Following the advice of a friend, BlakOpal picked up a 3D Connexion Space Navigator to use as a tool for filming and recording video in Second Life. While it doesn’t do any of the recording, it serves as a 3-dimensional camera control within SL. It’s a weird little device, but after tinkering around with the settings and playing around with it in-world it’s become an indispensable part of her SL-related gear. Even though she does the majority of the filming (so far, anyway), I kept finding myself sneaking over to her desk and grabbing the controller and experimenting with it on my system. I also started to notice that support for it was popping up in applications like Motion (part of Final Cut Studio), Adobe Creative Suite, and even Maya.

With the advent of the new machine, it was high time I went out and got one for myself. While I suppose I could have set up my own custom settings on my machine during any of the times I borrowed BlakOpal’s controller over the last year, I didn’t. Now, of course, it was time to remedy that. My first stop was the Second Life Wiki page devoted to the device, which has solid info, tutorials, and links.

My next step was to just spend some time fiddling around in SL, playing with the numbers, and coming up with some settings that felt comfortable for the way I use the controller. For those of you either considering a Space Navigator or new to the device yourself, let me share my findings with you in the hopes of saving you some time or helping you to get started. In Second Life Viewer 2, press cmd-P (ctrl-P in Windows) to bring up Preferences, and then click on the Advanced tab. There, you’ll see a button marked Other Devices. Click on that to bring up the joystick configuration screen. You can use all kinds of joysticks and controllers with SL, and this is the screen where you configure how they work. My advice is to do a screen capture before making any changes (in case you need to restore it back to this point), and then start playing around. If you’re not sure where to start, you can check out the screen shot below - it’s the settings I’m currently using.



There’s another neat trick I picked up that you might want to try - setting up a macro. With a little bit of playing around, I’ve been able to combine all the shortcut keys I need to use to hide not only my HUDs but my entire SL user interface into one button click on the Space Navigator. Windows users will want to check with the 3D Connexion web site for details on where to go and how to do that, but for Mac users it’s pretty easy. Running System Preferences in Mac OS, you should find an icon along the bottom row for 3D Connexion. Click it, then click on the Buttons tab. Next. click the Custom Functions button, and you’ll see a screen like the one below.



It’s blank to start with, but by clicking on the + sign next to Macros, you’ll be able to type in a name. I used “SL UI Toggle” and then entered what you see above in the notes. Now, next to Macro Steps: you want to click on the + button twice, to make two steps. In the first step, click and hold in the left column to see the drop-down menu, and choose Keystroke. Then double click in the column to the right and press the fn-ctrl-option-cmd-F1 keys all at once (depending on which machine you’re using, that’s either a handful or nearly impossible to pull off). If you got it right, it’ll look like what I have above. Line 2 is much easier. Again, click and hold to get the drop-down and choose Keystroke for the left side, then double click and press option-shift-H. Just like before, if you got it right your screen will look like what I have above. The first shortcut combo tells Second Life to hide all the User Interface elements, and the second combo tells SL to hide any of your HUDs. While some people prefer to leave HUDs turned on, for me they get in the way and putting the shortcut in here lets me take care of both in one step. Now you can click on Done to close the Custom Functions dialog. Back in the Buttons tab of the 3D Connexion preferences screen, click on the drop-down menu for Configure: and choose Any Application (if it’s not already selected). Then click in the drop-down next to the letter R and choose “SL UI Toggle” from the list. Finally (whew!) click the OK button in the bottom right.



The screen shot above is what the window looks like (running Second Life 2.1, other viewers/versions may vary slightly). If you got the shortcut set up properly, you should be able to click once on the right button of the Space Navigator, and your SL window will look like the one below.



That’s it! The Space Navigator’s left button defaults to turn on/off the ‘joystick flycam’ mode (so your camera can move independently of your avatar), and with the right button you now have one-click access to show/hide all the SL elements that you don’t want to have on screen when you’re filming or recording.

Tags: SL, Space Navigator

After months and months of deliberating and planning (as well as saving), I’m very happy to report that we finally got the last of the big studio upgrades sorted. BlakOpal’s new machine came a few months ago, and this month I became the very proud user of a Mac Pro. Cords, clutter, and fabric/decor still need to be squared away, but the machinery is finally in place. The new system will give me all the horsepower, memory, and screen real estate I need to not only dial up Second Life, but also handle everything Adobe CS5 in short order and meet all my rendering and studio needs.

Tags: Studio, Mac Pro, Adobe, CS5

Nothing specific to report, but a whole has been going on. For starters, I’ve updated the software and most of the plugins that are used in the creation of this site. Additionally, Adobe has finally released the long-awaited update to their Creative Suite family (BlakOpal and I both use Adobe apps extensively for RL and SL projects). Aside from simply updating what we use, I’ve been looking to expand my horizons on programs I use for RL projects, and I’ve been making use of some of the excellent courseware at Lynda.com to help.

I’ve also had my hands full with testing other assorted pieces of software, the details of which I’m not liberty to get into. SL-wise, I’ve had great results using both Snowglobe 2.x and Kirsten’s S20 viewers, in addition to the official viewer. I’d also like to point out that, contrary to the spreaders of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (or FUDdites as I prefer to call them), the 2.x viewers are not completely unusable for builders and content creators. Once you take a little time to get acclimated, they’re fine. I’m actually at the point where I prefer them to 1.x viewers.

I’ve also gotten lots of shopkeeper stuff done lately, as well. Servers and vendors have all been recently updated, and have better SL region communications than ever. I’ve also had some fun with a number of construction projects, ranging from designing a bunch of row shops, a complete re-work of our space in New Babbage, re-doing the landscaping on Reachra, setting up a new shoppe building, and playing around with a few other primmy projects that haven’t yet made it down to ground level. We’ve also just opened up locations in Sapphire City, at The Carrington in Seraph City, and Triborough NY, and there are some exciting new outfits on the horizon too. On top of that, we’re gearing up for the International Fashion Fair and a major upgrade of the XStreet shopping experience (seriously, it is about to get much more awesome).

One thing we don’t have coming up in the weeks ahead is the SL7B celebration. Yes, we’ll both probably be there during the event, but we’ve decided not to apply for a build site. The parcel sizes and prim limits are much smaller than last year, and realistically we don’t have the time and resources to start the process from scratch and come up with something that we’re both excited about. We think sitting this one out is the right thing to do, and we look forward to future large scale community events that we will have the opportunity to participate in.

As I work, I find myself occasionally taking lots of snapshots and screen grabs (either for my own purposes or to share with BlakOpal). This post seems like as good a place as any to share some of my favorites from the last few weeks.

Tags: SL, Building, XStreet, Marketplace, SL7B, Site, Adobe, CS5, Photoshop, Studio

By most accounts, people are very concerned about their privacy these days. Specifically, they don’t want people violating it. I can’t say that I blame them. While I don’t lead any kind of ‘secret internet double life’ (I’m known by Trilo in RL), I do like to keep my personal account details to myself. I don’t want to have others automatically creating accounts in my name on other web sites, putting me on mailing lists without my permission, sending me promotional offers, or getting at personal data that could help them steal my identity.

There have been two major breaches of privacy within the metaverse in the last few weeks, and I’m a little surprised that more people aren’t up in arms about it. Almost hilariously, more people are expressing militant outrage about changes to the LL viewer’s UI than they are about very serious and real violations of thousands of users’ privacy by organizations that really should know better.

The first one was with the SL Bloggers Ning site (no link, it’s not a public group and you don’t want to risk signing up). The backstory is that Ning.com recently announced the failure of their ad-supported business model. Ad clicks weren’t paying the bills, and they’ve been losing money on the free Ning sites hand over fist. To change course and save their company, they recently announced that they’ll be shutting down the myriad of free Ning sites (inciting civil unrest amongst those who feel entitled to something for nothing). They of course do offer a few reasonably priced premium Ning site upgrade options, enabling those who believe in the communities they’ve built to stay the course (or even improve service & remove unwanted ads). The leader/founder of the SL Bloggers Ning chose the option of moving to another free social networking site and starting over. The problem, apparently, is that she didn’t want to start over. And Group.ly, the new service provider, was so eager to build up its user base that they went to the length of providing tools to help violate members’ privacy. What they did was create and use a tool to scoop all the SL Blogger ning account info (at the very least user names and email addresses, though more data could have been mined) to populate a new SL Bloggers social network on Group.ly’s site. That’s right, without having given permission of any kind, SL Bloggers Ning site members now suddenly found themselves with accounts on some completely different social networking site. Even worse, it all went horribly wrong, and literally overnight the members found themselves being sent between dozens and hundreds of unsolicited emails. I’ll link you to a blog post about the aftermath, but not to either Ning’s or Group.ly’s sites, seeing as right now one of the last things you want is to have an account on either one of those sites. Ning’s user account info needs to be more secure, and Group.ly shouldn’t even be attempting such an underhanded way to grow its user base. And shame on the SL Bloggers’ founder who made the decision to use those tools. While she may have had honorable intentions (keeping her community together during a transition), she completely failed to think about the privacy implications or consider the best interests of the members of that community. The strangest part of it all (at least to me) is that more people aren’t outraged about it. Some folks have expressed anger and frustration about Group.ly’s handling of it all, but hardly anybody seems to care that they made such a tool in the first place, or that Ning’s user account info is so easily scooped by third parties, or that the person they trusted to lead their community would act so thoughtlessly.

The second one, which seems far more sinister, concerns Modular Systems, the makers of the Emerald Viewer. It has recently come out that Modular Systems has been involved in data mining. In a nutshell, they’ve been compiling a list of avatar names, IP addresses, and other information about users without their permission, for whatever reason. This information only became known because their site was hacked and someone got that list. It has now been posted on file sharing sites, there is no way to get that data off the internet now. Regardless of how evil or wrong the hacker(s) were who broke into their site and accessed/copied that private info... Modular Systems should never have been compiling it!!! It is important to point out that:

• The data that’s been leaked & published appears to have not been a list of users of the Emerald Viewer.
• You have no way of knowing that Modular Systems is not similarly tracking & logging data for all Emerald Users without their permission, for whatever purposes they choose. Modular Systems has already clearly demonstrated both a lack of respect for user privacy and a lack of website security.

I’m completely baffled as to why people (particularly Emerald users) would not be paranoid and outraged over this. There’s a good chance Modular Systems is compiling that data (even if under the guise of helping to craft a better performing viewer, it’s still wrong), and it’s also entirely possible that they could fall victim to another hack in the future. My advice to anyone who’s ever used that Viewer: Go change your account password on the official Second Life site now (for all your accounts if you have/use alts), and never use the Emerald Viewer (or any viewer from Modular Systems) again. No amount of extra attachment points, temporary uploads, sim-lagging radar functions, or boob jiggling is worth the risk of having personal details of your accounts published online. In my opinion, Linden Lab should not only seriously reconsider allowing Modular Systems to sign up new Second Life accounts on its site, they should think long and hard about allowing them to be on the Third Party Viewer directory.

Ultimately, of course, people are free to make whatever personal decisions they like about privacy and security. It just seems surprising that at a time when sites like Google and Facebook are being taken to task for what they do with user/customer data that these fixtures of the metaverse are getting away with the things they do.

Tags: SL, Emerald, Ning, Group.ly, SL Bloggers, Privacy, Violation, Viewer

Earlier today, Apple released new MacBook Pro computers. For the benefit of anyone considering a new system anytime in the near future, it's probably worth talking something they never seem to mention in the reviews.... how they'll handle SL.

Processor-wise, there isn't a whole lot to note. I'm of the opinion that once you get to a 2.4GHz or faster CPU, you have more than enough CPU power to run Second Life. Since the least powerful machine in the new lineup is at 2.4GHz, you can't really go wrong.

Of course faster doesn't hurt, and if you're considering running SL and other apps simultaneously, you'll definitely want to get one of the Core i5 or Core i7 models. All the machines have 2 processor cores, but the Core i5/i7 have two key features: hyper-threading (which creates twice as many virtual cores and really helps when multi-tasking) and turbo boost (which can at times concentrate power into fewer cores and give you a significant speed boost). Sounds nerdy, but the features don't require any input on your end and you just get better performance.

Memory-wise, you should be good to go. All the machines come with 4GB standard, which is more than enough to run SL and a few other apps. Better still, the machines can be expanded to 8GB (either right out of the box for serious power users or as a future upgrade for most users).

Graphics-wise, this is where it matters the most. The GPU (graphics processing unit) is where most machines (Macs as well as PC's and Linux boxes) struggle the most with SL. The 13-inch MacBook Pro's come with the nVidia GT320M integrated GPU. Like the 9400m chip that was in the entry-level MacBook Pro line before it, this does not have dedicated video memory, and instead makes use of your system RAM for SL textures and the like. While this isn't going to give you ideal performance, it's great bang-for-the-buck. The nVidia 9400m chip did a good job with SL, and the testing and benchmarks that have been done on the new GT320M chip are showing that it's 80% faster than the 9400m. Cool!

On the 15 and 17 inch MacBook Pro's, you get a 1-2 punch of graphical awesome. When Apple released the aluminum unibody MacBook Pro's at the end of 2008, one of the key features was two GPU's. You had both the nVidia 9400m integrated GPU, and the more powerful nVidia 9600m GT. Choosing the lower powered chip gave you an extra hour of battery life, and choosing the more powerful GPU gave you much better fps in SL. The only down-side was that switching between one and the other meant rebooting - not exactly convenient. With the new machines you not only don't have to reboot, you don't even have to choose. When you start running a graphically intensive app, the system switches over. When you quit, it shuts it down and goes back to the lower power chip. Awesome.

The chips themselves are impressive. For the integrated chip, Apple has gone back to Intel. While most Mac users will cringe at the mention of "Intel Integrated Graphics" - this is completely different. In the past, Apple used Intel's 'GMA' technology, which struggled to handle SL (to put it kindly). Since then, Intel has gone back to the drawing board a few times, and the current Intel HD Graphics appear to have a lot of great features. Hardware support for HD video scaling/resizing and H.264 video decoding, and the ability to use up to 1.70GB of system memory for shared video (aka texture) memory, up from 0.25GB in the past. On the higher end, Apple is using the nVidia GT330M GPU which features 256MB (on the base model 15-inch) or 512MB (on all the others) dedicated video memory and a whopping 48 cores. Looking at benchmarks, the GT330M has just about double the graphics power of the the best MacBook Pro available up to September 2008, and a third more powerful than the best aluminum unibody MacBook Pro that were available through yesterday. Despite all the added power, the automatic battery switching technology and other improvements results in a longer battery life - a full hour longer than the previous models.

If you use Adobe's professional apps (Photoshop, AfterEffects, etc), you'll reap some huge benefits when you upgrade to the just-announced CS5 versions, which not only fully supports 64-bit on Mac but can also put those 48 cores to use in cranking through your renders and other processor intensive tasks.

What might be the most awesome SL-related feature, though, is SHADOWS. While dynamic shadows is still in its earliest stages, it's something most (if not all) of us are interested in. At present, shadows aren't possible on the Mac with an ATI card. Not ATI's fault, just that the software support isn't there yet. Shadows are possible on the nVidia side, but in my tests the 9600m GT in my aluminum unibody just wasn't quite powerful enough to get the job done. There is a very good chance that shadows will work out of the box on the new 15-inch and 17-inch MacBook Pro systems. I'll keep my eyes open in the Macintosh User's Group and other spots, and report back/update once I can confirm whether they work or not. UPDATE! The new machines are currently unable to render shadows using a Second Life Viewer on the Mac. As with many other Macintosh models, this does not appear to be a hardware limitation as much as a software/driver limitation.

The new machines have several additional new features and options available, but that’s getting beyond the scope of this post (I’ll leave it to you to go check out Apple’s site or visit an Apple store and see for yourself). The new hardware represents a significant boost in performance over the machines they replace, and it looks like they’re going to do a great job running Second Life.

Tags: SL, Apple, MacBook Pro, Shadows, nVidia