Dedric Mauriac's blog

Reflection on glass

I've gotten the fish bowl to have a little more depth to it. I now have a texture that makes it appear that a light source it hitting against it. I'm not quite satisfied with it, but it is better. I was able to use AvPainter to figure out where to paint the object to simulate light. Transparency doesn't work so well with it as a default texture lies underneath my own. I've also updated the texture on the business cards so they are more generic. I only added 1 prim to make the drawing ball into a fish bowl filled with business cards (only a 100% increase). I'll have to spend more time learning about glass and reflecting light sources later.

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Horrible Fish Bowl

I was able to make a fishbowl and some business cards with just two prims. The problem is that the fishbowl looks horrible. It's flat and dated and has a bit of alpha clipping going on. What I really need to do is to get some textures painted on to make it look highly reflective and transparent. The transparent cyan just makes it look like it's a semi opaque piece of plastic. I'm thinking AvPainter may come into play here, but it looks like I'm going to need some kind of texture baking with actual raycasting, such as Blender - yet I feel totally out of my league.

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Drawing ball manual entry

Soft Vollmar contacted me regarding the drawing ball that I sell. The request was to allow the owner to manually add names to the drawing while preventing everyone else from entering on their own. I was able to make the quick change as well as added the ability to remove the name as well. She also needed a version that could be transferred. That fix was easy enough. However, I'm thinking that the drawing ball needs an update. I'm debating on making it look like a fish bowl of business cards. The downside is that the prim count would probably go up.

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Tech Office

I've been expanding a bit on the light blue glow color scheme I came up with the other day when trying to create a vendor spot that had more than just a networked vendor. I've got a service desk and a pillar of some sort with my logo above me. I was thinking about setting a few things out on the desk, but haven't come up with any ideas that I want to run with.

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Mesh on the grid

Mesh has made it's debut on the main grid yesterday. The price to import a simple cube (12 triangles, 24 vertices) is 11 L$ and it counts as 2 prim equivs. A sculpty would only cost 10 L$ and a cube prim itself would be free. Mapping textures seems to be really wierd especially with organic shapes. For the default blender cube, you would set your mapping to planar and face repeates to 0.5 and 0.5. However, this applies to the whole cube rather than to each face. Mesh is going to be big because of the find detail and control it brings. A lot of stuff will probably look odd from far away unless the creator mucks about the upload options with a fine tooth comb.

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Themed stalls

In the past, I really didn't bother with making my rented stalls look all that great. I just threw up a networked vendor or static boxed vendors and left. I'm trying to change how I work with rented stalls. I'm finding that each one seems to have a creative look, and that there are no two stalls that look alike. Regarding sales, I don't know if it will help either way. It doesn't seem to be having any affect just yet, as my in-world servers still read as zero sales each day. Perhaps I need to restrict the number of products for sale to be those that fit within the areas surrounding theme - but I haven't caught on to what that is just yet.

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Unmanned Traffic Jam

I always get a kick out of these unmanned traffic jams. There are scripted vehicles (without any passengers) that have been directed to travel on roads within the virtual world. The world itself is many servers representing squares on a grid. When you cross from one server to the next, that's when all the problems come up. These three vehicles were unable to compensate for the problems. Well, one of them could. It soon cleaned itself up and another one came along and crossed without a problem. If you right-mouse-click the other vehicles (altering how physics affects them), they disappear.

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More JEVN API commands

Esmay Rand and I worked out a solution to my problem. Rather then displaying the menu to the end-user, we worked it out so that a message tells the JEVN scripts to send the note (card, url, demo, etc.) to the end-user. I now have a 2-prim JEVN vendor with plenty of options for the end-user to choose from visually. I'm almost curious if I can make a 4 prim vendor to display 10 thumbnail images. For now, this will be fine.

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Viewer Update 2.7.4

A new update came out today for 2.7.4 (235167). "What's included" you may ask? In my opinion ... Nothing. A few bug fixes, language fixes, and some crash/performance fixes. This feels like its becomming a bit stale with what is available. I want to see something new.

Personally, I'm eager to see Mesh come through. I expected it to come through at the end of last month. They even have a few bug fixes concerning mesh. I wonder what the hold up is.

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Undocumented JEVN API commands

I've been in contact with the creator of the JEVN vendor systems trying to get the info menu working by clicking on a mapped area within a child prim. I've learned about an undocumented call to send the root prim a message to display the menu. The problem I run into now is that if the person who clicked "info" clicks on a button within the menu for information, they aren't always the person who gets that information. It's like the scripts in the root prim need to be told that the person clicking the button is the one that should receive that information as well.

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