After a good deal of time in development and several weeks of rigorous testing, we’re pleased to announce the release of Artemis 1.1 this update converts the ship’s interior to mesh as well as making a whole array of improvements to existing features and the overall experience.
From today our products will be available both in-world and via the Second Life Marketplace™
This re-listing also brings about the return of Ifrit Skytower’s Sculpt Packs now updated with new textures, ambient occlusion maps and handy reference trays for discerning map names.
I’m in the process of redoing Poseidon as a mesh build.
Why? Long story short, LL are changing the physics handling, and I didn’t like the increase in land impact this would cause.
Right now I’ve got most of the interior mesh stuff done, and I’ve finished texturing much of the new hull. I’m getting some pretty serious reduction in land impact – but I’m going to keep the new land impact a secret until I’ve got it finalized.
Suffice it to say, I think you’ll be both impressed and pleasantly surprised.
For the specifics, keep reading…
Since Panopticon 2 has been a bit outdated for a while now, and we already had some work done on Panopticon 3, we decided to bump Panopticon 3 into the Poseidon 1.0 release! Do you know what this means?
No more probes!
As some of you may remember, when asked about the portability of Artemis’ turrets we’ve mentioned they’re rather complex to migrate. This was primarily due to the calculations required to generate the firing arcs, we now however have a tool we can use to generate said arcs more easily and have begun porting the turret scripts onto other ships in waiting. This should help speed several ships along towards release rather soon!
Ifrit Skytower’s starship component sculpts are used far and wide in Second Life sci-fi builds. While the parts demonstrate the potential of the humble sculpty, he always felt the textures included in the packs to be inconsistent, for example: some of the packs have included Ambient Occlusion (AO) maps, some have textures baked onto said AO maps and others don’t have any real texture at all.
In light of this, he’s decided to rebake AO maps for all the sculpt packs including ones that didn’t originally have any as well as baking a new standard texture set for them. This should bring all the packs up to a consistent quality level worthy of modern builds.
Here’s some pictures of the mesh for the new elevator. You’ll notice there aren’t any poseballs – that’s because the new elevator requires no sitting! Still needs the console. The shell itself is only one land impact. I’m expecting to go from a 10 land impact elevator to a 5 impact one, depending on how SL’s physics engine feels like behaving.
The HUD weapons designator has also been updated to use new technology! You can now use it in mouselook (as before) to target the location or avatar you’re looking at, or type a command from 3rd-person view to target whatever your camera’s looking at!
What’s left?
Work continues on the Battlecarrier Poseidon 1.0 upgrade, with more work on the flight script.
For non-modders: The biggest difference you’ll notice is that you don’t have to sit on the elevator to ride it anymore! We’re using some new SL functionality so that it pushes you as if it were a physical object.
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