SL Pro!

On Thursday of last week, I had the pleasure of speaking at the 2010 SL Pro! Conference. My talk was on applying RL software development techniques to SL scripting (go HERE for my slides… Please read and comment!). But what I really want to talk about here is the process and experience of participating in this sort of real conference that takes place in a virtual venue.

Impact of SVC-3895: Rezzing Mono scripted object cripples sim FPS

Babbage just said “As of 10 minutes ago, Mono scripts now rez in 100 us instead of 15 ms on my development sim. I will try to get the fix deployed as soon as possible.” This is a really really good thing, as this bug is likely one of the major culprits to why SL has seemed so darn jerky and laggy since shortly after Mono was deployed (29 August 2008).  The problem has been tracked at http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/SVC-3895 if you are interested in the gory details.

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Tall avatars (and Avatars!)

I had an interesting little email chat with an SL content creator the other day on how to make tall avatars for Na’vi, the indigenous people in the movie Avatar. They are described as being around 3 meters tall. When you accommodate SL’s height inflation (due to an unusually tall set of defaults), I’d want something in the range of 11-14 SL feet. This is well outside the range available using appearance sliders. Worse yet, the usual techniques for making Macros (giant avatars) requires using prims to hide the avatar distortions caused by the animations needed.

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