LoD models swapped inworld

[Chic Aeon]

40 minutes ago, Pamela Galli said:

 I definitely think you should use your knowledge of optimized mesh to showcase it. 

So you think I am too "flat" to make it as a pole dancer?   LOL.   Likely. 

Hopefully we all keep on learning. This week I have been pinning vertices without knowing it. Can't blame it on a new version of Blender and this has only happened a couple of other times in five years, so no clue what that is about. But NOW, hopefully, I remember that Alt+P when your cursor is IN the UV pane will get them off again. So strange. 

Poco a poco. 

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, Pamela Galli said:

As long as there’s a market for something, people are going to sell it. And there clearly is a market for things that require an LOD factor of four

There is a market for things that look pretty on a picture on MP or in a blog. Simple as that. And then of course, some idiot got the idea that increasing the LoD factor didn't increase the load and a bunch of other idiots liked that thought so much, they started to spread it. (And yes, anybody who thinks they know anything about 3D modelling at all and still believes in such nonsense is by definition an idiot.)

 

10 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Actually yes it does :D.  

Oh. That comes as a surprise to me because it is quite obvious once you start looking.

 

9 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

My comment wasn't about LOD. The LODs are GOOD. I have been checking those for a couple of year. It is the POLY count that is astronomical.  

Yes but it's basically the same thing - the only difference is at which side of the road you fall into the ditch.

Apparently Linden Lab is working on a new (and long overdue) land impact formula and this is probably the biggest problem they have: you can't really make a formula to determine whether an item has good LoD models or a reasonable poly count.

It may be too late too. Linden Lab has not only been ignoring the problem for so many years, they've been actively promoting dubious building quality. Back when they had invitation-only official promotion campaigns it was quite common to see some really bad mesh makers among the chosen few deemed good enough to participate and at least one of the very worst mesh fakers SL has ever seen was featured as a "World Maker" in a well known not-at-all-sponsored-or-controlled-by-LL video blog. And look at Meauxle Bureaux. That filthy pile of garbage was actually supposed to be a showcase for what could be done with mesh in Second Life! With the official standard set that low, there's no wonder unscrupulous operators move in to take advantage of the situation and there's no wonder the regular customers fall for the hype.

 

9 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

What REALLY boggles my mind -- and I have said this before -- is that KNOWING the mistakes they may with "free will and the uploader", The Lab repeated it mistakes with Sansar

Yes but that's Sansar. It seems the Second Life Lindens have learned from the mistakes of the past. They have quite a job ahead of them if they want to clean up the mess though.

Edited February 6, 2018 by ChinRey

[Beq Janus]

On 04/02/2018 at 10:49 PM, Callum Meriman said:

Is it a real bug, or just something displayed in the incorrect spot?

To me, for the way the LOD numbers are, 8 LI is just too high.

Edit: This object is for sale in the current Fameshed if the more knowledgeable wish to check.

There's a mixture of issues here.

1) I think we have a small bug, where the 72 is an incorrect display in FS, clicking away and back again will almost certainly fix that, but if not I would be interested to see as I have never managed to see this except with occasional glitches when a mesh first loads. It might be a side-effect of #2 below.

2) Is a "feature" of the way I display linksets. I'd like feedback and suggestions on what the right option might be. The object is a 100% mesh link set, the root prim is a 2 triangle floor, the actual LOD info is 2 2 2 1. the rest of the LODs parts are constructed with solid high-poly LOD models and the 8LI reflects that. When you edit a multipart object it should just grey out the info panel I think, there is no sensible way for me to display such an object (it might be composed of prims and mesh or even sculpts), so it should probably keep the right-hand panel blank. the correct behaviour does happen when you "edit-linked" you can then use the small arrows or simply click around, to examine the individual components. I'd be happy to hear thoughts on what that initial (top level linkset) display should look like. 

In the animation below you can see the outline in yellow, of the root prim.

 

 

[Beq Janus]

On 04/02/2018 at 11:22 PM, arton Rotaru said:

Smells like an issue with the new Firestorm viewer. This thing on the picture has 39.752 triangles in it's High LOD. 8 LI seems kinda low for that number, and indeed, it's lowest LOd has just 19 spikey triangles all over the place.

 

The 72 in Callum's post might well a mini-bug  (see my post above), I cannot reproduce it, I suspect a glitch during the loading. The object overall is indeed 39K triangles and it is composed of 7 parts. The LI of 8 is what it is, that's got nothing to do with Firestorm, the object is constructed of 8 separate parts none of which have a BB larger the 1.6m, it doesn't make any specific tricks. It is a common (overly dense) model which happily does not cheat the LODs to keep the LI lower but accepts the higher LI. This item could be made a lot lower LI than it is, but at least it does not scam the user by asking them to hijack their debug settings to make it "look right".

 

[Beq Janus]

On 04/02/2018 at 11:13 PM, Chic Aeon said:

I actually made  LODs for this big model as it was "organic" and not what I normally do.  Making the custom LODs was a very good thing in this case (and in a couple of others today) as again, very organic (won't show as I think Fantasy Faire is supposed to be secret LOL). 

Anyway even using the exact same files WITH my own custom LODs I ended up with a higher land impact and cost on Agni than I did on Aditi.  I had previously thought that the Aditi uploader and the Agni uploader just weren't in agreement on things when THEY figured out the LOD models. That doesn't appear to be the case. 

 

That's a thread I have yet to come back to. I think I can answer some of your issues there are I would love to explore that more once I can stop ducking the meat-cleaver wielding assasins that are on my tail these days :-)

 

[arton Rotaru]

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

The LI of 8 is what it is, that's got nothing to do with Firestorm,

Yes indeed, the land impact display was correct. My smelling was directed at the triangle count display in FS. I wasn't clear enough in my reply really. I'm sorry for that.

1 hour ago, Beq Janus said:

It is a common (overly dense) model which happily does not cheat the LODs to keep the LI lower but accepts the higher LI. This item could be made a lot lower LI than it is, but at least it does not scam the user by asking them to hijack their debug settings to make it "look right".

Why does it look like this in it's lowest LOD then?

[arton Rotaru]

5 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

OK I want to make one more comment because I am feeling fairly disillusioned right now.  After going around and looking at the objects I have rezzed that are not mine and seeing their vertices count I am not a happy camper. The LODS are fine but OMG the numbers are astronomical and these are some of the best selling and most high profile H and G folks on the grid. 

While checking out that outhouse, which was kinda shocking because of it's insane polycount, there is a little petrol lantern beside it, and that weights in at 93k triangles.

So yeah, I'm feeling fairly disillusioned as well.

[Callum Meriman]

8 hours ago, Chic Aeon said:

Clicking on the various parts I got descending (if breathtakingly high) numbers.  I will reassess my "good" comment and replace with "pretty" LOL.  Second photo below first. 

The person who made these gatcha matches does make pretty things, but I don't like their mesh on a technical level at all. 

Zooming in on the match-sticks, to clip them, in order to show...

(( I now dream FS will one day add a "wireframe the selected object" feature to improve the new counts )).

 

I was disillusioned a few days ago with the stuff from the garden centre. There are moments I still am. Mostly though, I don't understand how the lab could ever hope to fix or dissuade practices like this, that horse bolted so long ago now.

Edited February 6, 2018 by Callum Meriman
Removed something that would ID this creator too easily.

[ChinRey]

23 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

Mostly though, I don't understand how the lab could ever hope to fix or dissuade practices like this, that horse bolted so long ago now.

I fear you are right. Back when @Patch Linden announced the new increased prim limit, he said he hoped people would use some of those extra prims to improve build quality. My reply back then was that they needed a time machine to fix those issues. Linden Lab has a very strict policy not to let new upgrades break old content and I think they are absolutely right there. But then, how are they going to correct this problem when so much of the old content is broken by default and needs resource-costly "fixes" to work at all?

Edited February 6, 2018 by ChinRey

[Callum Meriman]

1 minute ago, ChinRey said:

. Linden Lab has a very strict policy not to let new upgrades break old content and I think they are absolutely right there. But then, how are they going to correct this problem when so much of the old content is broken by default and needs resource-costly "fixes" to work at all?

There have been exceptions though. Invisiprims were broken with deferred rendering (Advanced Lighting). And Invisiprims were used in a lot of boats to hide water in the hull. That broke content. All those boats now have water inside them, in many cases making them pretty much unusable.

In fact there is a place in Nautilus... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nautilus - Shalim/249/201/23 built by Crazy Mole that uses an Invisiprim to hide water and make a dry dock.

Without deferred rendering

and with

 

[mikka Luik]

@Beq Janus remember, in SL no good deed goes unpunished... this is a great additional tool even as is so thankyou. I have a cleaver proof shirt somewhere just in case.

@arton Rotaru "disillusioned" well not quite the right word. Shrug, just  another chip in the fun part of making stuff. Maybe go back to scripting although I remember why I gave up that apart from personal satisfaction and the odd custom job.

(I only asked about a change in behaviour as its always been an instant reaction to that warning to fix my mistake and never noticed it could be over ridden. Although sing is my weapon of choice for day to day piddling about, I use the LL viewer to upload and test mesh since the time years back when I realised the major diff between my LOD default of 2 and that of the official viewer. Done it that way ever since. Personally I reckoned all this set LOD to a zillion fell under the same [redact rude word] as 'clear cache to fix all known problems' and the time where the perceived wisdom was to pump up that other mesh rendering setting, the name of which I am happy to have forgotten)

[Chic Aeon]

5 hours ago, Beq Janus said:

That's a thread I have yet to come back to. I think I can answer some of your issues there are I would love to explore that more once I can stop ducking the meat-cleaver wielding assasins that are on my tail these days :-)

 

The differences between Aditi and Agni are not new -- at least not for me. I had the same issue yesterday (Monday) again on a complex item which ended up higher land impact on Agni than Aditi.  Many things I make are -- well I guess after my eye-opening post on another thread -- VERY low poly (only in comparison (sigh and laugh) -- usually end up with the same costs and land impact. The more vertices that happen the more this occurs. In this case all the decor on the top two shelves is one mesh and the decor on the table top is all one mesh. So three mesh objects linked. On Aditi they are 7 on Agni they are 8.   There may have been a dollar or so difference in upload cost (most of my things upload at $11 but this was $12 I think) but by the time I finished this I just wanted to finish LOL.  

It seems unlikely that this is only happening to me, but maybe other folks aren't paying close attention. I know not.

NOT from Fantasy Faire *wink*.

 

 

 

Edited February 6, 2018 by Chic Aeon
uploaded a new photo. Blogger in me couldn't live with blurry screenshot :D.

[ChinRey]

45 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

In fact there is a place in Nautilus... http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Nautilus - Shalim/249/201/23 built by Crazy Mole that uses an Invisiprim to hide water and make a dry dock.

 

Garden Mole did something similar for the underwater tunnel at the Bay City Aquarium in Oak Bay:

 

I suspect the invisiprim was broken by accident though. The developers didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.

This is much bigger anyway. We're talking about breaking the entire catalogs of some of the biggest, oldest and most prestigious names in SL commerce here. Most of them will probably be put out of business for good because if they haven't learned how to make mesh by now, there's not much chance they will ever be able to learn.

On top of that, I don't think anybody even knows how to fix it. Tone down the significance of the LoD models in the land impact and we end up with OSgrid style overloaded models and, as Chic pointed out earlier, that is just as bad. Making good mesh for a dynamic 3D environment is a balance act. It is always a compromice between how many details you need to include and how much resources you can afford to spend. There are no absolute rules that can be defined as algorithms and fed into a computer.

But then again, in the long run it may well be that Linden Lab has no choice. Both Second Life and Sansar are srtuggling with the retention rate and there is no doubt that the ridiculously poor hardware requirement-vs-performance ratio is a big factor there. It may well be the biggest.

Edited February 6, 2018 by ChinRey

[Whirly Fizzle]

1 hour ago, Callum Meriman said:

Zooming in on the match-sticks, to clip them, in order to show...

(( I now dream FS will one day add a "wireframe the selected object" feature to improve the new counts )).

Is that JUST the matches? 18K triangles?
I think I'm going to cry....

Edited February 6, 2018 by Whirly Fizzle

[Chic Aeon]

My VERY old outhouse (like four years) :D.  All one mesh except the bucket.  3 li.  Could use better LODs but not bad LOL.   

[Callum Meriman]

Just now, ChinRey said:

This is much bigger anyway. We're talking about breaking the entire catalogs of some of the biggest, oldest and most prestigious names in SL commerce here. Most of them will probably be put out of business for good because if they haven't learned how to make mesh by now, there's not much chance they will ever be able to learn.

On top of that, I don't think anybody even knows how to fix it. Tone down the significance of the LoD models in the land impact and we end up with OSgrid style overloaded models and, as Chic pointed out earlier, that is just as bad. Making good mesh for a dynamic 3D environment is a balance act. It is always a compromice between how many details you need to include and how much resources you can afford to spend. There are no absolute rules that can be defined as algorithms and fed into a computer.

But then again, in the long run it may well be that Linden Lab has no choice. Both Second Life and Sansar are srtuggling with the retention rate and there is no doubt that the ridiculously poor hardware requirement-vs-performance ratio is a big factor there. It may well be the biggest.

Oh yes, I can certainly well comprehend how huge a problem it is. And I can just imagine whole sims being returned too if the lab made even the smallest mistake.

Consumer education may be the only way. As with how well JellyDolls turned out, and how we now aim to be under 80K complexity, when at the start, it seemed an impossible goal.

How about, Jelly Objects... 4 state slider, user choosable of course, so anything that has only (say) 2 triangles in medium LOD turns into a bright green cube.

[ChinRey]

3 minutes ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Is that JUST the matches? 18K triangles?
I think I'm going to cry....

Yes. I did that myself years ago when I found out.

Welcome to the real Second Life.

[Chic Aeon]

20 hours ago, Whirly Fizzle said:

Is that JUST the matches? 18K triangles?
I think I'm going to cry....

I was close to tears last night on another thread.  Nope it was this one LOL. 

 

This particular creator was very popular at The Arcade some years back. Really beautiful finished product with lovely textures (I didn't even GO there. If those matches are on a 1024 that would be another thing.) I had a friend who ran a role play sim who refused to buy things from this creator simply because we all knew they were "laggy". The problem is, we didn't really know why (we could have gone into wireframe of course but NUMBERS are better). 

 

These are OLD so it is very possible that their items are "better made" (by this discussions standards) now. 

 

Edited February 7, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[Chic Aeon]

9 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

How about, Jelly Objects... 4 state slider, user choosable of course, so anything that has only (say) 2 triangles in medium LOD turns into a bright green cube.

LOOOOOOOOVE   IT!!!!!    

 

Want to be fair though. I was over at Babbage last night taking a photo for a blogger meme thing and found one of the only mesh buildings there (I found two) had zeroed out all but the top level. Amazingly it was SO LARGE it actually worked well there.  So sometimes very odd choices can be OK in CERTAIN situations. 

 

Edited February 6, 2018 by Chic Aeon

[Callum Meriman]

Can you imagine the hundreds of threads we would get though

Quote

 

"Why is my friend's house all green?"

"I went to visit my friend's home and all I can see are green boxes everywhere, even her bed
She says she sees everything normally
I tried clearing my cache a few times, but that hasn't helped
Have I been hacked?"

 

 

[Whirly Fizzle]

18 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

I suspect the invisiprim was broken by accident though. The developers didn't realize what was happening until it was too late.

Invisiprims were disabled on purpose in deferred rendering. It wasn't an accident.

[ChinRey]

8 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

Want to be fair though. I was over at Babbage last night taking a photo for a blogger meme thing and found one of the only mesh buildings there (I found two) had zeroed out all but the top level. Amazingly it was SO LARGE it actually worked well there.  So sometimes very odd choices can be OK in CERTAIN situations.

Ok maybe, but also totally pointless. With meshes the size you seem to describe here, the LoD models have little or no impact on the LI so you might as well keep it full LoD.

[Callum Meriman]

11 minutes ago, Chic Aeon said:

...If those matches are on a 1024...

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T reports...

[ChinRey]

20 minutes ago, Callum Meriman said:

How about, Jelly Objects... 4 state slider, user choosable of course, so anything that has only (say) 2 triangles in medium LOD turns into a bright green cube.

What if it's an object that only needs two triangles for the mid model?

[Whirly Fizzle]

1 minute ago, Callum Meriman said:

Ctrl-Alt-Shift-T reports...