Hello MetaHarper Show Tools users! If you have been following our releases you may have noticed much polishing and maintenance over the last year. The performing arts in Second Life are growing and there has never been so many live choreographed performances as there are today. I am happy to see that this art form continues to flourish, and I hope to contribute to this trend by developing even bigger and more ambitious show creation equipment.
I’m happy to announce the next round of new features for MetaHarper Show Tools and ChoreoHUD Director for 2021! The following features are in a working/testable state and I’m actively looking for design partners to try them out in full live shows:
- Very Long Path (VLP) movers. These movers can hold hundreds of waypoints in memory, so choreographers can keep them active in a performance for an hour or even longer without having to stop or takes breaks.
- Movers can now be shared to multiple performance engines. This allows different choreographers to hand off control of the same mover to each other, or the same choreographer to create animation sequences of an hour or longer.
- When designing movement paths, the movers have new features to help smooth out travel speeds between waypoints.
- Movers, Performance Engines, and Camera HUDs are now ‘Experience Aware’! They can be configured so that users will not be bothered my pop-up permission requests when sitting on movers or clicking for dance invites. Additionally, the scripted camera design tool will no longer bother the user with popup camera permissions requests.
If you are interested in using one or more of the above features in your up coming live performances and have the time to allow for learning some new tricks and providing feedback, I’d love to hear from you!
I have some other projects current in active development but they are not ready for testing. These include:
- Adding ‘macro’ or ‘hot button’ capabilities to ChoreoHUD
- Adding the capability for ChoreoHUD to show organized subsets of animations
- Adding the ability to pull a full sim of audience members into choreography, using mover/animations
Is there something that you don’t see on this list? Please let me know. I hope to see you all on stage!
-Arrehn