Tuesday, July 26, 2011

More on Avination

My initial enthusiam for the $40 price for a sim is a bit tempered by a couple of limitations in Avination. The first is minor-namely it doesn't seem to support SL's media on a prim idea. In SL I am used to being able to have my blogs and my Flickr site open on prims so that I can at least see what's going on. The second is a bit more surprising given the OpenSim background of the owner, namely that Avination does not support OpenSim specific functions some of which are really cool especially the texturing functions.

On the plus side my inquiry about OS functions was quickly answered by their support staff. I also like that you can import prims that you own from SL using the Avination viewer, including scupted prims as my picture shows. Just be aware that it doesn't seem possible to import the scripts in the object- you have to do that separately or use Stored Inventory as explained here.

https://www.avination.com/support/faq/creation-inventory.html

Of course Second Life is not sitting still what with pending rolling out of mesh and if you haven't noticed realistic shadow rendering like that in Blue Mars. Since Avination is billing itself as content creator friendly, I wonder how the introduction of mesh in SL will affect Avination.

Who knows, I may ultimately find it cheaper to set up my own Open Sim server, and link it to OSGrid. Not that I have ever done anything like that mind you. Hmm as cheap as computers are today...might be worth it to take that plunge.

1 comment:

Stephen Gasior said...

did you ever try hosting your own region? I've done it on an iMac with Snow Leopard to the ScienceSim. It's relatively easy. Would you be a guinea pig for my tutorial?