xmir

The grid saw a number of major and minor improvements over the month of May. One milestone was completion of the road from andwest to Murat River, extending the passable roads to closer to 4 km. The stretch has been named the Telegraph Road, and an old style telegraph line has been built along the road from the reservoir in Hengill to the radio Station in Badr Jabaal. 

In Skomrak the road cross the bridge over a creek from the lake. The creek has some smaller waterfalls before it empties into the sea at Ornos. A mesh water animation tile was created for the creek to look natural as it runs between the waterfalls. 

The Telegraph road has been given route number 2, and the road from Herad to Norderhov has been given route number 1. Parts of route 1 has been called “Behnveien”. Roads will be marked with name signs. 

Festplassen - outdoor dancing

An outdoor dancing platform has been built in Lake Atlas in the hillside over the Motel. The view extend from andwest Bay all the way to the snow covered mountains of the Seven Sisters.

The dancing platform can be set up with a general purpose dance machine or a line dance machine, and should be able to have some 30 dancers on the floor at the same time. Some details are to be sorted out before the midsummer party that is planned. 

Access to Festplassen is via route 2 up from the Texaco station to the reservoir, and then take the road to the right. It can of course be found in search for direct teleport. 

Rigging worn meshes

A major breakthrough was made in rigging worn meshes as shoes. The current avatar is significantly missing in geometry in the lower part of the foot, and this makes rigging a low shoe excessively difficult as they will look more like scuba gear than shoes if they are to follow the geometry. For shoes worn as old style prim attachments this is relatively easy to work around, but for a fitted mesh shoe it has been a major challenge. 

By long time experimentation a method of weight mapping the mesh to scale reasonably well with the avatar geometry in combination with alpha masking was developed, so finally two mesh shoes that were created in 2011 and 2012 could be properly rigged and brought to market. For more on this, a new section of the XMIR site will be opened over the next month.