I’ve mentioned that there is an update to the Taketori coming, and that it’s just waiting for confirmation from a few testers that I haven’t totally botched it up.  With that new update pending, and the thought that I would once again have to run all around the grid updating vendors (for maybe the thirtieth time in the last eighteen months), I decided it was high time to get networked vendors in place.

So, I went and deleted all of the in-world Taketori vendors, intending to replace them in short order with networked vendors.  Only, it didn’t turn out that way.  I ran out of steam (did I mention I’m sick?) and ended up just leaving the situation with no in-world Taketori vendors.

I still have a bit of testing on the network vendor scripts that I want to test before going live, and I want to make sure that I plan well enough to not code myself into a corner, because I’m always at the Second Life group limit maximum due to having vendors in various places and would like to be able to make a secure networked commission vendor that I can just give to store owners without having to "drop a group to join a group" to drop a vendor.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, I got side-tracked by a post by Abu Nasu on the Second Life forums (registration required) about how he’d built a custom rig for creating Second Life animations in 3ds Max.

One of the tools that I used when making the Taketori is XSI Mod Tool, a free version of the SoftImage XSI 3D modelling and animation program specifically targeted at independent and hobbyist-level game makers that I’d used to create some "proof-of-concept" games for the XBox 360 in my previous job.

One of the nice things about Mod Tool is that it has way better support for custom character rigs and better animation tools than either Poser or DAZ, and I had already created an adequate rig that I wanted to use for creating C:SI weapon animations, but had given up on before finishing the export plugin because of a lack of time and the fact that I already had tools for that job.

Abu’s success has got me fired up on that idea again, and despite my previous protestations that I hate doing animations and did not want to have to make any more in the immediate future, I’ve decided to revisit that project and see if I can actually get it done this time.  If I ever do manage to finish the project, it could (hopefully) mean that creating animations will be a little less painful in the future, and perhaps I’ll be less reluctant to work on them :) 

We will see what we see when we see it, I may not get any farther this time than I did last time, but it will be a fun thing to work on that I hope will help me with future C:SI weapons.

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