The skies will return…

I miss windlight as well. I eagerly await its return.

I thought I would hate voice, especially with me being one of those girls who is not a girl in rl. However thanks to MorphVox, my voice can match my av. My rl voice would be very disturbing coming out of my cute little avatar. I just want voice to come out in more places. It is so much fun to hear everyone!

I'm sorry to go completely off-topic, but that tower in the main picture made me think of this thread: http://www.earthfiles.com/news.php?ID=1268&category=Environment

I was able to log in with the WindLight viewer yesterday. I hadn't even tried it since the 1.17 update as I just assumed it wouldn't work, but I noticed someone had posted an image on flickr saying they could still log in with the 1.16 FirstLook viewer.

Not sure if it causes any problems (I did buy a painting at "Mill Pond" and never received it, but I think that was an unrelated problem).

I was a bit distraught (!) at not being able to use WindLight any more so was very happy to see it working after a few days of using the regular viewer. Give it a try. It crashed several times which I don't normally experience, but again I think that may have been due to grid issues, not sure.

Cheers

Well, something I like to see implemented/changed one day is to have more input controls. In vehicle scripting, the input controls are used, forward, back, left, right, up, down, 'strafe' left and 'strafe' right. And of course mouseclicks.
While that may be sufficient for vehicles, there are lots of other potential uses, if you could use the whole keyboard. Think of a synthesizer where each key represents a pattern or chord for example, or think a multiple choice device, which will accept answers a-z by simple pressing them, rather than chatting them.

Hey, Torley

I was really glad to see Windlight show up, even though my old system isn't up to supporting it. I remember talking with you about getting better control of skies and environmental effects months ago, especially for islands.

You recall what else was on the list of things that have stagnated for too long? Hehe.

Mini-islands: Smaller sized private spaces with low prim and av counts, in a price range more affordable to the average resident. SL has developed for way too long as a corporate fuedalism. It sure would be nice to give a wider variety of people the control and privacy options that Estate Owners have.

Mega-sized sims: Andrew wasn't happy about this one, and explained why arbitrarily large dimensions messed with the physics model. Except his suggestion was this became a big problem on the 100-km scale! Surely 1-km-square sims are possible…

Concurrency-optimized spaces: any possibility of creating a stripped-down physics and rendering model for guest avatars that would allow hundreds or eventually thousands access to the same event? It would be interesting to play around with subtle "sharding" effects such as designating the stage and immediate zone around an av fully visible while fading the audience further away into gray outlines, for instance. Part of that would be an adjustment of chat and voice settings – stage amplified, but you could only "hear" people within a couple meters of your av's position.

I could go on, but I'm sure you already knew that.

-Ana

Torley yes it was still working last night for me (Monday morning SL time). I didn't bend or twist anything to make it work. I just hadn't 'uninstalled' the FirstLook build after the 1.17 update, and had been using the regular 1.17 viewer, and just tried starting up and logging in thru the 1.16 FirstLook viewer.. and voila it worked! It wasn't crashing for me like it was on the weekend, but then I only stayed in for an hour or so. (ps. the very kind artist at Mill Pond, Kristauf McDunnough, resent my painting & actually refunded me half the price for the trouble!)

I run on an Intel P4 with an nVidia 8600GTS card if that makes any difference? I was expecting messages like "you are using an old version, please update" or something like that, but no it just logs me in no problems. I'm at work now so can't check again for a few hours.

The pics are the first three (the "Farnsworth House" ones), taken on Sunday. hehe as I write this I'm realising I can't prove I took them on Sunday (not that you're asking me to!) but from what I've read I think that sim only opened late last week? Not quite sure tho.

Thanks Torley

Some other things I wanted to add:

Hierarchy in primsets. You now have one root prim and everything follows that. If an avatar for example sits on a child prim and you move the child prim, the avatar remains where it is relative to the root prim.

Texture offset in pixels. To keep textures down, I like to put several textures on one larger texture. Or I put numbers 0-9 on a texture for a counter. That often results in weird percentages, I once tried making a box with dimensions 4×3x1, but it was hard to texture, because the sides then were 1/8th of the full texture width and to position it correctly, I had to work in 1/16th measures. It would be nice if I could just say, the left-most pixel here is 0, 32 and the width is 32 pixels and use square pixels.

To be honest, these three things were how I expected them to work when I first came to SL and started some building and scripting.

Heyhey Tor, hope you don't mind if this became sort of an alternative feature discussion. I was never satisfied with Andrew's explanation. Perhaps it would have been better if he simply said "it's been tried on a larger cubical space and failed to meet performance standards". Has it been tried?

@Grizzy:

There's really that many options? I may have to check it out again. I shied off before because even the marketing sample voices were unconvincing. In fact MorphVox's samples seemed blatantly misleading – like on the "male-to-female" sample it sounded distinctly like they took a woman's natural voice and lowered it to sound male, rather than the other way around.

The trouble with all these products is they simply can't take a voice full of one gender's mannerisms and suddenly convert those to mannerisms of the opposite gender. Think about it – you probably know an older lady whose voice is at least as deep as most younger men, but no one mistakes her for male, do they? I think this simply won't work for most people unless they are already practiced in opposite gender mannerisms – varying vs. steadying tone, chest resonance vs. nose resonance, hissing vs. grunting, etc.

I will have to check it out again and see what of these they have accomplished some semblance of.

-Ana

Ananda,

I appreciate your comments. I'm one of the developers who works on MorphVOX and plays in Second Life. I'm a male in real life and I made the male-to-female samples for MorphVOX. The source voice is my own and the target voice is direct conversion of the source file without any touch-ups or makeovers. So the samples shouldn't be misleading

I agree that much of the quality you can get out of voice changing software depends on the speaker — source resonance, diction, accent, etc. So it isn't completely cut and dry to get someone to sound the opposite gender naturally. You need to work at it. The software only provides a mechanism for reducing the work it takes to change your pitch and timbre. And it does add some additional effects like Grizzy has mentioned.

We do quite a bit of customized voices adjustments for anyone who would like a unique voice for their character. Anyone who is interested in that can just contact voiceclinic[@]screamingbee.com for voice optimization.

We're also planning on creating custom voice packs specific for Second Life and I would invite any suggestions on what people might be interested in. So far we've talked to the Luskwood folks to get their help in designing voices to match the avatars they create.

Regards,

Gwygory

Lindens are sadists, right? Why else would we still see the WindLight startup screen on the Voice FirstLook? *sobs*

PS. Where can we admire some Torley stuff at SL4B?

On the subject of mega-sims, I'd love to see a long highway-type sim, say, 8 meters wide and 8192 meters long, that would create a strip of 32 regular sims long, and the total size is the same as a normal sim (because it's so narrow). You coulld use that to transport from one side of the grid to another with a higher speed vehicle, without worrying about sim crossings or no entry lines. Have two of those strips next to eachother (so you'd need the equivalent of 2 sims) to make separate lanes, each having only one travel direction.
Though of course vehicles aren't so widely used now, but that is also due to said problems you now encounter.

Well, like starcomber said, if you're having serious WindLight withdrawals, after much pain and sweat, I managed to get a working compiled version of SL for the Intel Macs:

WindLight First Look Viewer for 1.17.0.12 (Mac OS X Intel only)

However, it's painfully slow, ie. about a fifth of the performance of the regular viewer. Avatars also don't get their eyes rendered, who knows why, lol — and the "fullbright" setting makes things "overglow". Still, it works, and is as stable as the regular SL viewer hehe (noooo I didn't fix any bugs, but very likely added a few ones by mistake when trying SL to compile ).

It's good enough to take a quick picture of a scene in all WindLight glory but not much else. Also, you'll have to be quick, since very likely, with the two upgrades promised for the week starting on the 25th, this version will very likely not work any more, and I'll have to see if I can compile everything again… hopefully with more luck this time and hitting the right setting to have it run faster

One truly appreciates the developers at LL that can so-very-quickly launch a new version if something goes wrong, sometimes even in the middle of a grid shutdown (this has been quite rare recently, but it used to happen) — I took almost 20 hours to figure out how to compile it

*waves to Gwygory* Good luck on fine-tuning MorphVOX for use in SL, I'm really glad that Screaming Bee allows you to "be around" in SL and give so many helpful tips to the overall community and also take feedback on what they'd like to have as new voice packs. Oh, well, I guess you're also "addicted" by now — LOL And let me know when you've got a Mac version available that turns my hoarse, smoker's voice with a Kyrgystan accent (or so they tell me!) into something recognisable as English haha