Melissa Yeuxdoux

According to The Making of Second Llife: Notes from the New World, the slider limits were set up to avoid things like a pointless height arms race. Remember the Monty Python sketch with the TV MC whose height fetish escalates into "Flaming Star--the story of one man's search for vengeance in the raw and violent world of international archeology"? ("Eleven foot six?! Damn you!") In the case of breast size, SL comes nowhere near accomodating RL variation (and for that matter, enforces a symmetry that doesn't exist in RL), much less people's fantasies. Arm length constraints prevent proportionality for taller avatars (hence the well-known "T. rex avatar" syndrome). Worse still, the imposed limits cause interactions between sliders that make adjustment difficult, and force hacks that shouldn't be necessary. You want really long legs? You'll have to settle for a short torso and a short neck, thanks to the height constraint. Do you have proportions you like that you want to keep at different heights, say if sometimes you want to enjoy sims where they strive for consistent use of size, like 1920s Berlin? Good luck. If there were a simple scaling slider for the avatar it would be easy, but there isn't (despite its being proposed). There are lower bounds as well as upper bounds; if you want to be Mlle. Polaire in one of the Paris sims, it will take a hack to get her waistline. If you want to be a Tinker Bell style fairy, you can--thanks to people who had to do a lot of work to overcome the limits the sliders impose.

Gomen nasai, Watanabe-san. It was early, and I was in a hurry to get ready for RL work. Thank you very much for tracking the link down and posting it!

The post includes a slide show that I suspect accompanied the presentation at the Game Developer Conference. Do I have a realistic hope that SL can benefit from what they describe?

LL gets to decide what's "shared experience" at their whim. You're right; two avatars standing side by side can have widely differing graphics settings, draw distance, Windlight settings, and perceived position of the sun/moon, but that is deemed not to be a "shared experience" issue, while the mesh deformer is. At least with some third-party viewers I can choose not to render selected objects, so I can see or photograph the Eiffel Tower without all the stores cluttering its base while someone standing next to me does see them... but at least so far, LL doesn't consider that a "shared experience" issue.

One thing to point out: the FPS you achieve isn't just a matter of your computer, but will depend on the build, how many people are there, and your settings. Take a look at Penny Patton's blog post in which a single tiny object using multiple large textures (which made no sense given the object's size) took the frame rae she saw in the sim down from 75+ to 5.

Worked like a charm. Thank you; I've posted to my blog linking to this thread. Since I can't post a comment on the JIRA entry, I'll say simply that this gets rid of the issue that makes a 64-bit Linux build necessary, i.e. no streaming media, though I do wish they'd go ahead and do one for efficiency's sake and so people new to Linux don't give up; with a 64-bit version (and yes, people are now recommending that those wishing to use Linux install a 64-bit version if their processor supports it) it will Just Work. Thanks again; I'm in your debt.

Hi. In the JIRA entry on the mesh deformer, people have brought up the issue of builders creating needlessly high polygon count items. (Kind of like "this digital camera must be great, it has five petapixels!") I don't want to reward that kind of behavior, and I don't want the overhead such items needlessly induce. (Here I wish to join the chorus of gratitude for Codewarrior Congrejo's excellent thread on topology.) So... as a consumer, how can I know before I buy which are the products whose makers have done their work and put polygons to their best and most efficient use? If an in-store model is wearing a garment, can I right click on it and find out polygon counts? Do I have to count on reviewers or the sellers?

If I may ask, what exactly is "the community"? If it's SL users in general, I suspect, though I don't know, that the majority of them are consumers, not builders. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but to contribute to the cause, you don't just have to be a builder, but one who is adept at creating meshes. (I hope their tribe will increase, but as this drags on, hope is fading.) Nonetheless, those aware of the mesh deformer are, I also suspect, highly interested in it, having found that without it, mesh clothes makers might as well put up a sign reading "Procrustes's Mesh Clothing," because it's utterly impractical to fill out the combinatorial explosion needed to fit everyone.

"Orthogonal is one of the open source cult words, Qie, did you realize that?" Probably not, because it is no such thing--unless you have some evidence that nobody else has ever heard of that Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the inventor of two-level grammars (now called "van Wijngaarden grammars" after their inventor) and head of the committee that developed Algol 68 back in the 60s and 70s, somehow originated the open source "cult", unnoticed, a decade or so before Stallman started the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation was created. Vectors are "orthogonal" if they're at right angles to one another--more abstract systems define an "inner product", analogous to the vector dot product, so that two things in those systems are called "orthogonal" if their inner product is zero, or a set of things if each two of them are orthogonal. More important for the computer science usage of the term, orthogonal vectors are "linearly independent"; you can't add up multiples of some to get one of the others. By analogy, features of a program or programming language are "orthogonal" if they don't have arbitrary limitations, they can be combined as you will.

I use 64-bit Linux as well (Now Ubuntu 12.04). The shell script that runs the actual SL client binary, as far as I can tell, always puts that message out if it detects 64-bit Linux, whether the client actually succeeds in running or not. If the client actually comes up and runs, don't worry about the message. If, OTOH, it isn't running, please post a followup with more info about what happened. Be sure to save the output; try something like secondlife 2>&1 | tee save.log to start up the client. If you take the problem to the JIRA, they'll want that output.

Desirable as STORM-1800, "The vertex weights of the default mesh could be better", is, is it really multiple improvements?

This is one of the topics that the JIRA mesh deformer entry explicitly says to bring up here insteaed of there, so... I'll bring it up. There are some SL residents who want avatars of a sort the stock shape does not support. Let's start simple with humanoid avatars, such as those who wish to be virtual bodybuilders, those who dream of having figures like Mlle. Polaire, or those like me who wish to, shall we say, have an unusually high center of mass. The canonical solution so far has been attachments, but that cuts one off from most of the vast cornucopia of SL fashion. (For the well-endowed ladies of Second Life, I am happy to say that for at least a couple of years, an ever-growing number of clothiers have catered to us, but the nature of attachments makes for issues with consistent textures and lighting where the attachments join the avatar shape.) Mesh avatars avoid the issues of the join of avatar shape to attachment by not using attachments, but so far they are still limited for available clothing. Finally, mesh avatars have the same issue as mesh clothing--because they're the same darn thing, differing only in how much of the stock avatar you hide. Without the mesh deformer, clothiers have to either forget about mesh, replace the signs on their stores with something like "Procrustes Mesh Clothing", or suffer the combinatorial explosion that RL clothes makers can't avoid, i.e. making a bunch of different sizes of everything. With the mesh deformer, this isn't an issue--for those using the stock avatar shape. Mesh avatars do get deformed by the mesh deformer, BUT--those deformations appear to be tied to the stock avatar shape. Try them on a mesh avatar and the results are, to say the least, weird. Unless something is done to make non-skeletal sliders do something that makes sense for the shapes defined by mesh avatars, mesh avatar makers are stuck with the combinatorial explosion--and if we don't like showing up at an event with the same dress someone else is wearing there, you can imagine what it's like to have the same whole body as someone else!) One can leave the stock avatar head and neck exposed so that at least can be customized, but that shouldn't be necessary. So... what would be involved in letting one specify just what the non-skeletal slider settings do for a given mesh avatar? (And if one can do that, would that help make it possible to wear stock avatar clothing on mesh avatars? Having an inventory full of clothing you might as well kiss goodbye if you adopt a mesh avatar is a serious discouragement for those thinking of trying a mesh avatar out.)

Actually, if the Windows version works under WINE with reasonable performance, I'd be tempted to recommend it to people running 64-bit Linux because of the issues with Second Life and streaming media under 64-bit Linux.

Thanks, Innula; Tateru's post is well worth reading... but as she remarks, the text of the agreement does not define "shared experience".

"A shared experience change is one that modifies the definition of the elements that make up the virtual world, or how they behave, in such a way that users on other viewers don’t experience the same virtual reality. "This rule does not affect changes to rendering, user interface, or the controls a viewer offers for interacting with the world." So does a "derender" feature count as a change to rendering, or is it forbidden because not seeing something that others see means that they aren't experiencing the same virtual reality?