Mesh, huh - what's that ? (0. o)

[Coby Foden]

People who log in seldom, or have been long away, appear to have no information about SL's new stuff.
Few days ago I had this IM:

(Person's real user name changed here to Random Avatar)

Random Avatar: hey lady, whats up
Random Avatar: whats that big ring in your body

/me checks persons profile... /me guesses that this person has an old viewer

Coby Foden: Mesh cardigan what you cannot see because you are not using mesh capable viewer.
Coby Foden: Time to upgrade your viewer...
Random Avatar: how
Coby Foden: What viewer are you using now?
Random Avatar: 1.23.5
Coby Foden: Oh! That's very old one.
Random Avatar: ok...I will look in the internet for a new one
Coby Foden: I give you some links for new viewers what you could try.
Random Avatar: cool thanks

/me gives the person links to some viewers, the person goes to download, installs one, logs soon back in

Random Avatar: looks much nicer now :)
Coby Foden: Excellent! :-)

The best part was he had no problems at all in running mesh capable viewer.
He just was totally unaware what mesh is.

I wonder would it be possible for Linden Lab to "force feed" a message at login, to anybody using non mesh capable viewer?  Something like:

"To be able to see all cool features in world correctly, you might want to upgrade your viewer.  ;-)"

:matte-motes-big-grin:

[Drake1 Nightfire]

what rock were they living under to not know about updates to viewers? where did they dig up the download for that viewer, assuming they were a new av since anyone that has been around for any length of time would know about mesh..

[Coby Foden]

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Drake1 Nightfire wrote:

what rock were they living under to not know about updates to viewers? where did they dig up the download for that viewer, assuming they were a new av since anyone that has been around for any length of time would know about mesh..

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Hehehe... well that avatar account was actually over five years old.  Could be that he's been long away and thus had no knowledge at all what has been happening in SL lately.

Been indeed living under some rock ...  :matte-motes-little-laugh:

[Sephina Frostbite]

I had the same thing happen to me although the person wasn't nice about it. They started making fun of me and how I looked. I told them that its because of mesh and that they needed an update, There viewer and there attitude. About 20 min later I was sent an apology.

[Jennifer Boyle]

I think that LL's failure to communicate with it's customers is both exasperating and very misguided.  When they communicate about new features and bugs, usually either detail is lacking or the information is posted in some obscure place where average residents won't see it.  As a result, residents waste a lot of time and effort and experience a lot of frustration that could be avoided if LL just shared a little information.  Several times, I have spent hours trying to figure out why something had stopped working properly, thinking the problem was caused by something wrong with my viewer or computer environment, only to eventually find out that it was due to a known problem with SL. 

Think about it.  They broke invisiprims without telling us in a way that would reach most people, so many of us, when we first encountered the problem, thought there was something wrong with our setup or system, and spent a lot of time figuring it out.  Many residents still don't know about that.  Just last night, I encountered a very well-dressed woman, whose avatar was several years old, whose ugly, deformed feet were sticking through her shoes.  We discussed it in IM.  She doesn't run with lights and shadows on, so her feet looked fine to her, and she was unaware of the problem.  She said the shoes came with an alpha mask, but she never wore it because it made no difference in their appearance. She donned it and then, as expected, looked fine.  How many others are there like her?  How many avatars struggle with other known, but poorly-publicized problems, like the bug that causes avatars not to rez if they are wearing multiple tattoo layers.  Etc.

[Innula Zenovka]

The really bad problem with invisiprims is the number of default outfits that use them https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-29335 (unless it's been fixed recently -- I've not made an alt lately).

Now that the viewer will turn on deferred rendering for you automatically, assuming your graphics card can handle it, I'm wondering how many people create accounts for the first time, log in using one of these default outfits, take one look at their deformed feet, and give up.

[Jennifer Boyle]

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Innula Zenovka wrote:

The really bad problem with invisiprims is the number of default outfits that use them

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-29335

 (unless it's been fixed recently -- I've not made an alt lately).

Now that the viewer will turn on deferred rendering for you automatically, assuming your graphics card can handle it, I'm wondering how many people create accounts for the first time, log in using one of these default outfits, take one look at their deformed feet, and give up.

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That's really exasperating.  How hard would it be to add alpha masks to those outfits?

[Nalates Urriah]

Communication is a challenge in SL. 

The number of people using old non-mesh capable viewers is small now, 1 or 2%. 

Mesh was added and announced in August 2011. I suspect that most of those using old viewers know that. Theew are only a few stagglers that for one reason or another don't know about mesh. I don't think it is reasonable to bother all those that prefer or need old viewers with notices they need to update their viewer.

Nor do I think the Lab needs to spend time on such an issue when we have other more serious fixes and features that are needed.

As it is they asked and found out. So, users can handle this problem and leave the Lab to work on more important problems.

If you were being asked 50 times a day every day, it might be worth some effort.