We shall rue the day 1.9.1 is released.

Behold, I wear floppy bits!

Now, that's just maybe a dozen or so bits on my avatar that's floppy. I wonder what lag will be like when someone gets the bright idea of making detailed hair with 180+ prims?

Flexiprims are fun. There's going to be lots of really neat things made with these. The same goes for the new HD lighting. You still can't do spotlights, but I can understand why as they are more computationally intensive. HW lighting is very fast on my system, but HW+Software+shadows brings it to a crawl, about the same speed as 1.9 is with local lighting turned on.

I also like that we can mix transparency+reflection now. Finally, plane cockpits that won't look like it was 3D rendering stuck in the late-90s. (LOOK! OPAQUE CHROME REFLECTIONS! OOOOH!)

As for the rest of it, haven't tested it yet. There's a few client-side issues so far, such as child prims disappearing when alt-zooming, that I can see.

A point to this post? No, other than to demonstrate my floppy prims. Hur hur.

Hmm, I wonder what I should do today in SL.... "making detailed hair with 180+ prims" - hey, that's an idea, wonder who suggested that.

The flexible prims are amusing.

There are more people in the preview grid than I have seen for a long time, playing with the flexiprims.

Yeah! These rawk!

First thing I did was plant a flag. Second thing I did was fly around with a floppy cape.

What's the deal with the aweful fps in preview though? Even without floppies around I was less than 1/4 what I normally get.

-Ghoti

I, for one, am looking forward to clubs filled with a sea of medusa hair, which I'm sure is only a matter of time even with the limited number of qualifying prims at the moment.

My guess would be the preview grid is all hand-me-down hardware.

That and debugging might be active on that server.

I fully agree that our avatars should be twelve-vertex slightly oblong badly tesselated eggs, and trees should simply be textures that say "TREE HERE". Land should be a flat patch that looks like the Game Grid from Tron.

That way, everyone with an ATI RAGE!!!!!! XL and those of us who made investments in Monster3D card can run SL under our GLIDE-to-GL wrapper.

Hardware lighting? And how! And it better be green. All the time.

Knowing you, I am damn glad I do not have the right codec on my laptop here at work.

Actually, I hope Vindi upgrades his medieval outfits (the ones I have for being in the wizard mood) to flexiprims so they don't look like I am wearing a cardboard cape mockup when I move.

when someone does make flexiprim hair, can that person tell me if it goes through the avatar?? like.. your fringe going into your forehair,

if that happens... no flexiprim hair for me....

Yes it does. All floopy prims are phantom.

Well I'm glad I didn't get xcite version 2 yet, because obviously version 3 is around the corner....

This preview also includes llHTTPRequest(). We will hardly rue that.

Oooh I just realized that I can use the floppy prims to make myself a more realistic cat-tail.

Boobies?

That occurred to me.

"I'm sorry, can you scale down your tits? You're lagging me".

Still, i can picture women intentionally flatchesting their avatars to wear xcite-style breasts that have bounce to them. Just no Bloodrayne-1 style flopping or sex would put someone's eye out.

Lights and flopping prims are intresting but llHTTPRequest() is going to be the thing that has the biggest long term impact. It's really big.

I hope it supports PHP and Flash.

Would be so nice to stream Newgrounds cartoons.

You can already do this... Just point your media url to a flash movie, and when the movie preloader is done, just hit stop then play on your little media control and it should play.

That and how would you cover such attachments with clothing? Unless everyone wanted to go around dressed like the Minoans.

I saw a few people running around with capes. So, yeah, that will be pretty easy to do.

I personally noticed little difference when the area had seven people playing with flexiprims, and an empty area with nobody around. In physics sim terms, flexiprims behave like a fairly basic cloth simulation. That's probably less CPU-intensive than the realtime tesselator that adjusts prims for detail. The only downside is that some prims are now going to be converted into more polys, and it seems the "softness" setting adjusts the amount of subdivisions that occur on a flexiprim. (I'm sure most people will crank it to max.)

In other words, all the pieces were in there for something like flexiprims... So it's a logical extension of the cloth simulation that occurs on our avatar's clothes. (Drag and flapping in the wind, if you have the vertex shader enabled.)

As for llHTTPRequest(), I haven't played with that yet. This should be handy for those of us looking to do more robust back-end systems that link in-Sl objects to external databases/control systems. It certainly beats email and the limited XML-RPC.

I for one can't wait for my penis skirt.

I like Salazar Jack's "suggestion" of calling them floopy prims. Much better name than flexible or floppy. Spread it around.

Flexiprims were fun, but I don't think I'd make a wig entirely made up of these prims. For starters, it's only cubes, prisms, and cylinders that are flexible. And even if they are curved up or twisted, once flexibility is activated, that predefined shape is tossed out.

But these will make beautiful skirts and sleeves.

The new lighting features are a trip. I already plan to use them for my home.

For prim torus torture, I think the Hole Size function is broken. I crashed before I could bug report it.

And I noticed in the Edit tool, we can select what would happen if someone left-clicked on a prim. That's cool for opening boxes, they even will put all the contents in inventory in a folder (no scriptwork required). The icons they're using are kinda gaudy though.

I haven't been as exicted by an update in.... a long time.

This is fantastic stuff.

There's a few bugs in there, that I hope they'll fix (the dreaded building-menu-losing-focus bug is annoying), but the new features ROCK MY FACE.

BTW, a Spotlight is very possible; I made one, with a bit of toying around. hint: it's a cross between fullbright prims, some textures, and a HW light.

Flags look weird, but they amuse me.

Someone handed me a cape. EXTREMELY well done.

People were walking around with plates of jello. PLATES OF JELLO!

Making bushy tails will be a cinch (rigid prim with dozens of floppy bits attached... independent swishing)

Ah, it's great to be a builder in SL again.

Disable Vertex Shaders. I was running at 2 FPS when I first got in. Figured it was the new lighting model, nope.. gained nothing. So I disabled Vertex Shaders and bam, jumped up to 12FPS. Turned HW lighting and it dropped to 9. Did a little tuning to my videocard driver profiles for Preview and 9 shot to 15. Keep in mind this was an open area. Once I got near a heavily built area, not heavily populated, my FPS dropped to 5.

My conclusion is that the new culling system somehow isn't doing its job right. As for vertex shaders, seeing how Avitar Vertex Program (basicly deals with vertex shading on the avitar) option is missing I'm assuming thats what the Vertex Shader option is and they borked it. If not then its borked before even going into preview because it seemed like everyone in the grid was suffering from it being on.

BTW, am I the only one who's white floating text on their hud attachments turned black?

Hell, I'm already ruing 1.9.1. I can't use Ripple Water anymore!

Okay, I can't log on, either, but Ripple Water's all grayed out. Extremely disappointing.