Month: January 2018

“Most of the animations I would create wouldn’t need clothes.”

Just another day on the official Sansar Discord channel:

Most of the animations... 8 Jan 2018

(By the way, I did ask Ecne and Lillani permission to post what they said. I will *never* post an image like this from Discord without checking with all people quoted first.)

UPDATE: Medhue, who runs an animations business in Second Life, and who is well known for his tutorial videos for Sansar, weighs in:

You are SPOT ON about rigging. Technically, if given all the right resources to properly rig, there should be little to no poke thru. Animation is how you would test your weights in the rigging. Marvelous Designer clothing, though, is AUTO rigged, by the Sansar client. Generally speaking, if the clothing is not very loose fitting, then the auto rigger does OK, not great or perfect. The further you move the clothing from the body, the hard time the auto rigger will have. ALL of this is no excuse for banning animation.

All that said, rigging and weighting are one of those things that you never actually perfect, but more or less give up and call good enough.

Editorial: Linden Lab Needs to Fix Sansar’s User Forums and Blogs

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Photo by Daniel Páscoa on Unsplash

Inara Pey, in her most recent blogpost report of last Friday’s Product Meetup, says this:

Sansar forums, blogs, etc: it has finally been recognised that the current tool used for these – ZenDesk – is not well suited to the task (YAY!), although fixing this is not a high priority. There have been internal discussions at the Lab about using the platform and tools employed in creating the Second Life forums, blogs, etc., to build something for Sansar – potentially more as a cost saving opportunity then for the sake of functionality. Frankly, I’m still stunned that this wasn’t the route taken from the start given the Lab have the tools and the experience to use them, which could have been easily leveraged, rather than going for a tool entirely unsuited to the task and which presents information in a very unfriendly – and dare I say amateur – manner.

AMEN. I am in 100% agreement with Inara on this. I am going to add my strong opinions on this matter, which I have shared already with everybody (including Linden Lab staff) on the official Sansar Discord forums.

I know that at the casual meetup he attended last week, Ebbe Altberg (Linden Lab CEO) said he wants to have a “consumer launch” of Sansar sometime in 2018 (as opposed to a “creator beta”). But BEFORE they do that, Linden Lab really, really needs to reconsider the software they are using for their community forums/blog/documentation. I mean this truly ugly and uninspiring thing with the too-small font: https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us.

Frankly, it looks terrible and it projects a bad image for Sansar, which in so many other ways has a professional look and some design appeal to it. They already have a fully-functional, attractive-looking community forums/blog/announcement system in place for Second Life, why don’t they use that? Their official blog in particular really looks TERRIBLE, and it has a HORRIBLE URL to boot: https://help.sansar.com/hc/en-us/sections/115001137103-Official-Blog (hate to say it, but it’s true). Linden Lab should fix this before they kick off any campaign to attract consumers/end-users into Sansar.

I hate Zendesk, it is unattractive and Linden Lab can certainly do better. Look at the Second Life community forums page: https://community.secondlife.com/ and their knowledge base: https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/ and their blogs: https://community.secondlife.com/blogs/. Much better than what Sansar currently has!

 

Look at what High Fidelity has, it is much more visually appealing and functional: https://forums.highfidelity.com/. High Fidelity uses Medium (a free solution!) for their blog: https://blog.highfidelity.com/. Let’s compare that with the official Sansar blog:

High Fidelity Blog 8 Jan 2018
High Fidelity’s Official Blog
Sansar Blog 8 Jan 2018
Sansar’s Official Blog

I rest my case!

Inara Pey Blogs the Sansar Product Meetup Friday, Jan. 5th

Inara Pey blogged the Sansar Product Meeting held on the afternoon of Friday, January 5th, 2018.

Video: Penthouse Suite in C3rb3rus’ New Sci-Fi Sansar Experience, 2077

I was so impressed by the work that C3rb3rus had done in creating his new urban science fiction experience, 2077, that I went back today to take some video of the view from his penthouse suite.

It wasn’t just me that was impressed. Ebbe Altberg, the CEO of Linden Lab (the makers of Sansar), joined us on our exclusive first tour of the new experience yesterday, and he was very impressed too! He basically said, “Whatever you need to make this even better, C3rb3rus, let me know!” When you’ve got the CEO’s attention like this, you know you’ve made it!

As I already said in my earlier blogpost, the entire experience has the look and feel of something from the movies Blade Runner or The Fifth Element:

I don’t know about you, but I would totally want to rent this apartment! If you haven’t visited Sansar yet, this is the best reason I can think of to come do so!

You can install the Sansar software client, if you don’t already have it, at https://www.sansar.com/download. And then you can visit 2077 by searching for “2077” in the Sansar Atlas, or just by clicking this link: 2077. See you in-world!