Over the last few weeks I have had a lot of customers asking
me if I will be doing bento items. For those of you who don’t know what bento
is, or you read the announcement about it in December 2015 and forgot, Bento is
a new skeleton of sorts offering a whole new series of bones to play with
including face, tail, wings, hands and more. This obviously means creators like
myself can now do far more with mesh work.
Since Bento was announced, I have had a long list of items
planned. Fusion Ultima will be getting Bento ready hands, the Headworx project
from back in 2014 is being brought back and will use Bento, and the demon
studio will have Bento Tails and Wings. I may even do some more exotic items
too.
The problem surrounding Bento is that until a few weeks ago,
Bento was unfinished. I have been very cagey about this as Bento is complex,
and the last thing I wanted to do was create a whole series of items pre
launch, only to find LL's changed the skeleton or specs. As a result, while I
have many items that are ready to go to bento, I have never actually done
anything with them or really explored it in detail, waiting for it to arrive.
I had also assumed from past experience over fitted mesh
that the 3rd party viewers would take weeks if not months to integrate the
Bento source code in to the viewer. This would afford me time to get down to
creating Bento items, however much to my surprise they seem to have done the
job in a matter of days.
Anyhow, I will be playing catch up over Christmas and I will
have items ready for release in January 2017.
Soapbox time.
I will not rant too much about this, but I am quite
staggered by the fact Bento actually took a year. When it was announced in
December 2015, I got really excited by this prospect. Provisionally I estimated
that at the earliest, Bento would arrive in late Feb, latest May. In March I
got the skeleton for Bento and did some provisional testing with it. By May, I
was sat there scratching my head wondering what on earth they were playing at
as they seemed to be still developing it. By the time August came around, I had
lost all enthusiasm for Bento and given up on it ever arriving. When it finally
arrived much to everyones surprise this month, I had all but forgotten about
Bento. What is perhaps the biggest annoyance though is running through the
Bento rigging and specs, I find that the Bento skeletons from March this year I
got, are what has been released.
So what on earth have Linden Lab being doing? When they
announced this last year I thought they had given creators an early Christmas present.
Turns out I was right, but it was the wrong Christmas.
This next one, I am biting my tongue over. Sansar news.
Some years back I tried to calm the rumours down over Second
Life 2 as it was dubbed by fear mongering users. Over the last year more
details of Sansar as it is actually know have been learnt and I all can say is,
what I said all that time back was accurate.
Sansar is not Second Life 2, it will not replace Second Life
and it was never designed to do that.
Why? Here is some info. Sansar is not a grid as far as I can
see. It is software designed to make grids, small ones it seems which is going
to be licenced by LL's to outside companies. The reason for this is as follows.
At the time of writing there is no market place for Sansar planned, there is no
universal asset system each grid having its own inventory than cannot be
transferred, there is no universal currency (no L$) as each mini grid is
required to organise their own systems most likely paypal. In addition although
subject to new info coming in, there seems to be no virtual world planned on
the scale of Second Life by LL's outside of perhaps a sales demonstration grid
for the software.
Perhaps more important is some of the technical details. The
one that hits me hard is the viewer has no editing or building tools built in.
This is one of the biggest selling points of Second Life. Sim owners or
creators are required to use a special editing viewer. You can't rez things out
on a sim. If you make changes, the whole sim has to be reuploaded from the
editing viewer. That matched to the professional designer level technical
knowledge means Sansar is not a product of the people. Its a product of the few
with the right skills and it very inflexible.
From everything I have read over the last year about Sansar,
it has all confirmed what I originally said. For me, I will be dropping this,
unless something else comes out of the woodwork which is doubtful. Last word.
Sansar is not Second Life 2, it is not going to replace
Second Life and Second Life will not be closing, merging or being absorbed.
Your inventories, investments etc are safe based on what I have read over the
details of Sansar.
Hemi
