Mesh Deformer Maybe Now?

[Perrie Juran]

I'm just tossing this in here as a general comment.

Why does everybody want to make the 'shared experience' rule harder to understand than it is?

"You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer."

http://secondlife.com/corporate/tpv.php

Maybe I'm nuts but that seems pretty simple to me.

And the prime example that clearly illustrated it was the original multiple attachment points introduced by The Viewer Thou Shalt Not Name.

People using the Official Viewer saw the multiple objects floating in space all around you.  It altered other people's experience in a way that could not be shared.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

 

Why does everybody want to make the 'shared experience' rule harder to understand than it is?

"You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer."

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Because while the statement in itself is clear, it's not at all discribed what "shared experience" actually means.

I agree in some (if not most) cases it is very clear, like your example with the attachment points.

[Sassy Romano]

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Kwakkelde Kwak wrote:

That's not entirely true, the alpha masks shipped with all your favorite mesh clothing get baked correctly now, it's part of the SSA.

The render bake really needed to be fixed. the last couple of months before SSA I was unable to wear tattoos and I was not alone. One of the three baked avatar textures always stayed blurry. I haven't seen that since the change. Plenty of things I don't like about how LL handles things, but fixing this issue before implementing "cool things" I really do appreciate.

 

 

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Yes ok that's true about the apha's but I still find it funny that after all the effort, the render time of mesh clothing and the textures associate with it, still means grey people and today, my upper half failed to bake so given that it still fails and that it now takes orders of magnitude longer for clothing changes to bake for me, I find it an utter fail but that's just my experience.

[Sassy Romano]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

I'm just tossing this in here as a general comment.

Why does everybody want to make the 'shared experience' rule harder to understand than it is?

"You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer."

 

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Yes but why does LL care if someone else doesn't see me wearing mesh properly but I do any differently than if I'm forced to wear a mesh item that doesn't fit with a bad alpha?  I guess they're happy that everyone sees a bad result.  Most companies would take pride in the delivery of a platform that presented the best options instead of mediocre make do.

My point about "shared experience" is that the term in the TPV rules is pretty much there as a stranglehold over innovation and little else.  There are already so many ways in which the experience differs greatly between users.  Simply saying "oh well they *could* see it the same IF they enabled the feature" doesn't really work when that persons hardware may be completely incapable of doing so.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

The time it takes for you to see the change after a bake might be a bit longer, but other people can probably see your bake a lot quicker.

Before SSA (SSB), the rebake was pretty fast for yourself, because your viewer did your bake. Then it was uploaded to the region server, from where it was sent to everyone, including you. Your avatar always went blurry some time after a rebake before it finally stuck. That was the moment others could see your bake. Now the server does the baking, so the process of you (re)baking is shorter to others.

I don't think the speed was the reason for the change though, it was probably the fact that bakes often failed. Some people I know were pretty much always blurry to me because they have a bad connection. As I said I've had constant bake fails (I really mean always) when I was wearing a tattoo. That's not the case anymore.

To get rid of the gray objects, worn or not, the amount of data that has to be sent  from the servers would have to be lowered. People with a display cost of 500 000 and 100 textures 1024x1024 in size are the main cause of this I guess. Not much LL can do about that without imposing some real hard limitations. I don't think people would swallow those restrictions. Remember the proposed limit on script memory?

[Sassy Romano]

Yes but I don't find 45 seconds+ particularly acceptable, especially without user interface feedback.  You wonder if you clicked it or not and i'm not really interested in how fast someone else sees my change, for me, I am the primary end user viewer of the change, or should be!

As for the other issue with large textures and grey mesh, that's the thing, has LL spend a whole bunch of time on something that doesn't actually change the overall experience but just poked at one piece to the exclusion of all else?

[Perrie Juran]

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Sassy Romano wrote:

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Perrie Juran wrote:

I'm just tossing this in here as a general comment.

Why does everybody want to make the 'shared experience' rule harder to understand than it is?

"You must not provide any feature that alters the shared experience of the virtual world in any way not provided by or accessible to users of the latest released Linden Lab viewer."

 

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Yes but why does LL care if someone else doesn't see me wearing mesh properly but I do any differently than if I'm forced to wear a mesh item that doesn't fit with a bad alpha?  I guess they're happy that everyone sees a bad result.  Most companies would take pride in the delivery of a platform that presented the best options instead of mediocre make do.

My point about "shared experience" is that the term in the TPV rules is pretty much there as a stranglehold over innovation and little else.  There are already so many ways in which the experience differs greatly between users.  Simply saying "oh well they *could* see it the same IF they enabled the feature" doesn't really work when that persons hardware may be completely incapable of doing so.

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The rule as written applies specifically to the TPV's.  Most difficulties do arise when people try to apply it to other scenarios.  The issue is things that the Official Viewer is not capable of.

We all have various graphic settings available.  A person running at low can not see "glow."  Yes, their experience will be different than mine at a higher setting.  But that difference IS allowed by the Official Viewer.  That is what makes the difference when applying the rule.

As far as innovations go, yes it could act as a discouragent.  At the time the new rule was introduced, Oz did say, if you hve an idea, bump it off us to see if we are interested.

However, this seems to be a bigger discouragemnt, the new TOS:

7.4    Unsolicited Ideas and Materials Prohibited; No Confidential or Special Relationship with Linden Lab.

Linden Lab employs a staff of designers to develop new ideas and Linden Lab solicits and receives product idea submissions from professional inventors with whom it has business relationships.

 

Because of this, in your communications with Linden Lab, please keep in mind that Linden Lab does not accept or consider any unsolicited ideas or materials for products or services, or even improvements to products or services, (collectively, “Unsolicited Ideas and Materials”). Therefore, you must not send to Linden Lab (even within any of your User Content that we may request), in any form and by any means, any Unsolicited Ideas and Materials. Any Unsolicited Ideas and Materials you post on or send to us via the Service are deemed User Content and licensed to us as set forth above.

http://lindenlab.com/tos

.

This is more problematic than the TPV rules. 

Still, there is nothing to stop any one from developing ideas on Open SIM or other VW's.

[Sassy Romano]

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Perrie Juran wrote:

The rule as written applies specifically to the TPV's.  Most difficulties do arise when people try to apply it to other scenarios.  The issue is things that the Official Viewer is not capable of.

We all have various graphic settings available.  A person running at low can not see "glow."  Yes, their experience will be different than mine at a higher setting.  But that difference IS allowed by the Official Viewer.  That is what makes the difference when applying the rule.

 

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I know Perrie, I fully understand how it applies, when and why it was brought in but in my view it's still a poor excuse from LL to do nothing with the defomer, why they were 100% gifted and it remains probably the single most important issue for mesh clothing.

LL continues to camp for an inexplicable reason.  Anyway, i'll hush now because the thread has no place to go.

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

If it takes you 45 seconds, I'd agree that's not acceptable. A bake takes me about 5 seconds, changing a shirt takes just as long. That tells me it's not (just) SL causing it. Maybe you or the regions you're in have some issues.

[Medhue Simoni]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Or.... I'd suggest adding the ability to import meshes with skeletons, with a strict hierarchy that is separate from the SL skeleton, but attachable to the SL skeleton. So, for instance, if you needed a tail, you'd just attach a mesh tail with it's own skeleton and animations. This is a 2 for 1, as we get mesh objects with bones, imagine an animated npc, and we'd get all the extra bones we might need for any avatar you could think of.

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Well, Cloud Party just added ANIMATED ATTACHMENTS. Seriously LL, if you don't get off your butt and start adding things that we need, you are going to be blown away by your competition. SL should have had animated attachment and animated objects years ago.

[Cathy Foil]

At this rate it looks like Cloud Party will have a mesh deformer before SL does.

So sad when LL got one finished and dropped right into its lap for free!!!

Come on LL just release the Mesh Deformer already!  

PLEASE!

PRETTY PLEASE!!

PRETTY PLEASE WITH ICE CREAM ON TOP!!!

 

[Medhue Simoni]

Since I've finished my werewolf avatar, and also released him in InWorldz, I've had more time to work on mesh clothing. No, I don't plan on becoming a clothing designer, but I've been backing this mesh deformer project, and I wanted to do 2 finished products to really test it out.

I made a pair of jeans, and a tanktop. Both work pretty dang good, no matter what shape your avatar is. Of course, looking back, I could have modeled them both a bit differently, and added some more verts in areas, but the workflow is pretty solid and predictable.

My 2 deforming meshes only show some poke through in the most extreme body shapes. Of course, I have to use an alpha mask, as there is just no way around that. The little bit of poke through I do get, comes from where the alpha mask doesn't quite cover. I can't really go further, as then other morphs would stretch the alpha mask too far.

The really cool part is, that you can create a normal SL pants or shirt layer to adjust the fit of your deforming mesh. So, by using a default pants or shirt layer, you can use their sliders to make your mesh clothing fit looser or longer or make the cuffs flare. The awesome part is, that if you make that pants or shirt layer the same texture as your mesh, you can hide any of the other parts that may poke through. For instance, with my jeans, if you max out the slider for your belly, 2 little strips of skin poke through at the very top of the jeans. If I wear SL pants underneath, with the same texture as my mesh jeans, I can use the waist height slider on the SL pants to hide those small slits of skin poking through.

I have to adjust some textures, but I'll be releasing the clothing soon, with a demo video.

[Maxwell Graf]

Cathy, just for the record, the ability for mesh clothing to fit using deformation methods has been in cloud party since the beginning. They added it from the start. Making clothing work over there is ridiculously easy and pain-free, as are the other building tools. Not having to do separate LOD's or physics models, for example, make architecture really enjoyable.

Interestingly, they just added a suite of facial/head sliders also, to further individualize your looks. They also mention plans for adding even more sliders and avi features, like poseable fingers and facial expression morphing, which will be interesting.