05.16.08
Posted in 3d at 2:33 am by hypatia
http://community.softimage.com/showthread.php?t=250
Well, I am obviously going to end up buying Crysis soon 
I’ve held off till now, but I’ve been drooling over its character pipeline for a good long while to experiment with custom built avatars and viewing architectural models and furniture I’ve built in real time.
I’ve also been working with XSI Mod Tool for the last weeks, learning the animation tools. It’s a fine free package, with very few limitations (a polygon limit and none of the really high end XSI features, but you don’t need them for making game mods - the animation is not nerfed in it). XSI’s rigging is stellar, and I am finding I am enjoying it a great deal.
Eventually I’ll cough up and buy XSI Foundation just for the animation once I get my skills to the level I feel comfortable, for now though I’m happy futzing with Mod Tool. I highly recommend it to learn a high end 3d package for no cost and the ability to use work you created with it in pro editions of the product, something you can’t do with Maya Personal Edition.
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05.06.08
Posted in Second Life tagged group notices at 10:28 pm by hypatia
Ah, LL drops another bomb reducing functionality rather than fixing the scalability problem in SL. Sighs.
Changes to Groups, New Rules on Group Notices
Edited for Clarity: Sorry for the confusion. The new rules do not prohibit a group from sending more than 200 messages. They do mean that if a group has more than 200 notices stored, starting with the 201st, the group can expect those notices to be regularly removed from storage in the database.
Group messages older than 14 days or in excess of 200 can be expected to be deleted from the database (once each day.) – Katt
- - -
As part of our ongoing effort to provide you with the highest quality Second Life experience possible…we have identified and tested an issue that should help alleviate load on the databases.
- Starting Tuesday, 6 May, 2008, all group notices that are older than 14 days will be removed from storage in the database. (Notices were previously held for 31 days.) The reason for this change is to help reduce load on the database. Note: Nearly *every* group that uses notices in Second Life will be effected by this change, which will be ongoing.
- Groups will now be limited to 200 notices *per group* each day. Older messages, over the 200th, will be regularly removed from storage in the database. There are about 135 groups we expect will be impacted by this limit. The owner of each of these groups should see a message in-world Tuesday, notifying them of the change.
Please note that in both cases this process would remove the *oldest* notices, if any. This will start on Tuesday 6 May, 2008, and is intended to help stabilize the databases.
In short - large active groups with a lot of group notices (say, Fashion consolidated, Live Music Enthusiasts) have an archive of a few days to a week at best now. An archive vulnerable to users scrolling it actively, rather than the purely time based 30 day archive we had before.
I’ve proposed this JIRA to help protect our archives from spamming - Group Notices -> limit number of notices sent by an individual to a set number within a set length of time.
http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-7083
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