One of Karl Stiefvater’s more popular tools is his prim alignment tool. This tool has only ever appeared in third-party viewers to-date, as Linden Lab’s policy is only to accept code made under one of its contribution agreements, regardless of the license under which the code is available.
By way of saying thanks for a recent donation, Stiefvater has submitted the code for the alignment tool under one of those agreements. That’s no guarantee that this popular tool will necessarily see the light of day in an official Second Life viewer, as that is still up to Linden Lab, but the ball is now in its court.
Tags: Karl Stiefvater / Qarl Linden / Qarl Fizz, Linden Lab / Linden Research Inc, Second Life, Virtual Environments and Virtual Worlds
This entry was posted
on Friday, 6th January, 2012.
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Possibly related posts
Qarl turns back on Lab rejection, “the code is open”, Linden Lab rejects Qarl’s prim-alignment tool, Fredrik Linden announces departure from Linden Lab, Qarl’s open letter to Linden Lab, Qarl Linden laid off
Commenters are to be civil, courteous and respectful to others, insofar as it is possible to do so. Beyond that, you're not required to agree with the opinions expressed by me or by others.
Think for yourselves! First time commenters will wind-up in the moderation queue and your comment won't appear right away. Ditto for anything that gets flagged by the anti-spam rules.
Might as well just throw it into a black hole…:)
Very awesome! Hopefully it’ll get pulled in soon.
On another note for the mesh deformer project, I see via the JIRA Oz has pulled Qarl’s alpha release patch into one of his own Snowstorm branches, and there’s an automated viewer build for it: http://automated-builds-secondlife-com.s3.amazonaws.com/hg/repo/oz_project-2/rev/247240/index.html
And the installer is labelled “SecondLifeProjectViewer-Deformer”, so while a new Project Viewer type isn’t listed yet on the main site/wiki, it seems the Mesh Deformer feature will be getting the Project Viewer treatment.
Really glad to see Oz ontop of that. It’ll be nice to see the prim alignment tool in soon too.
“Popular” for whom? A handful of people who actually think that they will make some money by it, a handful of bloggers and a handful of coders. While the really popular diseases of SL remain the most poular diseases. 3D object imports and everything related are an overhyped waste of LL time and LL investment so far and neither fix anything nor will boost anything. This patch will not change that at all.
@Vivienne
The “popular” prim alignment tool is unrelated to mesh. Do follow Tat’s links or watch the video demo of it directly if you’ve never seen it before: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UCeU8ItZGA
It makes it easier to create with plain prims available to everyone first and foremost.
Oh, i misread this. Yes, the prim alignement tool is an improvement in certain situations. But nothing beats aligning by using the grid. Anyway, In-World tool improvements and native formats are what Second Life needs, not more imports.
Hopefully the lab will take it as presented, it will be one less thing for TPV’s to have to merge manually.
I am not optimistic about how the Lab will handle this.
Cast your minds back, O best beloved, at the initial release of the Viewer 2 beta. It was, as one would expect of beta code, no exemplar of perfection. There were obvious defects. Some of these faults were picked out by the beta users, sometimes with lamentable lack of brevity. So were so obvious that it was inconceivable that they would carried on to the formal release.
I was one of those who explained why the colour scheme chosen, with none of the alternatives available to Viewer 1 users, was defective. Yes, it was similar to the Viewer 1 default, but one could not consider that a recommendation. Perhaps the beta code was incomplete.
The problem was simple enough, a colour scheme which could be described as shit brown on brown shit. It was low contrast–if you were an old time photographer you might have said that there was no more than a couple of stops difference between text and background.
And there was no choice.
Maybe it’s my eyes, which might be taken to mean I can be considered disabled, but if so, no provision was made for disability. Nobody bothered to look at the default choices for the operating systems on various computers, which use both colour and brightness to provide contrast. It was almost as if none of the Lindens were using the Viewer.
Nothing changed with the formal release, and the alternative colour schemes of Viewer 1 were never implemented. Over time, various third party alternatives were provided, by hacking XML files provided with the Viewer, but ewvery Viewer upgrade needed a new set of files.
If User Retention is an issue, it seems counter intuitive to force a difficult-to-read colour scheme on the users.
Viewer 2 with Mesh begat Viewer 3
The colour scheme did not change.
It is my belief that, since the Lindens apparently cannot even see the problem–I wonder what sort of computer displays they use, and a braille interface comes to mind–and an available solution has never been taken up, that the chances of any other Viewer improvement being adopted are slim.
“Dans ce pay-ci, il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un admiral pour encourager les autres”
i don’t use the alignment tool but it is very handy. my work flow (ie, habits) have me using the numbers panel to type in coordinates. it would probably be faster for me to use the alignment feature, but i’ve been two finger typing for 15 years so . . . .
nice possible addition to the SL viewer if it gets implemented =)
@Wolf – Linden Lab has a lot of programmers, and very few or no artists involved with development. This explains things like poor website design. The light green on white color scheme uses two colors the eye is sensitive to, so little contrast. The eye and brain detects edges by contrast, so reading text requires contrast. Programmers by and large simply don’t understand this stuff not because they are stupid, but because they never took an art or graphics class.
Personally, I think if you are designing software for a 3D graphical world, some art/graphics classes should be a *job requirement*. Then they would learn things like contrast, how the human eye moves over a scene, and camera placement, and how they matter.
I think my chief point is that nobody at Linden Lab seems to notice there’s a problem. Fixing it doesn’t really depend on graphics or art training, just go and look at a few OS default schemes and you’ll see what works better.
Maybe they’re not human?
will LL really want to refuse Qarls alignment-code-gift? http://bit.ly/wPg86O
[...] didn’t cover the contribution at the time, as Tateru had it very well covered. However to recap: Karl, formerly Qarl Linden, now Qarl Fizz, submitted the code to LL by way of a [...]