comments throughout the weekend rounds out another mentoring time block.

Organized Hey Avatar! videos into one pa …

Organized Hey Avatar! videos into one page after people from work and elsewhere asking for list of them. Also linked from Linden Video Tutorial wiki page and the main Help Portal entry page under Beginner’s Guides. That combined with answering some emails and a day of review media URL for a friend and coworker makes another four hour mentoring block.

I also got in some good Blender research time including discovering the included, but not default, ’rounded’ theme, which I love. Also really loving use of the tablet for modeling these days, so fast since discovered the line, curve, and ‘v’ motion trick to invoke grab, rotate, and scale. Also discovered a setting that lets you get away without a number pad by activating the real numbers on the keyboard to do the same. I love that since I have a Logitech wireless that has no pad (and also almost no letters any more since I have worn them all away).

Completed a mentoring block with the Hey …

Completed a mentoring block with the Hey Avatar – Laugh, Clap, Wave, Make Gestures video tutorial and having submitted http://imohax.com to one of the listing of SL Blogger sites out there that I have come to find is just another empty hole. There are a lot like that. Answered a few questions posted in comments on the video sites. Thought about doing ‘Hey Avatar – Shake Hands, Bow, Hug, Animate Yourself’ to cover all the gesture like animations that involve one or two other avatars, an animator HUD, and accepting permission to animate. But decided to wait until MOtor is finished both for that and for the ‘Hey Avatar – Improve Your Walk, Sit Animations, Get an AO’. I continue to get reports of how impossibly hard it was to setup the current AO offerings out there. Time to finish up MOtor, polish it up, and make it available to the masses for some ridiculously affordable price. Also, by combining an multi-animator with AO we can get by the problem of incompatible priorities between animations so that one need not deactivate one’s AO just to give a handshake, for example. Also need to consider having it detect if the other person is also wearing a MOtor and activate more direct communications between HUDs.