2007 September archive at Daikon Forge

Archive for September, 2007 Page 2 of 7

Second Life + Vista = Suckage

Sep
26
2007 in tournaments, sculpties, Animating, Textures, C:SI, SL Celebrities and WTF.

Well, I tried to get in-world today so that I could watch the Shadow Samurai vs. Yakuza tournament, but I STILL can’t stay in-world for even 5 solid minutes. I crashed three times while hanging out in Samurai Edo and trying to find out from Doll Kabuki or someone else there where the tourney location was.

I never found out, as after the third crash I gave up in disgust.

I’ve tried the official viewer, the "experimental" viewer, the Nicholaz + official viewer combo, the Nicholaz plus "experimental viewer" combo, nothing worked. Even when I am in-world, everything flashes randomly and it drives me freaking nuts, since I’m highly sensitive to flashing (It’s a migraine trigger for me). I was really hoping the Nicholaz viewer could redeem my Vista experience (he’s been working on detecting "redmap situations", and his viewer is generally much more stable), but alas: not in this case.

I give up. I’ll either wait until I can get my Windows XP running well again, or set up a dual-boot with Ubuntu (like Colin did), or Linden Lab fixes this stupid crap. There is absolutely nothing about Second Life that’s compelling enough to make me put up with this crap, and I’d so much rather enjoy my real life than torture myself with that kind of experience.

And speaking of enjoying my real life, I’ve got a new weapon under development, and I’m using my "can’t get into Second Life" time to create some new animations and do some texturing work, as well as play around with sculpties to see if I can make anything that’s suitable for a weapon

So far, I’ve yet to find anything that I can do with sculpties weapon-wise that works well enough, since apparently sculpted prims are far more suited to making cool Ice Caves than weapons. But I’m stubborn, and have some time, so I’ll keep at it, haha.

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Unofficial Tournament Updates

Sep
22
2007 in Second Life.

Closed

I did make it to the PodCast Mafia Katana Tournament today, but it was mostly a very frustrating experience for me since I wasn’t participating, didn’t know anyone there, and crashed no less than 6 times during the one-hour tournament. Nevertheless it was good to see people "getting into it" and shouting encouragement to their friends :)

Got yet another ShadowSamurai vs. Yakuza update:

Hello Samurais,

Tourny has been cancelled today due to miscommunication with Yak and is rescheduled on Wednesday 26th 7:00pm s/l time, next week.

One for All, All for One

I’m thinking at this point that there’s not much point in following the unofficial tournaments here on the blog. I haven’t got many readers in the first place, and there’s only a few clans that I still get group notices from now (stupid SL group limit makes me angry), so even if I continue to follow clan tournaments would be heavily biased towards clans that I’m still a peripheral member of, and that number shrinks every time I have to join a new group in order to open another store.

I know that Ayame Musashi is currently reworking the official C:SI website, and from what I understand from Esprite there will be an event calendar and better clan support soon. That’s really the correct place for this kind of info anyways, I was just attempting to provide a "stop-gap" measure for the short term.

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Update: Shadow Samurai vs. Yakuza Tourney

Sep
22
2007 in Second Life.

2 Comments

Just got this in my email, and wanted to post it for those who are following along:

Group Notice From: Kenneth Susenko
Hello Samurai,
Tourny is tomorrow 2:00pm s/l time with Yak clan. plz come and meet at dojo. Have a good fight!
One for All, All for One

Also, a reminder about Stuart Warf’s Katana Tournament, which is being held today at 5:00PM SLT on the Nowhereville sim.

I’m going to do my best to show up for both, though I’m not completely confident that I’ll be able to stay online long enough to see an entire tournament. For whatever reason, since last Wednesday’s grid maintenance and subsequent mandatory viewer upgrade, I’ve only managed to remain online more than five minutes once.

Fortunately, that one time was on Samurai Edo, where I got to see the progress that Esprite and Archanox are making on the sim rebuild. It looks pretty nice so far, and Esprite mentioned to me several of the things they are taking into consideration in the build to reduce lag (to the extent that SL allows you to do so) as well as create appealing community spaces.

Hopefully we’ll be able to schedule a full-on official tournament when the rebuild is complete

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My first experiences with ZBrush3

Sep
17
2007 in WTF.

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After months of sitting on the fence wondering if it would be worth the considerable price tag for someone like me with a small budget, I decided yesterday morning to bite the bullet and purchase ZBrush3.

I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I was as I filled out that form, paid my $610USD, and anxiously awaited for the download to complete. Man! I can’t tell you how excited I am that someday I may even be able to get it to start up!

Yeah, that last sentence was sarcastic. I’m actually in a blind rage right now, because ZBrush crashed when doing the online activation thing that software makers seem to be so very fond of these days, and almost universally do very poorly. Right when it went to activate, it crashed with some message about tablet-something-or-other. Well hell. I have a Wacom installed, but it wasn’t attached, and I can’t imagine that would cause things to blow up. Would it?

I tried restarting ZBrush several times, and each time it would just crash instantly to desktop after the splash screen was shown. Naturally enough, I decided that this was a good time to reboot and re-install the app. Now, however, I just get a message saying that something was wrong with my license, and asking if I would like to recover. Damned right I would! Who wouldn’t want to actually use the product they spent so much money on? So it tells me to call customer support and give them this code…. Okay, well…. They aren’t open on Sunday, better wait until Monday.

That’s frustrating enough, but then Monday finally arrived and I’m getting all excited again thinking that customer support can help me out, right? Wrong. The guy apparently has "seen this before" and throws up his hands in defeat, asking me to send an email to the support team (which I did yesterday for f***’s sake) and they will get back to me in 24-48 hours.

Um… What? I have to wait yet another twenty four to forty eight hours for them to "most likely" get back to me? What the hell kind of customer support is that?

So far I’m completely unimpressed, Pixelogic. You fail for customer support