A Sorry State of Affairs

Over the last 4 months, I have it has to be said, been very concerned over the downturn Second Life has been taking. While I am a creator and I love what I do, I also run a business, and you see trends forming as you watch sales and how much money you are earning. Its fair to say my sales haven't been very good.

And as it seems, Linden Lab is the root of the reason why Second Life is declining.

Its has long been known Linden Lab has a serious problem.
They don't tell people things, they are awful at support and they are known to make awful decisions that affect the whole grid, and while often these decision are valid, they never explain them.

I will give you an example of their poor communications.
Back in 2009 Linden Lab announced that they were reorganising the rules over adult material on the grid with the creation of a new rating system for sims.
This caused an uproar amongst users and creators.
Linden Lab's response was their usual. Nothing.
Some time later, they imposed the new rules, which included verification of users ages. This was done via a strict and quite frankly overkill method that either you registered a valid credit card, or gave them a copy of a current drivers licence or passport to verify your age.

As a sim owner, I complied with their requests and I understood the rules.

Earlier this year, I was grumbling about the usual SL policing issues on one of my sims to a friend. Someone was coming to my sims on zero day old avatars and causing trouble, and I questioned "How on earth is this person getting past the passport / drivers licence rules" as they had no payment info on file.
She has been on the grid for a few years, and turned round really confused and said "what are you on about?" I explained what I have said above about the "Rules".
Her response was simple. "I didnt have to do that. I just ticked a box"

I was both confused and skeptical about this, and to just check this for myself, I registered a new account, logged in on it, and went over to my sims and went straight over to the one adult sim I have.
As I tried to cross the sim border, a box flashes up which said something to the effect:
"You are trying to access Adult Land. If you want to see explicit adult material, click okay"
Clicked okay and I am on the sim.

At some point, no clue when, Linden Lab relaxed the rules and went from a cavity search approach to accessing adult materials to simply asking a question.
Outside of the fact they put the grid through hell with this "Adult" switchover 5 years ago, it is massively annoying that they sneaked this through the back door, didn't say anything that I saw to explain they were relaxing the rules and merchants and sim owners were kept in the dark.


Anyhow. The point of my soapbox today does revolve around this lack of communication and something I found out by chance yesterday that has left me spitting blood.
As you may remember, some months back I created the Caldera Project above the main sims.
Caldera was designed to comply with the rules for Adult on sims, and I ensured that there were no explicit materials in order to maintain the Sims Moderate ratings. This included not including any related furniture which can often red flag a sim.
Yesterday I was going over to the sims to do some clean up work, adjusting the parcel keyword searches to include new features many of my products have.
I started with the Demon Studio. Did a quick search to see how well things were doing.
I got a bit of a surprise... I wasnt even in the top 200 listings.
My initial reaction was "good job I came over to fix this"
Then I did a little more indepth searching to see what other keywords would come up...
Nothing.
Then a horrible thought crossed my mind. I did a specific search to find what was going on and it was then I nearly fell off my chair.
It wasnt a bad search result. The Demon Studio wasnt on the search at all.

You know that horrible sinking feeling you get when you find out something serious. That was me, as I realised that the Demon Studio had been excluded from the Search.
And what was worse, the only major thing to have changed, was the introduction of Caldera. Which meant... well. Caldera opened in April this year and it was most likely that the Demon Studio hasnt been listed on the SL search since April. 4 Months ago.
I am still fuming over this. The only thing that could have caused the parcel to be black listed was a cave I installed that had adult animations on it. However... I was sensible. I deleted the adult animations from it making it PG and nothing more than a pretty feature.
Odder is the same cave is on the Pheadra sim too.. and the parcel that is on is, yes, still listed on the search.

Needless to say I was in a state of shock for a few hours, and the only thing I could do was to move the whole sim to adult. And lo and behold... the Demon Studio reappeared back on the search.
I still dont know what caused this though, hence the extreme measure.

Why I am angry though is simple.
For 4 months, a parcel I was paying for, every week, to be on the SL search, was not being listed. I never got a heads up from Linden Lab about this. They just blocked it out and left me wondering why my sales were in decline.
It was a matter of me checking my search results that alerted me to the fact.

What angers me more about this exclusion is it was probably based around the sims filtering system picking up a "Adult" feature (incorrectly I may add).
All I will say here is this.
There is a Moderate sim out there - its a big one, well known with massive footfall.
Its listed as Moderate. And it has a sex strip club on the sim, with naked women dancing in the window. It also has an explicit shop open in its mall area dealing with adult products and its no hold barred. Yet, this sim is getting away with murder, while I am struggling to understand why my parcel got blocked off the search.

Linden Lab - please, for the love of god. Sort yourselves out. Tell people if something doesnt sit right with you and why it doesnt. You could even make this an automated system.
Don't randomly block people off the search and give zero explanation for why you did it, yet still take their money.

I am now however reconsidering move both my primary sims to adult considering how much of a pitiful joke it is to access adult land. I could in theory now turn caldera in to a full on adult playground...
I will have a good think about this and I will be monitoring the Deaths Head sim to see exactly how moving to adult affects it. That said, with the epidemic situation over the how the grid is behaving of late (constant outages, database, asset server, and teleport issues), not sure it could be a fair comparison.

A rather pee'ed off Hemi

Getting more Fibre in my Diet

Its been a very long month here at Violet Studios and with quite a few changes.

In between the getting various larger projects built and tested I have other things going on including the building and restoration of a new Studio PC with more power so I can create better things.

However, as I reported earlier in the year, I was majorly upset with the state of my internet service provision.

For years now I have struggled with UK broadband providers.

My first Service provider was Sky who offered me “Unlimited” broadband. Who then because I used more than 40 gig a month, capped my usage and restricted my access.

I then moved to O2 who again promised me I could have Unlimited internet, only to throw me off their service saying I was using too much data.

Funny how the word Unlimited works isn’t it?

After that I had to quickly find a new provider and step up Talk Talk, who promised me Unlimited Internet too, and for a change, they really did and for near enough a couple of years I was very happy, right up towards the end of last year when things started to get problematic.

It started with a few niggles here and there.

Every so often, at peak times I found SL was struggling a little on download speeds.

Then rather than every so often, slowly by November 2013, it became struggling a little every evening and all weekend.

However as December arrived, the problem was getting alot worse.

My broadband was rated at 6 mbps however by peak times the figures were getting down to dial up speeds of around 0.5 mbps.

As I hit Christmas, the speeds were getting terminal and I was clocking speeds of less than 0.2mbps

Putting that realistically, I hadn’t seen speeds like that since 1998 on 28K Dialup.

This for me was unacceptable. I was paying for a service I wasn’t getting, and as someone who designs and works online, I need a stable connection all day. And that wasn’t happening. I was being forced to down tools at 4pm in the afternoon, and pack in work for the day, as I couldn’t use SL.

In fact if I crashed, there were times it took anything up to an hour for me just to manage to log back in SL because the speeds were so low, the viewer was refusing to run giving error messages.

So, I called Technical Support. Little did I know at the time this was going to be the start of four months of swearing, arguing and broken promises.

First few times I got ran through their standard scripts and was told that there is nothing wrong.

Third time, I got them to come out and look at things. Took them 10 days to get someone out and after he came, he managed to improve my connection slightly, but the peak time issues were there.

I called again, and this time I got an engineer from BT Openreach come out and finally I got the whole story.

Internet in the UK is slightly confusing in that there really are only two companies offering services in the UK. British Telecom, and Virgin Cable. All other providers are tied to BT who leases them services. This I already knew, as it was BT who imposed restrictions of data on both Sky, and O2 previously turning unlimited, in to limited.

As the Engineer explained, as he lived only a few doors away from me, the local telephone exchange hadn’t been upgraded for 15 years. And in that time, use of the internet had gone from 30% to 90% and there had been 3500 new homes built that it was serving.

The problem was not my internet connection. It was the Exchange itself trying to funnel thousands of Terabytes of data and not having the physical capacity to do it hence network bottlenecks and pitiful speeds.

The only ray of sunshine was BT was installing Fibreoptic broadband. Actually they weren’t. They had deemed the area I live in to be “commercially unviable” and had no plans to update the network so they could get the UK government grant to install it. Amazing considering the area has huge commercial viability and I don’t live in the middle of nowhere.

What surprised me, was September to December 2013, I had seen them on the street installing it, although at the time I had no clue what they were doing. So the lines were there, the boxes and hardwear were installed and all ready to go!

The engineer told me that this was only really happening because he and some others had gotten so angry, they had contacted both the local member of the UK government and the head of BT Openreach to come up and urgently look at this area and it had been deemed critical, and as a result of poor planning, they were having to bypass the local exchange completely as it wasn’t commercially viable for them to do the exchange.

So, at last, Fibreoptic broadband was on its way.

However checking the Openreach website my area was coming up as “Nothing planned.”

Back on the phone to Talk Talk asking one simple question. When can I get Fibre?

By the end of January this year, I finally managed to pin them down to getting an answer.

28^th Feb – so I put up, shut up, and bit my tongue and waited patiently.

As the time approached, I rang up to see where we were up to. They wouldn’t give me any more information and as March arrived, and no Fibre broadband I called them again.

This time I got a response. “Sorry, but we don’t have that information, we never have had that information, BT Openreach are in control of the deployment and whoever told you that should never have given you a date as they didn’t know.”

Or, if you want, they lied to me just to get me off the phone and stop me calling them.

Its fair to say I was fuming however checking the openreach website again, I saw that in mid March the partnership that was funding Fibre Broadband Deployment in my area was doing a “Public awareness” campaign with a local meeting so I booked that in my diary for mid March.

Perhaps I could finally break this Talk Talk Blames BT, BT Blames Openreach (ironic as its their own company), and Openreach has no contact details!

The meeting arrived, the website was still saying “no plans” and I got there only to find BT Openreach were too frightened to send any representatives leaving only the partnership staff to answer the maddening crowds of angry people.

So I asked them the question I had asked Talk Talk. When can I get fibre?

“oh, we arnt sure as it is openreach and it will be ready when its ready, but I would say you are looking at June”

Cue near enough Nuclear meltdown.

I got back in from the meeting spitting blood but the next day something changed.

Openreach’s Website says “coming soon”.

Called Talk Talk Support again to be as usual hit by the wall of ignorance and apathy.

But it seemed something was finally moving.

Over the next few weeks, I checked the Open Reach website until on the 5^th April, I logged on to find the words “Accepting Orders”

Finally... Its over. I can use the internet on an evening again!!!

Rang Talk Talk.

I had already checked their website and it said “not available” but it was probably due to them not being up to date.

Wrong. They told me they didn’t have fibre broadband end of story and call back next week – maybe it would be up and running.

Called up the a few days later to see what the deal was and if they had it.

Again I was told to go away, but there was something else I was doing at that moment. I was checking out their rivals out of curiosity to see if they had Fibre available.

Talking to the salesman on the phone, I went on to Plus Nets website, typed in my details and how odd... they were showing that they had Fibre broadband available.

Salesman tried to shrug that off saying oh they must have a deal with BT or something as BT own them.

So I checked Sky’s website while on the phone. Accepting Orders.

He didn’t know what to say.

I checked EE’s website – Accepting Orders.

Oh... errr. I don’t know. We should have the service too if they all have it.

He then confidently said to me “Right, I am going to raise this with our back office as a priority case and I am going to take personal ownership and responsibility for this. I will guarantee to give you a call back at the latest next Friday. I know that you have had so many problems with our service and this isn’t fair on you, but if you could give Talk Talk this last chance I will sort this out for you and get you a really good deal”

I can be stupid sometimes, but I took him at his word. I put the phone down, and I waited for a week off the back of his promise.

11am the following Friday – when he said he would call, I sat by the phone waiting eagerly.

Nothing

11.30am, I got sick of waiting and called Talk Talk.

Oh... I am sorry, but the issue was raised with our back office. It seems that because Talk Talk don’t have access to the exchange to put our own equipment in it, we arnt able to offer you Fibre Broadband services. Its simply not possible.

I ground my teeth and then asked these questions.

Why didn’t the salesman who promised me to take personal ownership on this call me back, when did he find out, and when did the back office actually give that information?

They actually answered honestly for the first time in four months, probably knowing already at this point they had lost me as a customer.

The guy had read the note from the backoffice 3 days before on the Tuesday. And the Back office had issues their response to this 7 hours after it has been put through – at 7pm on the Friday before.

As for the lack of response, they had nothing.

I cancelled my services with Talk Talk 20 minutes later, went back to Sky Broadband and although the transfer didn’t go smoothly, I finally, at the start of May, 6 months after my internet became unviable on an evening, moved to the basic package of 38mbps Fibre broadband.

The results so far have been stunning really.

Day or night, regardless of when you check, I have a stable speed of 37.5mbps

I could go for an even higher speed of 78mbps, but I decided to see how I get on with the introduction speed and upgrade if I need to but so far, I have acres of bandwidth to spare. SL runs like lightening, day or night, and I managed to download software patches for my daughters PS3 games in minutes.

Previously I tried to download a 1.2 Gig patch for a game, and it failed after 4 hours

The same on Fibre shockingly took less than 15 minutes to download and install.

I was needless to say a very happy camper.

This does mean a significant change though at Violet Studios.

For the last six months, I have been forced to down tools around 6pm, and go watch TV as SL was effectively unusable.

I couldn’t build, I couldn’t upload and at times I couldn’t relog in.

With Fibre, I can build, I can now upload at 9mbps (previously at max 0.3mbps) and I have a fast stable connection.

So... PC is upgraded and working at ultra fast speeds, broadband is stable and extremely fast.

Time to get back to working like a maniac.

What do I want to do tomorrow?

For years now I have run my own businesses although for a time, I ventured out in to the real world.

Ever since I started out working for myself, I have enjoyed that flexibility that comes with being your own boss. However during the time I moved in to the corporate world, shortly before I joined Second Life, I found one of the greatest horrors.

As I got up every morning, I was presented with a question for myself.

“What do I have to do today?”

Its a very simple question with such dark undertones and for me, it represents a question that can be soul destroying.

We all wake up and plan our days, however one of the most subtle undertones that you never understand is you actually never plan your day, the day plans you.

Working for myself, I understood that question from a different angle – its not “What do I have to do today”, but “What do I want to do today”.

Many of us live our lives with those two questions, but even in the vagueness of your “days off” the need to do things often intrudes in our desires to do things we really want to.

Each day I went to work in my Corporate day, I learnt the real meaning of what I had to do on those days, not what I wanted to do.

When that side of my life came to a close, I came to Second Life, it has to be said not in the best state of mind. The question I had asked each day had demoralised me, pushed me down and left me feeling like a horrible person. Thats the world of business – it turns nice people in to monsters.

But Second Life offered me a salvation because, I changed the question.

“What do I want to do today?”

What did I want to build, what did I want to design – I could choose, pour out my creativity, be slightly insane, and enjoy what I was doing.

For two years just about, I had the pleasure of living that question each day but the strangeness of SL started to slip in the door.

It started quietly really. Script Limits. Linden Labs answer to annoying every creator on the grid who built things with scripts in them.

And then, slowly, during 2010, I started asking the dreaded question every so often... What do I have to do today?

With the Arrival of Mesh, the continuing war on scripting, and my products growing more and more technical, there came in day at some point in 2011 when I stopped asking “What do I want to do today?” and started project managing, looking at update programs, searching for solutions, investigating what the new technologies could do.

And sadly, that is where all hell broke loose really... the beginning of three years worth of that kind of stuff.

By the time it hit 2012, I realised all of what I have said above, and needless to say it depressed me. I knew I wasn’t building new stuff, I knew that SL was becoming tiresome and I had to find a way to break out of this cycle.

This is where the origin of “Project Chase your Tail” came from as I started to realise that since 2011, I had been chasing my tail.

It has taken an insane amount of time, effort and thought to create a way to solve all the problems that came from Chasing my tail, but today, I can finally draw a line under it all.

For VSX, the major problems over scripting were solved last year with the release of VSX5 and VSXM – both product lines have radically streamlined scripting thats extremely low cost.

The Unlimited Saga came to an end with Unlimited 3, a system that means I no longer have to update products, but rather the huds cutting down on time, effort and production time.

Finally, the whole Mesh issue. For many years I had an ongoing confusion over mesh. On one side was my desire to make rigged mesh, but the whole series of flaws in mesh threw me in to a tizzy, and at the same time, the issues over how rigged mesh works with skins and clothes left me with a headache. Although unrelated my hands are now untied with the arrival of Fitted Mesh, a product that can do more, and works how I wanted it to in the first place, and although a massive slog, the ADV skins are the final piece of the puzzle so I can now apply skins and even clothes using ADV.

There are dozens of other irritational elements that cropped up over the years, however, as of today, that it. They are all solved, they are all fixed and if I need to do updates to anything, I have already been proactive, rather than constantly being reactive.

Tomorrow is Monday and I think I will sleep well tonight and the first thing that will cross my mind tomorrow is this

What do I want to do today?

Waiting for the buses... The Fitted Mesh Legacy

Since its announcement in November last year, many designers and builders in SL have as I have said previously been chomping at the bit, gagging for the technology to be developed, tested and deployed.

And its not been an easy wait. Near enough a month back I reported my issues over the official Linden Labs DAE files being borked - now it seems that people have finally noticed this only in the last week.
The simple fact is, I was hoping for Christmas time when Fitted was going to be released, even if I was knowingly being unrealistic over it.

I was guesstimating that Fitted Mesh would arrive on the grid at the end of Feb 2014, and I had my build program in place for this, with new products being tested, built and even boxed up ready for that day.
Imagine the coffee spillage and jaw on the desk, when out of the blue Linden Lab officially released Fitted Mesh last monday. This was unexpected.
I had been following the JIRA on this, watching for issues cropping up, and while it had been quiet and had slowed up during January, occasionally a show stop issue was cropping up.

So... its GOOD NEWS!!! Fitted Mesh is here, its released and is ready for use...
No... its not.

This has left me with a bitter taste in my mouth, as Fitted Mesh isnt here really. The simple fact is, Fitted Mesh requires users viewers to be up to date.
Some people may resist the urge to update to the official Linden Labs Fitted Mesh viewer and personal choice is one thing.
But physically being unable to update to fitted mesh as its not available on your viewer of choice means that officially releasing fitted mesh is nothing more than a joke.

There really are two kinds of SL changes when it comes to technologies and viewers.
There is the minor changes - stuff thats nice to have, features that make life easier, or improve your inworld experience, but they arnt essential.
Then there are the major changes which are few and far between. In fact in the last 3 years I can only remember 3 such instances. Fitted Mesh, Project Sunshine, and surprisingly, the original Mesh.
What constitutes a major change is the fact its an essential and the world will not render correctly if you dont upgrade.
For Mesh - without a mesh capable viewer, the thousands of objects in world using mesh will be broken.
For Sunshine, without a viewer capable of sever side baking, you will see Grey people everywhere.
And for Fitted Mesh, any mesh using the new bones will appear on none fitted mesh viewers as a spagetti string being dragged into the bottom corner of the sim.

Back in late January, the team behind the Singularity Viewer (a frankly excellent Viewer 1 based viewer which is as good as, in my books at least, any viewer 3 viewer), released their Version 1.85.
That viewer offered dozens of fixes, upgrades, clean ups etc, but shockingly, and surprisingly they jumped the gun and integrated in Fitted Mesh.
At the time I questioned if this was a wise move as the JIRA for Fitted was still throwing up bugs, however hats off to them. Not only has that idea worked, but actually found some more bugs for the official project to fix therefore making a positive contribution to the development of fitted mesh.
It also allowed me to do beta testing on Fitted Mesh items without having to use the Test viewer form Linden Lab, which in itself is extremely positive for me.

Now with the official release of Fitted Mesh, and seemingly no changes to the operation of Fitted Mesh, Singularity is much like the Official Viewer, Fitted Mesh ready.

The problem is, Singularity is a Third Party Viewer, and for all its bonuses and smooth operations, its certainly not the biggest.
However, lets just get this straight.
Singularity is based on the original Viewer 1 - Not the latest generation of viewers. And the fantastic team there managed to retroengineer the Fitted Mesh system from Viewer 3 code, and fit it in to a Viewer 1 code, and it works perfectly. That deserves respect.

However, while two major viewers have adopted Fitted Mesh, the largest user base viewer on the grid, Firestom, hasnt got fitted mesh.
I will say fair enough - I got a surprise when it was released, and I was estimating a few more weeks before it arrived. However this isnt another "Facebook" feature - this is serious. This should have been planned out, tested and been ready for release. After all, Firestorm is based on Viewer 3, and the official Viewer 3 has fitted mesh. I know its not a matter of drag and drop, but considering Singularity managed to retroengineer the code and released it weeks ago in their viewer, why have Firestorm been caught with their pants down like this.

Firestorm announced last week that they had delayed their monthly meeting for a week and "Exciting news" would be coming.
Many builders saw this as either something major is going to happen, or, they were going to release the fitted mesh capable version of Firestorm.
This meeting was planned for this last Saturday night (UK time) and I logged in to the Firestorm site on Sunday morning to see what happened.
Short answer was, nothing. There is no new press releases or viewer releases.
In fact its now monday and the firestorm blog is still devoid of information and I had to go over to Nalates' blog to see what the crack was.
After trawling through all the information, it seems Firestorm is still "testing" their viewer. They are being deliberately vague over any release date and this is not good at all.
It could be released tomorrow, or next year for all they are giving us.

And for the first time in quite a while, I am very sad to say, Second Life is now outside of Linden Lab's control. They have officially released a new technology, but the actual practical release date for creators isnt what Linden Lab says it is. Its being dictacted by Firestorm. As the largest user base viewer on the grid, they control which technologies can and cant go "live".
Am I being a drama queen over this? Not really if you think about it.
Can I release any full fitted mesh products using the new bones?
According to Linden Lab, yes I can. The technology is in the official viewer.
Practically though, I can't. Firestorm doesnt have fitted mesh, and may not have it for weeks or months.
If the largest user base viewer on the grid doesnt support Fitted Mesh, then a large percentage of users cant see fitted mesh, other than pointy spagetti. That means practically, I cant release any fitted mesh products until Firestorm updates.
I suppose I could do, but the vast majority of the SL population will not accept having to move back to the official viewer or Singularity, and all I will get is bombarded by angry customers who cant see fitted mesh.

So... I guess we are stuck waiting for the number 22 Fitted Mesh bus to arrive in Firestormville.
I will post more when or even if there is news from Firestom.

Fitted Mesh testing and production & Biting my tongue

Looking back in a week in hell

If you were reading the blog last week, you will have noticed my outspoken and quite upset comments about everyone favourite company.
The issues are now resolved finally and I am back (I hope) to business as usual, however you will have noticed that my comments have disappeared.

I did write up a pretty scathing assessment of the situation last week when it was concluded, and needless to say what I was saying wasnt wrong and was very justified.
However it occurred to me shortly after publishing that final assessment that here was a company that had no issue with denying payments to their customers without warning.
The old saying "Dont bite the hand that feeds you" comes to mind - quite literately.

All I can say is fear got the better of me and that is enough. I will bite my tongue.


Fitted Mesh - moving to the next level.

Having to recover from last week hasnt been easy for me as I did end up so stressed I got physically ill. So, on Saturday I thought I would do some tinkering that ended up getting vastly out of control.

Going back to my earlier work, I took one of my prey boots, and did a quick productionised experiment to see if I could get this to behave, and needless to say, that first experiment came out very well really. The boot looked exactly as it should do in world, textured and operated the same as rigged mesh, but it did work well with the soft deformers too.

So I decided to go to the next stage which was full on shape testing to see where the limits were.
I found out, with boots at least, was there were three problem areas.
The first one seems to be a well known bug over the ankle - the joint seems to misbehave.
The second was the knee angle - this slider only seems to move the leg itself left and right which effectively means knee angle is useless.
The final one is bodyfat. It seems bodyfat uses some odd deformers. The outer leg remain fine, however there is quite a heavy (no pun) deformation on the inner leg that the Collision skeleton doesnt like so you get a clip through overhang.

So first genuine look at Fitted Mesh shows that it cures many of the major issues that were absent in Rigged Mesh however it is still an imperfect system.
However from my understanding of things it never could be perfect.
With the SL avatar, its been set up with deformers. These are physical groups of vertices that are programmed to behave in a certain way. This is a very accurate way of getting things to behave right.
Fitted Mesh though uses the collision skeleton. This actually has zero affect on how the SL avatar does its business on deformers. There is no link between the collision skeleton and the deformers.
The purpose of the collisions skeleton is from my understanding, physics. Take away the avatar, the collision skeletons purpose is to stop you walking through walls or falling through the floor.
That all said, while the body deformers are not directly linked to the collisions skeleton, the sliders that operate the deformers are linked to the collision skeleton.
Its a way of recalculating the mass of the avatar so it can judge if your body size is equal to the that of the body mass on the collision skeleton.

How it does this is almost like spheres of influence. There is a mass balloon inside each collision joint. You go from 50 to 100 on the slider, the balloon inflates.
By rigging the mesh to the collision skeleton, you effectively can inherit the properties of the balloon, so if you are looking at the upper leg, it will inherit the properties of the parent bone, therefore offering the same properties you get on rigged mesh, but will then include the mass balloon too, therefore the sliders will work there too.
However that makes the assumption that the deformers behave in the same way as the balloon does.
For muscles its pretty accurate, but for bodyfat, its not as the deformers alter themselves in a different way.

There... my probably inaccurate overview of Fitted mesh and hopefully showing that while a vast improvement, the system is still imperfect.

I did say though my tinkering as always got out of control.
The reason for that is, I now have a full set of production model Prey boots in world. Literately the whole line and the extras have been built, rigged and fully assembled.
The only issue that really affected the boots would have been the ankle joint, however Prey has even on rigged mesh, had a fixed ankle so that instantly cures the ankle as there isnt one.
At the moment, I am testing them but in a lovely way, I could release these tomorrow without even having to wait for the official Fitted Mesh release.
Why?
Well, this is the secondary quirk of Fitted Mesh. While the Fitted Mesh project is still in beta, the collision skeleton isnt new. In fact its always been there right from the start.
Prey boots dont use any of the new bones being introduced in the Fitted Mesh project, therefore, I am wearing the boots right now using an older viewer without fitted mesh and they look, behave and work perfectly.

I have found a few little bugs I didnt spot, which will require some minor reworking, but overall, I am very happy with how these have turned out. With some in world beta testing time, I think by the weekend I could have the Version 4 Prey boots in store and released.

Sadly though I will have to wait to do more work as above the thight, you will need to have the full fitted mesh viewer enabled and how long thats going to take is a different story.

Issues of Pride and Sloth

This last weekend had been quite annoying for me, sometimes in a good way, but more over in a bad way.

An Issue of Pride.
We are of course going back to Fitted Mesh here, and following my repeated headbanging last week over this, you can assume that I didnt drop the subject.

Teaching yourself something is always key to being very good at what you do. Without knowledge, you will constantly slip up, get stuck, and either fail, or bug the crap out of friends as you stumble along.
Having worked with rigged mesh for two years now, and listening to the fact that the "workflow is the same as rigged mesh" when it comes to fitted, I assumed this was a logical progression.
I never claimed to be an expert or a guru on rigging - its something I am still learning about day by day, but fundamentally I learnt about rigging through a process of trail and error, but most importantly, learning from other people who have been kind enough to share their knowledge.

As of right now, I have Hemi in world, wearing a fitted mesh boot - the same boot I was using for experimental purposes. Although it still needs vast amounts of weight painting work, that boot is pure fitted mesh, it behaves as expected with the sliders although I have to say, the one size fits all theory isnt true - fitted mesh isnt a magic pill for curing fitment problems and you may still end up with 2-3 different items depending on how the items are rigged.
In short - it works and the reason it works is because after looking at Fitted Mesh for a week, I realised that my pride was the weak point. I thought I could do this by myself, but as I said above, I am not an expert or guru. So, I swallowed my pride, and turned to someone who is an expert and the very first test I have done with new knowledge and tools, has worked out.

Where now? Sadly, nowhere. Fitted mesh is still in beta, and its now the process of waiting for things to progess to actual release. So, that project is now on hold.
Quite a shame really, as the boot itself, works both in the Experimental viewer, and the regular viewer.


An Issue of Sloth
This one is not actually directly related to SL at all atlhough it is indirectly causing me massive trouble.
In the UK, the gatekeepers our of internet services are British Telecom - a company who for those that have dealt with them, are pretty much loathed.
Having worked on the internet since 1996, I have sadly had a lot of expiernece with BT, and its fair to say I would rather shove wasps up my backside that deal with them ever again.
They are unpleasant to say the least, and sadly even when you dont deal with them directly, they are the gatekeepers, and even through the many service providers, they still cause you problems.
I was with Sky for a long time... then one day, I couldnt use the internet on an evening properly. I bought Unlimited Broadband from them. BT had imposed a 40 Gig download limit per month on them, and because they were having to use BT's services, I got data restrictions. In the end I had to move.
I moved to O2 Unlimited... everything worked well for a year or two... and then BT once again started causing trouble resulting in me being forced off their service!
I then moved to Talk Talk, who have in fairness been very good, but this time BT has caused an even larger problem that isnt just affecting me that has been coming slowly to a head now for nearly a decade.
In 2002, I moved to Sky broadband and I was told "sorry, you cant have our full service as the local exchange is still under BT's control and we cant put our equipment in - they have said they will be unbundling that exchange soon."
I kept checking on the status of that upgrade to the exchange, and sadly nothing happened.
Back then, the exchange in question was dealing with probably 1000 houses, of which remembering the year, not many of them had the internet.
Since that time, a lot has happened. Due to the proliferation of the internet, the % of people using the internet has gone up massively - in my area 90% of homes now have broadband. So that would be roughly 300 to 900 connections.
Except, there is a secondary issue - local development. over the last 12 years, huge housing developments have been going on local to me adding more and more to the load on that exchange. In fact its closer to 3500 houses now. That is 3150 houses, all trying to get online through an exchange that was originally developed in the 1990's, for at max 1000 homes.
The result is quite frankly horrifying. At 10am in the morning, I am getting a stable speed test of 6 megabits a second. What I should be getting from my connection.
However as you move through the day that speed slows and slow, until at 9pm in the evening, I can only get 0.3 megabits a second.
This, is similar to doing 60 MPH on a motorway, and then at peak times dropping to 3 MPH.
The sad thing is, it has taken me 12 phone calls to talk talk and 2 engineer visits to actually explain what the problem is.
BT have known this was going to be a problem now for over a decade, and going back to Sloth, they did nothing about it until now, as it seems, it has taken a member of parliment (government) and the head of the Fibreoptic Openreach project to have to get involved in a panic.
The largest irony is, most of where I live is on Fibre Boardband - 100 Megabits per second or more.
It is just this one area where its not been deployed due to that exchange not been upgraded.
They are currently doing an emergency deployment of Fibre to our area as the problem has now moved to critical... and after 6 weeks of shouting and grumbling, I finally find out that by the end of Feb, fibre boardband may be availabe to me, and not in the nick of time.
The funny thing is, the exchange in question is still not being upgraded and is actually being bypassed with the fibre system going to the master exchage nearly 10 miles away.
Sadly though, this means my SL connection is almost untennable on an evening - at speeds less than dial up due to the sheer congestion of the current network, SL struggles to work.
That of course means that by 5pm, I have no choice but to stop working on SL - its physically impossible to do more than get IM's.
Roll on March please...

Ducks in a Row - The End of Chasing my tail

I think, I have been hinting a lot recently at the fact my efficiency drive is now reaching its end.

VSX now offers one of the technically most advanced products on the market, while doing it all with the most insanely small scripting costs.

vStrings too are in constant development and of course we have been releasing the Unlimited 3 upgrades in to the Beholder store and the Boot selection.

I think from my point of view, this efficiency project has been an ongoing war now since 2010 – my infamous “Project Chase your Tail”.

And as I have probably ranted about previously, the majority of this has been down to Linden Labs script limit project. I will say, it is fair what they did and I understand why, although with the usual flair and gusto that befits Linden Labs, they neglected to bother telling anyone or making this public knowledge (that I could find at least).

The first part of the massive clean up operation was the introduction of Unlimited 2, which thankfully solved 98% of the problems although it did come with its own set of issues.

However, with ever increasing script limits, and the quite surprising move of many sim owners to hammer people who had too many scripts on (in their eyes and quite heavy restrictions I may add), over the last few years, even Unlimited 2 was starting to struggle.

Over the last 18 months, we have been working on what would become Unlimited 3 although it has been a staggered development as effectively U3 has been developed for very specific products.

Its first incarnation was released on vStrings as a single usage “Designer HUD” and back in July this year, U3 made its second appearance on VSX and VSXM.

For both of these products U3 brought massive advantages in script reduction, and additional functionality.

Unlimited 2 model vStrings compared to Unlimited 3 went from 7 scripts, to just 1 script, which is obviously a massive reduction when you look at a broader picture.

From there, the job was started of making Unlimited 3, actually more unlimited.

While production of this full version was carrying on, production U3 systems were build for Beholder and our Boots selections (lets just be honest, you can only ever wear one set of eyes and one set of boots).

Again, the advantage of U3 is obvious. On Beholder Eyes, they went from 18, to 3 scripts while offering vastly superior functionality.

One thing we were investing alot of time in though was as I said above, making U3 more “unlimited”. And this job proved to be alot harder than we anticipated, actually taking two months more than originally expected.

All of this work, just for two little buttons – Synch and Pick.

Much like U2, you can choose which items you want to effect. So if you have from the demon studio as an example, Horns, Tail, spikes hooves and ears on, you can press Synch to load up the items you are wearing, however unlike U2, this doesn’t automatically default to just one item. The Pick button will allow you to choose which item you want to affect, but with a much better advantage, you can also now select “All”, to blanket change every item you have on. This system gives massive flexibility.

The second great advantage of Unlimited 3 is how it operates. This was something that bothered me on U2, which did and will continue to do a good job but didn’t do it “just right”.

Unlimited 2 created a Universal HUD and individual products. In other words, the HUD was nothing more than a conduit to do the work, and inside the individual products was all the data and information needed to change things.

Unlimited 3 changes that in a subtle way, but with massive effects. Now, rather than the HUD and the data being separate, they are actually one, with the products simply containing the conduit, hence you set the products up once, and you never have to touch them again.

What this means is, if I do end up getting an itch to do new textures, I simply build up the updated HUD, and customers can come to store, and grab the free copy of it and you are ready to go.

Simple!

The final advantage of Unlimited 3 is the actual product cost, script wise.

I will use an example – a Set of Vishpla Horns from the Demon Studio.

Under Unlimited 2, there is the master listener script, 2 prim control scripts (Vishpla are quite large prim wise so need two), a master Resizer script, and then the data scripts of which there are 4 (Bone, Cross, Gems and Metal).

That means there are 8 scripts in Vishpla under Unlimited 2.

Now that is quite easy to look at and honestly they are really light on scripts.

However... if you end up wearing 10 Violet Studios products, and I will give an average here, but actually on the Avatar, you will have 80 scripts on.

From what I know, the rough limit for scripts on an avatar before things start to break badly, is 224, so its well within limits. However many sim owners put a limit of 100 scripts per avatar before they get snooty with you, and I have see games sims ask for as little as 30 (which honestly I think is a little over the top, but their sims, their rules).

Working with Unlimited 3, the figures regardless of the product, are simple – A Master Script, and if required a Resize Script (Rigged mesh doesn’t require resize). That means at absolute maximum, you will only have 2 script per product.

That means, comparatively speaking, you are wearing 10 items you should have under 20 scripts on from the Unlimited Perspective.

Which now brings me back to the title. Ducks in a Row.

With the Demon Studio and the Cyber Studio all now running on Unlimited 3, this now brings me full circle.

In 2009 and 2010, Violet Studios was a power house of design and development with new products almost pouring in to store on a weekly basis. For those that remember though, the torrents of new products slowed until they effectively stopped.

Part of the reason for this was the ever increasing technical nature of the products I was building, taking more time to create, but the majority of this was down to the fact I was having to constantly revisit prebuilt products thanks to script limits.

Between the learning curve of mesh, VSX optimisation, vString development, and the constant battle of trying to make my “unlimited” products perfect scripting wise, my time was monopolised.

Today, vString is now stable & efficient and the calmer and more sensible development of vString 4 is quietly and in a controlled way happening in the background.

VSX is now down to extremely low scripting costs and is effectively a stable final release and has even been superseded by the VSXM series.

Finally, the Script Limit war is over, with Unlimited 3 fully deployed in store with the threat of having to revisit these products again gone forever (as the HUD does the update, not the products). And let be honest, if 2 scripts it too many, then SL really is it trouble.

Hence the title. All my Ducks are now in a Row.

Project “Chase your Tail” is over. I cannot improve the older generation of products any more outside of tiny amounts of what would be effectively Petty Tweaking and even if I did that, I couldn’t make further script reductions – its simply impossible.

It seems to outsiders, odd that I would devote nearly 3 years to an efficiency drive and I will even admit, I do at times wonder if I am bonkers to obsess over this so much.

I will say though, this wasn’t about the actual products, but it was about the future.

I could have easily shrugged this off, and carried on building new products, however what that would have meant was there would have been even more products in store to clean up, and customers would not have got the very best from me.

Today, the timing of the end of Chase your Tail does coincide with several new technical developments on SL. My knowledge of mesh work gets better by the day, the so called Liquid Mesh is on the table and is due out soon (although learning about this is giving me a headache). I have dozens of new products on the bench at the moment, between myself and Juggz we have developed a quite frankly stunning series of scripting tools within vString, VSX and Unlimited.

Finally, there is one final part of 2013 which will see a whole new aspect to Violet Studios future product lines appear in the Demon and Verotic Studios as the long awaited ADV Skin system finally gets released hopefully before Christmas. Expect more on that soon.

I think it fair to stay, Violet Studios is now stable and all in order, and 2014 will be a very interesting year for myself and customers.

Dare I say the flood gate are about to reopen.