As part of my private build of Firestorm, the Open Source third-party viewer for Second Life from Linden Lab, I have added new library dependencies for something I am working on (adding metadata to snapshots).
This blog post details how I added them, making use of CMake and modifying various files.
I present it in the hope that it may prove useful to others.
If you’re not familiar with MystiTool, it is a HUD that is a veritable Swiss Army knife of useful things. It dates back to the earlier days of Second Life, where many things we now take for granted were absent or severely basic. For example, you needed an object or HUD called a Flight Assist (or Flight Feather, or Flight Ring, or any number of other names) if you wanted to fly above 200 metres. Rather than take up valuable attach points, back in the days before we had multiple attach points, having that in the MystiTool rather than as a separate object was beneficial. Since then, the flight limit has been raised several times and then in 2012 was removed altogether, making that feature of the MystiTool redundant.
Similarly, as Viewers (both Third Party and Official) have added functionality previously offered by the MystiTool, so those too have become obsolete (or, at least, less useful). Examples include the Radar, scanning a sim for avatars, chat notifications (such as an avatar entering chat range), TP to camera, Favourites, and TP History. Some are only included in Third Party Viewers like Firestorm, but some have even made it into the Official Viewer.
The feature erosion is not too dissimilar to the history of Microsoft Windows; in the early days, various tools, utilities and applications filled in the gaps in functionality missing from Windows itself, and gradually Microsoft incorporated the ideas and made many redundant. A case in point was Icon Hear It which added sounds to events in Windows 3.11, and was rendered instantly obsolete by Windows 95 which had that built in. But I digress.
But that doesn’t mean that MystiTool is now obsolete, as there are plenty of features that are still useful. Furthermore, with v2.0 of MystiTool, many of these features are now implemented as plugins which means you can choose to uninstall them, which reduces your script count and memory usage by allowing you to prune them out. You can therefore trim the MystiTool right down to only those non-obsolete features that you actually use.
Personally, I regularly use the Elevator & Sky Platform Rezzer, the Pose Stand Rezzer (especially the more fully featured deluxe pose stand, although the basic one is also useful), Object Chat ID (useful for finding the owner of a chatty object), Facial Emoter (I use it for photography), Collision Notification, Avatar Information and Channel Listener (useful to find who is talking to scripted objects, but also for debugging your own).
As the feature set continues to shrink, the argument for having a MystiTool gets weaker. It is no longer the must-have tool that it once was, but for many ‘oldies’ like me (currently 6 years & 3 months, or 2300 days) it is something that has been part of our SL for so long that it is something to which we have become immensely attached (no pun intended) and will probably hold onto until completely redundant, if not beyond.
I Still Use My Mystitool by Cheyenne Palisades
Posted in January 2013. A similar article to this one, but slightly out of date now. More descriptive about some of the features than this article is.
Official MystiTool blog by Mystical Cookie
The official MystiTool blog
MystiTool on the SL Marketplace
A link to MystiTool on the Marketplace, which also summarises the full feature list.
Are you a MystiTool user? If so, please do comment below with what features you regularly use!
Slink Mesh Boots!!, originally uploaded by Nana Minuet.
I have to say I was getting very excited by Mesh, especially with the recent announcement that Phoenix is going to be supporting it (thanks to some dedicated work by Henri Beauchamp of the Cool Viewer).
These boots are a great case in point – imagine how wrong the knees would look in that pose if those were sculpt boots!
However, all is not as good as it seems; I’ve learned that the current implementation of Mesh is worse than useless, for clothes at least. It would seem that a mesh object attaches to your skeleton, not your “flesh”, and cannot be resized in-world. That means that if you are slim like the model in the above pics, those boots would look great. However, if you are any other size than her they won’t fit. Oh, sure, an alpha layer will mask out the bits of you that the boots cover but if you have bigger thighs than her you’re fresh out of luck.
One of the biggest benefits of Second Life is you can be who you want to be. You (or, rather, your avatar) can be exactly as you want it – it’s the overriding expression of your individuality and what makes Second Life so wonderful. But if Mesh clothing is going to force us all to resize our avatar to the clothing, rather than the clothing to the avatar, then this is a bad thing.
There is a JIRA running on this. It’s rather technical but the gist of it is “change Mesh to resize to your flesh not be fixed size and attached to your skeleton”.
See https://jira.secondlife.com/si/jira.issueviews:issue-html/SH-2374/SH-2374.html
I was talking to a friend in Second Life today who was really scratching her head over what viewer was what and what the hell was going on. So this is just a short post for her and anyone else who might benefit.
There are other Viewers out there too – Cool Viewer and Kirsten’s Viewer, for example. However I don’t have enough experience of them to comment.
Well, it seems Jessica Lyons doesn’t hang around and has assembled a team to take over where Emerald left off. And amongst that team is LordGregGreg.
According to her blog entry [here], Phoenix is starting out as a sanitised Emerald, like LordGregGreg’s Emergence Viewer, and will be developed from there.
In keeping with my recent post [here] on how an Open Source Project should be run, they’re running a publicly-viewable repository and full transparency.
This is very encouraging news indeed.
