ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Over the past few years as a secondly resident I've seen a lot of changes, some good some bad, in this virtual world many of us have adopted. Whether your a content creator, or just a average citizen, in this virtual world you've probably heard about mesh by now. You've also probably heard about, and personally witnessed, the lag that has plagued secondly. This lag comes from many things. One of these is probably the most well recognized, that being over stressed servers, not to point fingers at any one reason why this lag is occurring. In the recent months I have watched several video's about the upcoming mesh feature in secondly. Many of these video's, including those from Linden Labs, have educated me on how mesh effect the servers that run secondly, as well as how mesh will effect the individual's computer who is a resident of secondly. According to a video by Linden Labs mesh are less stressful on the individual's computer, and more stressful on Linden Lab's servers. Putting less stress on the individual's computer in theory sounds like a terrific idea. However when implanted into a virtual world with servers that are already over stressed, this idea seems to crumble. Implanting mesh into secondly would not only add more lag to the virtual world, but it would have many other horrible fallout effects. These effects could include using a single mesh to grief a sim and use up all of the sim's available prims, and content theft from third party sources of a entirely new level which would all but terminate secondlife's building community. After researching possibilities for improving secondlife's virtual content I have come up with a incredibly simple solution that would drastically improve the quality of inworld property, as well as allow the virtual creators in secondly to keep their jobs. The idea is to simply upgrade sculpts. Sculpts were a amazing and revolutionary idea by Linden Labs to have a content type that was completely exclusive to their world. Sculpts allowed for significantly richer content while keeping the content exclusive to their world, which allowed for inworld creators to form a community of their own. By doubling the amount of vertices allowed in a sculpt Linden Labs would stress their servers less than with mesh, and keep a building community thriving. Please help me get this thread noticed by Linden Lab's so hopefully we can build together for many years to come. ortiga Waco 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Joyus Sohl Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 I tend to agree with ortiga, if what he's saying is true. SL servers are pitiful .and I think they certainly don't need more stress. I like to support whatever helps keep SL stay fresh and current ..such as mesh technology . . .but . .if the servers can't support it .. . . it could finish SL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 upgrading sculpts with double the verticies would in a sense make sl's content twice as rich and could easily compete with what meshs could offer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vextra Messing Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 I think mesh is coming wether we like it or not. And why throw away the advantages of the technology just to keep SL content exclusive to SL.. I know we have a functioning microcosm here but If Sl can't keep up with the times, it's not going to stay relevant forever. My wish with mesh is that LL set down some standards, especially for the human avi mesh, otherwise clothes makers, shape and skin makers are left wondering.. I sympathize, Ortiga. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Caitlin Loxingly Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Servers should be upgraded to handle the addition of meshes imo, SL has more unique textures than other 3d worlds but a sim only being able to support 100 or so avatars has got to be pretty legacy hardware for a server. Consider other 3d worlds supporting 500+ in an area about the size of a sim. a big part of the problem is asset servers not being able to handle the loads because there are not enough. a sim does not need to load textures so it should not have to serve them, texture serving should be split between enough asset servers to actually handle them or separated from the asset servers and the sim servers and have texture servers that can handle the load of the full number of people who have payment information on file online at the same time. LL gets enough money they can upgrade to reasonable servers. A sun from 1998 would handle meshes just fine without the limits of Inel/AMD processors. Windows was never made to be a good server and if that is what they are using it is no surprise the problems, intel and amd processors were not made to be servers either, it simply dominates the market because of the money they can use to fool corporate customers because of the wide home user base feeding them. Even though not good as servers they could still suffice if there were enough with high enough bandwidth communication between them and the network topology designed to separate traffic and reduce collisions. LL just needs to put out the cost of upgrading and plan it well. Consider this, NWN was able to serve 50 clients from a pentium 2 with 256 megs of ram and only on a on a 56kbps modem, it did not have to serve textures but it did gave to compute pathing and collisions for custom meshes as well as a combat system and multiple zone chat separation. With the advances from the pentium 2 and 64 bit memory addressing, processing the meshes for 70 people in a sim would not be a strain for modern pc if the texture and asset serving is split off properly, even if it had to serve the textures it would not be a strain on a processor released in the past 2 years since it would not have to render them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogboat Taurog Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 mesh will, imho, alienate a lot of users as meshes (corect me if im wrong) can only be viewed on V2 viewers which are demonstably slower than snowglobe based V1. phoenix is very popular as it allows people to use SL on older computers. not many people will buy a new PC just to use SL. i wont. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TzunCet Xomotron Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Mesh is the future. You're not holding on to your 8 tracks are you =P I do not think it will be half as bad as you think. I'm new here, but as a content creator I can assure you, we always have your best interests in mind, especially in the design and creation process. Creators have full control over the density and resolution of our products, and believe me when I say quality of products is by no means measured in polycount. The creative freedom to design w/o the restriction of prims is a godsend, and I really think you will enjoy the experience. The quality of Second Life "life" will increase exponentially... It's a simple fix really. All that needs be done is impose poly limits, not a problem... Merchants can also be -enforced- to advertise polycount on their products, the same way McDonalds needs to exhibit calories next to their Big Mac =D If I'm not mistaken, textures are 512x512 regardless, the only real issue is polycount. Impose restrictions for different types of products, Content Creators will be more than please to comply... Dense meshes don't mix in the "video game" scene, we already know that. It's actually a challenge to use less to get more. We look forward to the challenge... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 Well while there are doubts and concerns on whether or not Linden Labs will allow future third party viewers, the main concern focuses not around whether the user's computer can handle sl, but rather can Linden Lab's servers handle the added stress. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashasekayi Ra Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 LL can't unring the mesh bell now. Not only have they spent alot of time and money researching and developing it, there are many people expecting its release. But more importantly, mesh is more effiecient than sculpts on several levels. A sculpt always has a set amount of triangles even if the shape doesn't need it. With mesh, you can use just the amount of triangles needed. Plus, you have precision control over the LODs. You can texture a mesh properly without distortion as well as set different material zones as well. And as someone in this thread already stated, SL can't remain behind the times technologically if they want to continue being a viable player in virtual worlds. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TzunCet Xomotron Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Sega Master System or XBox Kinect?!? It's going to be alot of fun, place a little faith in content creators =D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 The problem I'm trying to get across is there won't be any content creators in secondlife when meshs arive. The proposed format of 3dmeshs is collada, the same file format as the millions of files that are available free on google's 3dwarehouse. No doubt the content will be richer, but the server performance will be drasticly lower. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 by upgrading sculpts linden labs would stay with the times with sculpts you can already precisly control the LODs sculpts don't even count trangles they count verticies, big difference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogboat Taurog Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 TzunCet Xomotron wrote: Mesh is the future. You're not holding on to your 8 tracks are you =P I do not think it will be half as bad as you think. I'm new here, but as a content creator I can assure you, we always have your best interests in mind, especially in the design and creation process. Creators have full control over the density and resolution of our products, and believe me when I say quality of products is by no means measured in polycount. The creative freedom to design w/o the restriction of prims is a godsend, and I really think you will enjoy the experience. The quality of Second Life "life" will increase exponentially... It's a simple fix really. All that needs be done is impose poly limits, not a problem... Merchants can also be -enforced- to advertise polycount on their products, the same way McDonalds needs to exhibit calories next to their Big Mac =D If I'm not mistaken, textures are 512x512 regardless, the only real issue is polycount. Impose restrictions for different types of products, Content Creators will be more than please to comply... Dense meshes don't mix in the "video game" scene, we already know that. It's actually a challenge to use less to get more. We look forward to the challenge... im a "content creator" (i hate that term by the way, its so pompous) also i also have friends who are not running state of the art computers, they are actually responsible for a lot of the cash in SL, the 40 plus husbands and wives etc who have disposable cash but not enough for a new top of the range PC, when the old one can do most things they want. SL should be very careful here that it doesn't become out of reach to the normal user or you can say goodbye to all of it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogboat Taurog Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 content creators? pfft. ive been here 4 years and watched as concurrency rates fall, mainly due to LL's stupidity. this could be the biggest yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogboat Taurog Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Ashasekayi Ra wrote: LL can't unring the mesh bell now. Not only have they spent alot of time and money researching and developing it, there are many people expecting its release. But more importantly, mesh is more effiecient than sculpts on several levels. A sculpt always has a set amount of triangles even if the shape doesn't need it. With mesh, you can use just the amount of triangles needed. Plus, you have precision control over the LODs. You can texture a mesh properly without distortion as well as set different material zones as well. And as someone in this thread already stated, SL can't remain behind the times technologically if they want to continue being a viable player in virtual worlds. SL is a unique environment, its not behind the times. who is gonna beat SL at their own game? blue mars? :smileyvery-happy:. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 To double the vertices of a sculpt, use 2 instead of 1. To be honest, sculpts was just a workaround for mesh and they are just a pain. They are a pain to model, they are a pain to texture, they load very slow inworld (compared to mesh) and they waste a lot of resources. Just an example: Lets say a car today is build out of 30 sculpted prims. 30 x 2048 = 61440 triangles to render by your graphics card. My mesh car is built out of 17.500 triangles in highest LODs, down to 1600 tris in lowest LODs. Sure I also liked the fact that everything in SL was exclusive to SL. But lets face it, to keep SL attractive in the future, we have to make it look much more state of the art and not going on with it's more and more outdated look. There's nothing which is holding anybody back from learning mesh. It's not rocket sience or something like that. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 not only this dogboat but also if the servers become to laggy with the addition of meshs the game will be useless to even those with high end pcs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 arton sculpted prims allow a total of 1024 verticies, you would divide this number by 4 to get the number of poly's on a sculpt which is 256. 256x32 (the number of sculpts allowed on a vehicle not 30, that changed a few months ago with havok7) and you get 7680. AKA your suv there has twice as many poly's as a sculpt car would not vise versa. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dogboat Taurog Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 arton Rotaru wrote Sure I also liked the fact that everything in SL was exclusive to SL. But lets face it, to keep SL attractive in the future, we have to make it look much more state of the art and not going on with it's more and more outdated look. There's nothing which is holding anybody back from learning mesh. It's not rocket sience or something like that. nope it isnt rocket science, but 99% of mesh creators will create over bloated models to suit their pcs. then you are seriously in trouble. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 The prim limit for physical objects is still 32 prims. Only thing that changed is that seated avatars no longer count against the physical limit. Heres a picture how sculpts are rendered inworld. It's triangles what you have to render. No matter what the object is called or how it is brouhgt inworld. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ishtara Rothschild Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 If mesh is the end of secondly, we will all have to go back to firstly and wait for someone to develop a thirdly Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Dogboat Taurog wrote: arton Rotaru wrote Sure I also liked the fact that everything in SL was exclusive to SL. But lets face it, to keep SL attractive in the future, we have to make it look much more state of the art and not going on with it's more and more outdated look. There's nothing which is holding anybody back from learning mesh. It's not rocket sience or something like that. nope it isnt rocket science, but 99% of mesh creators will create over bloated models to suit their pcs. then you are seriously in trouble. I don't think so. The prim accounting for meshes will be high enough to compensate overbloated meshes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ashasekayi Ra Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 Uhmm.... the system still renders sculpts with triangles. The same with tortured prims. The issue of sculpt inefficiency has been discussed ad nauseum by the developers. Sculpts were a work around because they couldn't implement mesh at that time. Now, don't get me wrong, I think there will still be a place for sculpts after mesh is released. Anyone that has followed mesh development knows that mesh will be crippled in several ways. So, I doubt it will totally take over any time soon. As for the creator comment, it makes me wonder if you have uploaded a mesh to aditi yet. As has been discussed a 1000 times, somebody just uploading a mesh from Google sketchup won't cut it in the market. For one thing, he will need to give it proper LODs so that it isn't penalized heavily by the uploader in prim count. Beyond that, the auto LODs in the viewer look horrid ... yet another reason a customer will chuck it. Then, there is the question of making a proper physics shape for the item. This doesn't even get into the issues of dealing with rigged mesh. This will also take extra work that doesn't come out of the box for models dowloaded from other sites. So no, it won't be a simple process to make a marketable product. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tomoe Pawpad Posted April 23, 2011 Share Posted April 23, 2011 i know a content creator that says that the LOVE what they do but when mesh comes out.... they might as well just count their days because they don't intend on "upgrading" to mesh. hell most of their work is still mostly prims in a sculpted SL. yeah they do deal with sculpts, but they probably would be left behind in months of mesh being implimented.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ortiga Waco Posted April 23, 2011 Author Share Posted April 23, 2011 ok either way sculpts are still less poly's then meshs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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