Friday, February 15, 2008

Windlight and Particles

Yesterday I posted something on the JIRA about particles not displaying properly in the current relase of the First Look: Windlight viewer. Basically I'm not seeing enough particles no matter what my max particle count is. In the below snapshot there is a comparison of the same effect in Windlight and on the Release Candidate viewer. My issue was a duplicate (oops--there wasn't one that I could see dealing with that problem when I checked, but apparently I'm not good at using Jira) but I attached the snapshot to the original issue.





That brings me to another point I wanted to mention. Second Life currently has a little bit of a problem keeping particle textures in memory or whatever and ready to be displayed on the effect. This makes short particle effects start off as grey rectangles before the particle texture loads and can be quite annoying for trying to make a short particle effect look nice because even after the texture is loaded once it might need to load again the next time it's used. There is a workaround for this for creators: the particle texture should be put onto a prim. For example, for my chain lightning staff I am working on I put a tiny cube inside the staff. The cube has all the particle textures I'm using and even though it's hidden by the rest of the staff the texture still loads and the particle effect never has any problem with showing grey blobs instead of lightning.

Monday, February 4, 2008

Update: Eyana's Commission Vendors

Earlier this evening I updated my affiliate/commission vendor script. There won't be too many noticeable changes for those people using the vendor. Most of the changes are back-end things to better manage vendor tracking for auto-updates. The previous version had no way of knowing which vendors were removed or deleted from the grid. That oversight made it difficult for the updating script to work efficiently because people have had the tendency to rez all the sizes of the vendors and then remove the ones they didn't want.

Anyway, the old vendors should have a message saying that there is a new version available. The new vendors can be purchased for L$1 through the old vendors, or just pop by the main shop to grab them, or just ask me to send them to you. The L$1 fee through the old commission vendor to get the new one is another oversight in the original script where it would not allow any L$0 sales.