This week’s daily casual meetups will take place Monday through Friday at 2:00 p.m. Pacific Time/Sansar Time at Witchy’s Sandbox. Here’s a shot of us meeting there today!
Category: Uncategorized
The Importance of Keeping Sansar Documentation Up-To-Date
The Sansar team at Linden Lab is working hard to bring us the best virtual world platform that they can. They deserve our respect and kudos for a job (mostly) well done. But Ethos Erlanger has a valid complaint about Sansar documentation that is not being kept up-to-date as the software platform evolves over time. This might seem like a picky thing, but it’s not. Both creators and consumers are relying on that documentation to be accurate, and it’s very frustrating when it’s not.
Everybody can do their part in two ways: by asking good questions of Linden Lab staff via the community forums and at the Friday product meetups, and by making documentation update requests. Ethos explains how:
When items such as these come to light, the best we can do is request an update to the documentation. Everyone can help out on this topic by writing requests for documentation here. (They just call it “Documentation” when you get to that page.) I would think it would be called something like: Documentation Requests, but Linden Lab must have held that focus group without me. The odd thing is that this link goes to a subsection of “Community”. So do not look for it under the Knowledge Base which is where I instinctively looked for it. And that is if you can find the Knowledge Base.
And, just to be helpful, here is the Knowledge Base. and here are the Community Forums.
Sansar’s First Hovercraft!
Galen (whom I have profiled before) has created the first true vehicle in Sansar: a hovercraft you can steer by simply moving your avatar around on a platform! He says:
It’s a hover platform that’s operated simply by walking around the platform to make it lean in the direction one wants to go.
This machine relies on dynamic stability, especially using a series of PID controllers and the Script API’s impulse mechanics. These allow it to respond to changes in mass as people board and move around in order to keep the platform mostly upright and near a target elevation.
There are no hidden collision volumes or other tricks here. This actually works very well, even if Sansar’s physics engine isn’t perfect.
Testing the New Terrain Editor
One of the most eagerly-awaited new features of the September 8th Sansar software release was the ability to use an interactive Terrain Editor to sculpt land, much as you can do in Second Life! Today I tested this feature out, and despite a few bugs it worked well.
Here’s what the Terrain Editor looks like in Sculpt mode, where you can create hills and valleys:
The smallest size of land that you can sculpt at one time is 32 by 32 metres square, and the largest is 256 by 256 metres. You can set the size of your sculpting tool anywhere from 1 up to 32. You can also set the strength, hardness, and noise of your sculpting. All of these features are described fully in the Terrain Editor documentation.
It’s possible to soften or sharpen the peaks and valleys you create, and even flatten it all out if you want to start over! Here’s what I got after only a few minutes of sculpting. You can see where I smoothed out one of the hills. You can also “paint” the land using one of the preset textures (stone, grass, soil, etc.). You cannot yet add your own textures, but that feature is promised for a future release.
Everything is not yet perfect. Using the Terrain Editor did crash the Sansar software for me three times in a row, and I did come across a screen display problem when in Paint mode. I reported these bugs to the Bug Reports section of the Sansar Community website. This sort of thing is to be expected when beta testing software. Overall, I am extremely pleased with the Terrain Editor! It is a powerful new tool for Sansar creators.