Chain Lightning Staff Released

The staff is finally released. I had a couple of minor issues to fix with it so instead of releasing at version 1.0 it is released at version 1.01.

Check out the SLExchange page for it or go to my shop in-world.

This staff has a chain lightning attack that can target up to 16 targets at once. The targets can be switched from People to Objects (scripted objects only). There is also a lightning shield that damages those who touch it.

Aside from the attacks, the staff has a left- and right-handed standing pose built-in, custom color options, and some color presets.

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.

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.

Simple Jet Flame Tutorial

This tutorial shows how to make a simple jet flame effect in Photoshop. Just load the images in sequence and follow the text on the images. Hopefully everything makes sense.
























Download: Finished Jet Flame Effect (tga zipped)

Windlight Firstlook

The Windlight Firstlook is available. I'm testing it out currently and I am having mixed feelings which mostly lean towards extremely displeased. The environment looks great. The shading on prims looks fine.

Avatars look awful.

Dreadful.

Ugly.

Any type of shading or shadow on any avatar for me looks awful. It's like the shading is not blending at all. Ugly lines going across the avatar. It's like doing a gradient with only eight colors.


I updated my video card drivers. I tried all kinds of settings. If I turn off all the shaders I have no problem, but then it looks worse than it does in the old client.

Blah.

I was really, really looking forward to Windlight and now that I can't use it without grimacing whenever I see a person while nobody else seems to be having this problem is kind of upsetting. The environments looked really nice. The reflections were nice. Everything was nice and smooth on pretty high settings, but no matter what the avatars looked so poorly shaded.

I posted on the SL forums, so maybe someone can help me.

edit: of course jira is not loading in my browser either.

relaxing

relaxing
Originally uploaded by eyanayohkoh

This is my first painting that includes some elements straight from Second Life. The tree, terrain, and person (me!) are taken from a high resolution snapshot in my home sim, Mew.

The moon and stars are from scratch in Photoshop, and there are some touch-ups on the SL snapshot done in Photoshop as well.

I'm not sure I have the lighting done properly. Something seems a little off, but I'm not sure what it is.

edit: The stars look oddly blurred in the lower resolution versions of this image. I painted everything at 4000x3000 and it looks fine there. I'll have to figure out a way to make it look better in a regular resolution or just paint a new star field.

Rolling Restart Bug Fixes

I just read about the rolling restart Linden Labs plans for the 6th and this bug fix made me smile.

• SVC-912: Sky Eclipse’s avatar crashes regions EVERYTIME she logs in, regardless of where she logs in

Poor Sky Eclipse!