You know, about a year ago I was fervently advocating Uru within Second Life, trying to get people interested enough to convert in some way and prove there are alternatives.
Recently, I’m beginning to re-think that strategy, and have held my tongue there (though continue to outwardly show that I’m clearly an Uru person).
From the rampant arguments among its residents and the ways that Linden Labs are not acting proactively enough, on what appears to be a sinking grid, this is *not* the masses that I want over in the Cavern.
The folks I know who would appreciate the wonder of that world are mostly people I’ve met there the past couple years, and have supported over that time. Now I want to help them emmigrate elsewhere – perhaps be able to get their creations integrated into an Age someplace within Uru Live.
Enter the libsecondlife open source project. They’re working on decoding the client/server protocol used by the system (with the support of the Linden Lab staff). As of yesterday I’ve been added to the project team; My contribution will likely be in the form of documentation more than coding – I understand a lot of the basics of what happens but don’t have the knowledge or time to work on the details therein.
One of its sub-projects is the ability to accurately export build data for use elsewhere (in particular they are exporting to an XML format that’s readable by a *Blender* offline build plugin). You can take the next logical step, and use the data from that Blender import to create optimized meshes for use within the PyPRP plugin used for Uru Age Building.
There are several challenges to this; A non-obvious one is a matter of scale since LL uses metric while Uru uses the English scales. The really big one is the fact that object packets are not yet fully understood, so an accurate export is not yet possible.
This is something I care enough about that I’m willing to sacrifice the time I’d use working on Uru modding (like the Pahts Shell) to assist in the project. Because one of my concerns is that I won’t be able to see my dreams of true emmigration be possible before the Second Life Grid collapses under its own weight.
Anyway, onward bound…
–TSK