Massively^™

"Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenjik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead" -- Robert Sheckley

Trinity Coulter (formerly) the Second Life fifth anniversary (SL5/SL5A/SL5B, pick one) organizing committee's main organizer has left (or been kicked out of) her role, only a scant week or so after replacing SignpostMarv Martin in that capacity. Group logs indicate she was ejected from the group by Dusty Linden. Coulter said that 'it was determined' that it would be in the best interest of SL5 for Coulter to 'step aside', when asked.

According to SL5's Art director, Shosana Epsilon, Linden Lab's new position is a blanket ban where a child and an adult are pictured together in the same image, nor images of children near beds. So, no images of family outings, or implications that children sleep -- the image above would be right out, we presume, even though neither figure is a child avatar. Linden Lab staff previously stated that the Lab was afraid of legal restrictions that could partially or wholly shut down the Second Life service.

Jacek Antonelli, whom you already likely know as the creator of the Blender BVH animation exporter for Second Life, has released an excellent tutorial on getting to grips with Blender and the exporter, so that you can get into this excellent free tool for creating animations.

Her tutorial is simple, straightforward, witty and well-illustrated. If you create Second Life animations, but don't use Blender -- or you want to get into creating animations for Linden Lab's virtual world, you owe it to yourself to take a look at this.

Jacek Antonelli has released a new version of her Blender animation exporter that allows use of Blender's sophisticated (and free) animation suite to create animations for Second Life.

This release focuses primarily on the user-interface, improving the layout to make things a whole lot easier for those who are not already Jedi-masters of the Blender package; and a mighty good change it is, too, as you can see above.

One of the more sophisticated animation tools out there is Blender, a cross-platform, free suite of 3D creation tools. Blender allows a lot of animation tricks that are normally only found in packages costing hundreds or thousands of dollars.

The eclectic, artistic, and highly-animated Jacek Antonelli has released a script, scene and animation skeleton that allows users to create and export high-quality animations from Blender into the BVH format used by Second Life.

Over the course of the weekend, two patches have appeared to allow the creation of megaprims in 1.19 series Second Life viewers (Able Whitman), and 1.20 series viewers (Jacek Antonelli). This all predicates on Linden Lab continuing support for the creation of megaprims.

Nicholaz Beresford apparently has been working on another edition of both his Bleeding Edge and Eye-Candy releases. As a part of the patch-set, an option to create megaprims has been included, as well as increased-height building. Bleeding Edge has reached revision W, while Eye-Candy is at revision F.

At one of Linden Lab's recent Second Life server updates, it appears that they have disabled (or expanded) the constraints on prim sizes. As a part of the Havok-4 project, there was considerable discussion about bringing large prims back into the picture again, so we think this is an intentional change, rather than an accidental one.

Whether or not Second Life users were supposed to find out about this or not at this stage, they certainly have. Simple packet-injection gimmicks have spawned whole new packages of the so-called megaprims in the last 36 hours, many of which are freely available. Indeed, we've been sent lots of them.

As far as this blogger knows, the only time you could previously ride in a bubble was with the Starax wand, at a hefty price of 16,000L. Now that the wands have been off the market for over a year, Jacek Antonelli has made considerable improvements on bubbles. Not only are these bad boys pilotable, but they also have a built-in group chat system!

Our very own Tateru Nino suggested this Second Life machinima by the unstoppable Codebastard Redgrave. Codie was asked to film the Bubble Ride Party at Cuddlefish Junction on March 15th. Blending different Windlight settings, she composed their adventure as if it were in a surreal version of reality.

[Thanks, Tateru!]

If you have machinima or movie suggestions from any MMO, please send them to machinima AT massively DOT com, along with any information you might have about them.

In response to the security issue with the German language viewer, Linden Lab yanked both Second Life viewers today (although they didn't actually say why - Jacek Antonelli has her own take on how she feels the situation should have been handled).

Both Second Life viewers are now available for download and login again with fresh updates - updates you'd be well-advised to obtain, if you use the German language version.