Second Life – Page 3 – nimil’s adventures in wonderland

meshes and shadows…

October 13, 2010 by nimilblackflag

its been an annoying couple of weeks for me on second life due to some strange teleport issues that only affect me when on an old style ui viewer such as snowglobe or imprudence. so i’ve been using kirstens viewer since it allows me to actually leave my home. since i’m on it i’m playing with shadows since i can :p

test build 40 of the s20 viewer is very nice and anti aliasing seems to have improved from previous builds. still not great but getting a lot smoother.

my front patio is looking gorgeous… its kind of tempting to stick with this viewer. the UI is starting to give me less of a headache but kirstens does not include rlv or temp texture uploads 🙁 i wish someone would fork it and patch it…

today was also the start of the mesh beta so i grabbed that viewer as well and tried stuff out! its pretty crowded right now so it was hard to log in to the test regions but i finally got in and uploaded a dumpster i’d previously made in 3ds max back in june.

this is what it looked like in 3ds max

now its time to stop goofing off and work a bit more! lots of cool stuff coming out at [ LuNi ]

thank you linden lab!

September 8, 2010 by nimilblackflag

i know i have been bitchy about decisions LL has made in the past. but without them i would not have second life, so in the end, i will always respect their wishes.

when the blog post and email came though that emerald viewer would be blocked from second life i was so happy. thank you linden labs for not dropping the ball on this! thank you for protecting us from a malicious viewer even though there were so many people using it!

seriously, if you are dumb enough to keep clinging to the emerald client after all that has come out about their devs, then you deserve to have your information stolen. LL is not at fault for this, the people behind emerald who were making poor choices and stupid decisions were at fault. this is not a plot to make people use 2.0, if it was, they wouldn’t have mentioned that there are other clients to choose from, they would have just said, hey, use our viewer now!

as i mentioned in my last blog, lordgreggreg’s post sent me running to imprudence for fear of my privacy and i have no reason to look back. even with emergence and now phoenix, i refuse to trust any of these people, because too much has gone on involving them. i do think jessica seems a bit more level headed than the rest of the devs that appeared in interviews and blog posts. i know there were many behind the scenes that had nothing to do with what happened, however for those who did know, i have nothing but contempt for you.

i wish people would stop trying to ruin second life. it is my second home. it is my escape from the horrible first life i have to live with every day. adding stress to my second life just makes things worse for me and i’m sure others as well. why can’t people just have fun and stop making things harder for everyone else?

if you haven’t tried imprudence, i really suggest you do. its a great client and the devs are super nice. they are trying to do all they can to make the users happy and are very concerned with keeping our private information PRIVATE. they supply weekly experimental releases which contain new fixes and new features, and there’s nothing that i miss from emerald.

on top of all of it. IMPRUDENCE HAS WORKING HIGH RES SNAPSHOT!!! if you are a photographer you know the pain in the ass that comes from having to manually step up your image size to a larger size than your screen so you have better detail control. high res snapshot is supposed to do that for you but every other client i’ve used, this function did nothing. on imprudence it actually works! images are bigger than your screen and all you have to do is check a box 😀

i don’t really like the 2.0 ui otherwise i’d probably spend more time in kirstens viewer. the shadows in that viewer are spectacular, as you can see from these shots of the new [ LuNi ] store:

that strange shadow cast there is from the broken glass texture on the outside of our store’s orb

an unexpected result but a cool one!

the only other major thing i dislike about the kirstens viewer is that anti-aliasing is broken 🙁 once she fixes that, it will be an amazing photo client. that, the ui, an the lack of features that i require as a creator (temp textures!!!) keep me on an old style viewer.

anyway, stfu about LL being bad because they blocked emerald. they might have just saved your bank account and other important information. you have tons of alternatives.

where is our world headed?

August 5, 2010 by nimilblackflag

for the past 4 years second life has been a second home to me and over that time i have watched it change in both good and ugly ways.

recently there have been all these lay offs, which i cannot really understand. i do know when layoffs occur it usually means a business is in financial trouble, but with all the privately owned sims and people still paying premium account membership fees i can hardly believe that we would be in that much hot water money wise…

so what is bringing on all of these bad decisions? does anyone know? not even phillip linden would discuss it during the recent "town hall". instead it was more disappointing hype and a supposed promise to make things fast easy and fun.

today saw another linden lost to the axe, and this one shocked me beyond belief. of all the lindens to get rid of, they got rid of qarl?!? i’m not saying he’s better than any one else working at the lab but he is the father of sculptie prims and that only leads me to believe that we are not going to get meshes, or flexy sculpties, and that’s pretty disappointing. sculpties revolutionized our world and gave us so many more options for creating.

i wish that we could have some answers. what did we do to deserve a collective cold shoulder from LL?

i’m not a doom-sayer and i don’t think the end is nigh… but i think we are looking at some hard times ahead.

imagine peace

July 29, 2010 by nimilblackflag

i was pretty shocked to find out a couple of days ago that yoko ono has a sim in second life! lucas found out about it on twitter and retweeted the invite to go see a lighting of the imagine peace tower. he and i went to the second lighting of the night and we were pretty disappointed that it was fairly empty. we did meet up with crap mariner there, and i listened while they and lucas talked about the early days of the internets (which always makes me feel like a baby) we hung out for a while and i took some photos.

and no crap was not having problems rezzing. they have become a shadow of their former self.

you can check out the imagine peace tower here.

the blog i ment to write a couple days ago

June 14, 2010 by nimilblackflag

oops *dusts off the blog* sorry i’ve been pretty much MIA for a while here. my second life has been just a wee bit boring and i’ve been stuck in RL with some things as well.

the other day was my 4th rezday in second life. i’m really surprised i made it this long.

when i started second life, i was not really joining it for any specific reason. i just like to join things, i like to play video games, and they had just opened the sign ups for people without credit cards, so i joined. i had seen second life over the shoulder of someone else, but they were strictly just a furry so i only saw the furry part of sl, and i assumed that furries ran the place. of course i was wrong :p

i used to go to random places like the angry ant, and sit on a bar stool or in a booth and watch other people because i had (and still have) absolutely no social skills. i guess one of the reasons i actually joined was because i was trying to force myself to be social in some way or another.

that is where i met my second life sister lindsay. she was a dancer at the angry ant. she’d only started second life a few months before me and she seemed like the life of the party, so i had no idea why she was talking to me, goofy little noob, but she was, and we ended up best friends. even though my stupid times and even though her stupid times, we have never lost that friendship. most likely if i had met her in real life, we never would have spoken, but thanks to second life, we have a bond that will last forever.

i love second life because it has helped me in so many ways, and even though there have been times when i have wanted to grab lindens by the collar and shake them for stupid ideas that they have come up with (the verification mess, the 2.0 client, the homestead crap) i still would not trade this world for any other. because of second life i have gained skills, i have made friends, and i found my soul mate. i have been a mother, a fashion designer, a model, a photographer, a dancer, and half a dozen other things.

i sound like some sort of infomercial for second life don’t i? every year i sit here in awe at how much i have changed since the first time i logged on. sure i still have a lot to work on, and yeah i’m still pretty bad at some things, but i have learned so much here, and i think i would be pretty lost if it went away.

my rezday party was small, and that’s my fault because i didn’t decide i wanted one until it was already half over. i dj’ed some random crap for who ever showed up from my and lucas’ friends list. it was mostly our sl families. and then i zonked out like a rock and forgot to do my poppins jump photo for moggsy 🙁 i’ll have to do a belated one.

where was i?

April 13, 2010 by nimilblackflag

a lot of people have been asking where i’ve been. i’ve gotten quiet and pretty much all of march i was rather inactive on my blog, flickr, and other stuff. well the first reason for that is just real life depression, and i’m slowly trying to work though that. still a lot of stuff to get used to after the death of my father.

the second reason for this is that lucas and i were working on a sim for a store owner who contacted him. although he doesn’t usually do custom work, we were asked to build them a 100% custom build. everything from textures to sculpties to terraforming, all of it was 100% made by us, no prefab work at all. and he would have free reign on the idea of how it should look. that perked his interest and we decided to accept it.

it ended up with too many things changed to what was laid out to make the effort worth while, so we decided to part ways with them after the initial month.

fortunately we got some really good material out of it that might turn out to be sold at the store. among other things, it gave us a new store build to play with too.

to leave this entry i thought i would share some pictures that i took while we were building the sim.

most of this work is lucas’ i’m not much of a builder so he’s the star here. i made some cool textures though and it taught me a lot about making textures for builds.

lucas had a cool idea for this place including some stuff he never got the chance to build. one thing he was able to build was the heart.

in his own words:

“i wanted to imagine a sim having a heart, literally. and since we’ve kinda worked with ‘heart themes’ in the past this was an idea that kept appealing to me. to imagine a transplanted heart growing inside of a sim and spreading its arms out to touch and make everything its own.”

to give you an idea of how big that heart was… that little hard to see dot to the right is lucas standing there… so just imagine how massive it was in person.

the store build was based loosely on the house from edward scissorhands, and i’m really kinda glad we get to keep it, because i love it. and yes i’m trying to talk him into making prefabs, but feel free to try begging him yourself as well :p

i made this awesome window light thing! it came out pretty cool for my first try at something like this. i also made the textures for the store including that awesome shattered window.

in the end i can’t say i’m not disappointed that we didn’t get to finish the sim. we had some great ideas for the rest of the place that we never got a chance to make. i hope that lucas will put some of this stuff up for sale in the future.

Adventures in SL 2.0

March 11, 2010 by nimilblackflag

everyone has been weighing in on the new sl 2.0 and i’ve been too busy to really go though and see what i like and dislike about it. i tried it on the day they brought it out and spent about 10 minutes it in and it left me with a sour taste in my mouth honestly.

please click on the cut to keep reading. be warned, its long and full of pictures!

what did you get for xmas?

December 27, 2009 by nimilblackflag

since i’ve been pretty much gone since all this real life stuff happened, i decided yesterday to get on briefly and check out all the amazing gifts my friends left me for xmas. i had a lot of fun smiling and opening presents. thanks to all of you who sent stuff it really lifted my spirits.

so now i present to you, the haul:

from my wonderful and adorable sl daughter i received this awesome bracelet which tells the world that i am the “best mommy” this gift actually made me cry. it was so sweet of her.

caesey also gave me a set of bat jewelry, this is the necklace from it. also wearing a candy cane made by rai blaylock, one of my newer plurk friends.

from my friend jasmine, i received this outfit from sn@tch… while i do love sn@tch, this outfit is very… um… not me lol

a plurk friend, quaintly, dropped this cupcake on me 😀 its really cute and has several poses, and will most likely serve as a throne for my daughter as she is the cupcake princess *nods*

ryker sent me things to stick in my mouth 😀 some really cute cookies, this is just one of them.

fenni got me this adorable mouse for my shoulder. i collect rodents in sl, i have a huge folder full of them, but this one is my fave at the moment.

foe sent me this weird ornament shaped lounge thing.

i tried to make a collage of all this stuff that rai blaylok sent me. you’ll probably have to click on that one to get the larger version.

autumn sent out these really awesome friendship bracelets. i love it! it reminds me of when i was a kid.

danni, one of the girls that live on the island lucas and i live on, gave me a box with a white and a black version of this corset piercing! she is so sweet and she even gave presents to the kids 😀 she also gave me a necklace but i haven’t put photos in it yet so i didn’t take a picture lol

these last two gifts are from the wonderful emerald wynn. i am so glad that i’ve met her, she is so sweet and i really admire her blogging style. she sent me a monkey.. and some sort of odd cat thing that i can lay on. that monkey has a worried look on his face >_>

so that’s my haul! i know you are saying OMG WHY DIDN’T LUCAS BUY YOU A GIFT THAT BASTARD. but no that’s my fault because he’s supposed to take me shopping for one but i can’t think of anything i want lol so i will buckle down and figure out something i want him to buy soon and then dedicated a whole blog to it *nods*

so anyway thank you people in second life who brighten my day. i have no idea how to repay you but thank you all the same.

omg shadows?!?!

December 5, 2009 by nimilblackflag

omg shadows?!?!

Originally uploaded by N I M I L [is] loved!
*EDIT* the shadows left as soon as i disabled them 🙁 now when i attempt to enable them again i get blackscreen.. bleh…

so today i was reenabling boob physics on emerald since i dl’ed the new optimized version of the client when they had an update, and just for the hell of it i clicked the “enable shadow rendering” box just to see if it would work this time.. shadows have been very hit and miss for me.. i got them to work once before but only in one room of the house and after i crashed they would not return. but this time i crossed my fingers and checked the box, hit apply.. got a little stall and then BAM shadows..

there are a few problems, some noticable from the screenshot. the most annoying being the fact that i cannot take a photo of the shadows using sl’s snapshot button.. i can only photograph them by killing my ui and huds and using an external image capture program.

the second problem which is glaringly obvious is the fact that my anti aliasing has gone insane and killed its self.. i have weird jaggy edges and white outlines around things definitely not what it looks like without shadows on.

other problems, my fps is taking a hit but sadly enough 3-5fps used to be my normal fps when i had my old videocard.. so i’m not really dying from it.

oh and my eyeballs are glowing like michael jackson in the thriller video.

still pretty to see light and shadow streaming from the huge windows of my enclosed balcony porch thing…

how did that happen?

November 19, 2009 by nimilblackflag

i was trying to come up with a good way to introduce the blogging world to the new adventure i’ve set out on in second life, but its just for some reason really hard to explain i guess lol.

only in second life can an adoption consist of two people saying “ok you’re mine now :p” and it be binding.

last week lucas and i added a couple of new members to our family. it wasn’t planned and i’m still not sure if it was a good idea (just kidding kids) but we did it and i’m really happy to have them in our life.

so second life, these are my kids. caesey and elijah. one is 6 1/4 and one is 13 going on 21 :p both of them are completely and utterly awesome and i feel very proud to call them my kids.

to some, second life families are weird, but i’ve never felt that way. i think here in this world where we can be anything, we should be allowed to be ANYTHING. and if you wanna be a kid well be one! i think its awesome. so far i’ve gotten to tour an elementary school (hke), attend my daughter’s dj sets (she rocks), run though the kids 50L fridays (they have one too! and its great!) and go to some pretty interesting places.

on top of that i feel peaceful! yes that’s right this has been RELAXING! yeah i know real motherhood would probably be hell on wheels compared to this but this has been wonderful. always someone to hang out with and talk to and everything is so happy and light. i’m really a big kid myself so i have always gotten along with children. i’ve just always thought i would be a crappy mom. and yeah i dunno if i’m being a good mom to them or not (only had them about a week or so.. so not sure)

i do know that i am one of those annoying moms who takes 283497294 photos and makes their kids pose on every friggin poseball in the family section of glitterati.

of course there is the down side which is stupid and annoying.. you can’t take kids to formal ballrooms without the embarrassment of having them kicked out even if they are dressed formally and the club is not an adult establishment (its not like they were having sex there.. they were playing jazz..sheesh.) so we’ve had a little trouble finding things to do with the kids that don’t involve standing in the skybox looking for things to do. what they really need is a family friendly website where people can list this stuff because its so buried under the mountains of FREE SEX!!! and business in a box shops that you can’t find anything worth going to.

ok i’m done ranting. in closing this family thing is really fun. i’m enjoying it a lot 🙂 no i’m not going to lose my evil side being a mom. my kids are devils.. don’t let the cuteness fool you. the first time i met caesey she was floating around our old shop last year wearing love kills (that’s the heart balloon with a noose), and my son likes to tell people we’re rock stars… so they are just like their mommy and daddy. and its slightly inspired me to make creepy stuff that kids can wear as well as adults.