Lets be honest

[Gaia Clary]

 

---

Caitlin Loxingly wrote:there is still a problem with numbers there, if a sculptie has 1024 faces that would require 2048 vertices (4 vertices per face with 2 of the 4 being able to be used in the face adjacent) and becomes 2048 faces once it is passed into OpenGL and converted from quadrilaterals to triangles as OpenGL can not render quadrilaterals. a geometric solid sculptie can be made from a 63x64 mesh, which is 4032 vertices, effectively 4096 once stitching is taken into account, for a minimum of 3906 faces in a 64x64(x4294967296) sculptie map.

---

Maybe it makes sense to show you the first 4 minutes of my upcoming video tutorial
about basics about Sculpties ? Maybe that helps a bit:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/3d-creation/video-tutorials/sculpties-basic-tutorials//

 

[Charolotte Caxton]

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

 

---

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

@ Dogboat: Comparing using V2 to eating crap is kinda offensive to me, but I get your point. My point was that if people come in to SL and only have V2 to use, they will not be stuck in their old outdated ways. I know there is a large vocal group of users that detest V2 mainly because it is not the old viewer and I understand peoples inherent resistance to change. It's human nature, that's ok. What needs to be discussed, as it is being done here, is that there is no need to fear change if that change is indeed beneficial. What we are attempting to do with this discussion, I believe, is alleviate fear by pointing out the benefits of new improvements. Media on a prim? That sounds interesting. Did a lot of people think that was gonna make SL a barren wasteland as well?

---

no, most in the know thought it was a waste of time, actually it had something worse than many realised, a way to beat your firewall.

btw i tried kirstens and LLs versions and yet im back to using phoenix.

its not that i'm addicted to it, its just better, faster, has useful tools and is generally nicer in my opinion.

 

---

I cannot argue against that if it is generally nicer, has better tools, and is better and faster.

That sucks about the firewall thing, I think.

[Csven Concord]

If we just had teleport hubs again, all our problems would be solved.

[Caitlin Loxingly]

@dogboat: i have used 3rd party viewers since shortly after i began SL, you can't judge how long by looking at my account age, add a few years and that's be about right. I changed to phoenix as soon as it came available and it was a great viewer. I saw was because since the last server patch for me it started to crash way too much to use, as in would no longer run for more than a minute no matter what i tried to get it stable again. i tried a couple other viewers and they were either as unstable or forced v2 on me anyway since they moved things around to become as nonsensical an interface as v2 but with lower stability. I ended up going to the v2 latest beta and though it surprised me it has, honestly, been more stable than phoenix ever was for me. i miss the tools carried over from emerald and i am still lost in the interface but it is nice to, for the first time in years, be able to be in SL for 12-16 hours in a crowded and over-textured sim without a single crash, i have even gone a little over 26 hours in SL in the same set of sims, busy and over-textured and full of scripted items and combat meters, and still i am more stable than i ever was in the past, even though it is a beta. i'm not saying people should switch but in my case i had no choice other than quitting SL or trying one of the text only viewers, but, as much as i hate to admit it, i have only crashed twice since i started using v2 beta over a week ago and i am on 12+ hours every day

[Caitlin Loxingly]

thanks but the basics are not a problem understanding and if there is an attempt to convince me that OpenGL is able to render 1024 quadrilateral faces with less than 2048 vertices and less than 2048 actual faces in memory i would point you to OpenGL org for some reading. I'm not gonna touch a flash file hosted on an untrusted server with being logged in under my account name anyway.

[Gaia Clary]

 

---

Caitlin Loxingly wrote:

thanks but the basics are not a problem understanding and if there is an attempt to convince me that OpenGL is able to render 1024 quadrilateral faces with less than 2048 vertices and less than 2048 actual faces in memory i would point you to OpenGL org for some reading. I'm not gonna touch a flash file hosted on an untrusted server with being logged in under my account name anyway.

---

so naa, i do not want to convince you about anything, just try to get the numbers right ;-)

 

So here another try:

You have 32 faces along X ... when you look along the x axis, you see it is evenly spaced and it has 32 edges along X. these 32 edges need 33 vertices to be constructed along X.

The very same is true for the Y axis. So there you also have 32 edges along Y and 33 vertices to construct them.

This spans up a square matrix of 32 * 32 faces, made out of 33 * 33 Vertices.

33 * 33 = 1089 vertices
32 * 32 = 1024 faces (note that the inner faces share all their vertices with adjacent faces!)

Now each face is a quadruple and it will be transformed to 2 adjacent triangles when actually processed in your graphic card. That makes

1024 * 2 = 2048 Triangles

And maybe there is just a different interpretation here ? If you name Triangles also faces, then we are d'accord ;-) But still the whole sculptmesh needs 1089 vertices.

BTW: The movie from my previous post is on Youtube and its not a flash movie but an MP4. If you prefer the youtube link, here it is:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsaYC0ThZUg

And you say the Machinimatrix server is untrusted ? Is there an official way to get it to become trusted ? I would like to let it undergo any procedure that makes it trusted. Maybe that is why i do not get so many hits on it ?

[Drongle McMahon]

Caitlin, here is my attempt to resolve this ...

Would I be right in thinking you are referring to the requirements of the data at the point where it is fed into the opengl pipeline. If it is fed as triangle strips, that is indeed one new vertex per triangle and thus two per quad. However, this does not mean it has to be maintained in that form in the host application, or that it needs to be streamed in that form.

Since a (basic) sculpty is topologically equivalent to a sqare array of quads (ignoring edges for now), each vertex of the specified object will be re-used in two successive strips, and the data for each strip can be generated as needed for pumping into opengl. Thus the requirement for storage and streaming is reduced by half, to one vertex per quad. Unstitched edges increase this very slightly.

The reason the basic sculptmap is 64x64 pixels is an artefact of the use of the image streaming/compression system. The requirement for an unstitched planar map of 32x32 quads is 33x33 vertices, but the image system will handle only exact powers of two. Thus 64x64 is the minimum size for a 33x33 map. In fact odd-numbered pixels in either dimension are ignored*, except for the last (number 63) in each unstitched dimension, which is used for the 33rd vertex row/column. In the stitched dimensions, the 33rd row/column is implicitly copied from the first to achieve the stitching.

*yes ... that's nearly 3/4 of the pixels!

[TzunCet Xomotron]

If you read carefully, this is sounding more and more like an issue w/ SL's end of how they handle their server, not really anything against the Mesh Viewer or content creators. This is an advancement in technology, and a grand opportunity to enhance the quality of the Second Life user experience, I say we look to the future and embrace it =) Any idea that custom designed models will be more expensive to the server is unfair... Modelers can make very dense models, or very Low Resolution models, that's a choice of the individual, not a strike against Mesh View... All this talk of how prims are better, my first impression w/o evening knowing about SL was "wow, that's a pretty dense cube" =/

It'll be a blast.... A walkthrough of visual eyecandy.

[Dogboat Taurog]

 

---

TzunCet Xomotron wrote:

If you read carefully, this is sounding more and more like an issue w/ SL's end of how they handle their server, not really anything against the Mesh Viewer or content creators. This is an advancement in technology, and a grand opportunity to enhance the quality of the Second Life user experience, I say we look to the future and embrace it =) Any idea that custom designed models will be more expensive to the server is unfair... Modelers can make very dense models, or very Low Resolution models, that's a choice of the individual, not a strike against Mesh View... All this talk of how prims are better, my first impression w/o evening knowing about SL was "wow, that's a pretty dense cube" =/

It'll be a blast.... A walkthrough of visual eyecandy.

---

for 1% of the residents of SL yes, the rest will be long gone.

 

[Charolotte Caxton]

Dogboat, I have to wonder, where do you get the idea that the majority of the Residents are opposed to this? From what I have read, it seems that most are for better graphic content, not against it.

[Ripped Winkler]

The ability to rig Mesh isn't to be sneezed at either 

That's one baby id like not  to see tossed out with dog's bathwater :smileywink:

[Charolotte Caxton]

Hi, Rip. I don't get it.

[Ripped Winkler]

Old saying " Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater"

Just saying we would lose more than the ability to make efficient mesh object 's with this threads proposal.

i Also hit relpy to your coment instead of the post' 

[Nalates Urriah]

quote: sculpts don't even count trangles they count verticies, big difference

Ashasekayi Ra has made several good counter points.

Just to drive it home… If one does not know that everything in a virtual world is a collection of vertices making up triangles and you can’t have one without the other, I can’t believe they have researched the issue or know anything about 3D modeling. Sorry ortiga Waco, you don’t know what you are talking about.

Quote: by upgrading sculpts linden labs would stay with the times

Quote: with sculpts you can already precisly control the LODs

No professional modelers use sculpties. You may want to laugh at Blue Mars but the technical excellence is ahead of LL’s. Their business model sucks not their render engine and mesh tools. All the high-end games use mesh as the most efficent and advanced way to render worlds.

May be a few professionals have learned to use sculpties for SL, but it restricts the content that universities can use in other places and then bring to SL. One just cannot import the millions of 3D objects out there as sculpties. It requires a major rework to turn most 3D models into sculpties. The restrictions and limitations on sculpties are ridiculous. (…compared to doing things with mesh.)

Making a replacement avatar from a sculpty and providing weighted vertices… that would create a hybrid no one would know how to work with if it is even possible. The idea with SL is to get the learning curve down not up.

UVMap control is, for practical purposes, non-existent with scupties.

Sculpties data is encoded to an image, we call it a sculpty map. The X, Y, Z vales are in the Red, Blue, Green vales and can only range from 0 to 255. No other data can be included. No custom UVMaps, no edges (which are made in a sculpty by stacking up vertices in one point thus wasting vertices and triangles), no anchor point to bone information…yadda, yadda....

Simply said, a sculpty is a highly simplified mesh stripped of all the stuff professionals use to control their models. We are now getting the professional stuff lacking in sculpties.

As to server load… to the server the mesh is another asset to be handed out. The only real server lag feature of mesh, AFAIK, is in the physics. SL mesh has a Physics Channel. A very simplified version of the mesh can be placed in that channel. If not, there is either no physics or the cost of the mesh is way high. So, with mesh we may see some decrease in server load for physics calcs.

If you haven’t been to ADITI lately to see what people are doing with mesh in just the few months we have had them in Beta, you are clueless to what is coming. After years with sculpties there are nowhere near the number of sculpty models in SL that are built with mesh.

Sculpties were a brilliant idea. Their purpose was to make apples and bannas and other organic shapes. Mesh is the all-purpose modeling medium for any shape and complex texturing.

 

Servers… ortiga thinks the servers are not being upgraded, obviously not paying attention to the office hours minutes and Linden postings about internal networks and servers being updated and/or replaced. SL is not running on the first computer they started with. Plus we are seeing new software going on the servers every week. Also, more and more of the asset handling is moving of the simulators to be handled by other servers. Changes in how region crossing is handled have been added, new scripting, … on and on.

Want to know what’s up with the servers? Geez, don’t listen to ortga, go read the minutes in: Server Beta

 

[Charolotte Caxton]

Oh, ok. Thanks for clarifying.

[Charolotte Caxton]

@ Nalates: Thanks for that.

[Poenald Palen]

I like the comparison to 8Track BUT, will point out it is more or less than that, that was a sort of standard anyone could make tapes for!

 I think sculpts are like those toys that are pretend music players and pretend cameras. You pull the camera's fake polaroidish picture out and it is the same picture lol. Exept, it has thousands of pictures that thousands of users create and sell...sort of. Like a happy meal music player thingy, the stereo at home doesn't handle it NOT because of age, it is due to it not being known or being used by many people!

Besides, you can pop in an 8track and listen to it...it might brtake these days due ot age. BUT, you can still play vynil records AND buy them and those are obsolete to! Not many stereo systems have a turntable, still bands make vynil!!!

 

[Caitlin Loxingly]

---

Gaia Clary wrote:

1024 * 2 = 2048 Triangles

And maybe there is just a different interpretation here ? If you name Triangles also faces, then we are d'accord ;-) But still the whole sculptmesh needs 1089 vertices.

BTW: The movie from my previous post is on Youtube and its not a flash movie but an MP4. If you prefer the youtube link, here it is: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsaYC0ThZUg

And you say the Machinimatrix server is untrusted ? Is there an official way to get it to become trusted ? I would like to let it undergo any procedure that makes it trusted. Maybe that is why i do not get so many hits on it ?

---

i was naming triangles faces since that is how they are they are actually rendered, as triangles, so we are d'accord

as far as the mp4 it is handled by flash because of how it is imbedded and without looking at the source code for the forum page i am not able to see what the content type is beyond flash movie nor where it is hosted, i just guessed it would be the same host as the link listed above it.

i consider any site i am not familiar with untrusted, even the forums here are untrusted as anyone who can post to them could place an image as an ip logger. yeah, its paranoid thinking but after certain events all my thinking is paranoid and adds to the reasons i am a shut in, that is part why i even found SL

 

 

---

Drongle McMahon wrote:

The reason the basic sculptmap is 64x64 pixels is an artefact of the use of the image streaming/compression system. The requirement for an unstitched planar map of 32x32 quads is 33x33 vertices, but the image system will handle only exact powers of two. Thus 64x64 is the minimum size for a 33x33 map. In fact odd-numbered pixels in either dimension are ignored*, except for the last (number 63) in each unstitched dimension, which is used for the 33rd vertex row/column. In the stitched dimensions, the 33rd row/column is implicitly copied from the first to achieve the stitching.

*yes ... that's nearly 3/4 of the pixels!

---

@Drongle

i was referring to the data stored and sent, which is still a 64x64 image at 32 bits pixel depth (the x4294967296 reference in the post) 8 bits which are an alpha mask, an illusion of security for the creators but in reality easily bypassed, and as a lossless image format even if all the pixels were the same value the file size would remain the same. a text mesh of the same would not require a 32 bit number for all 4096 pieces of data (pixels) and could be compressed significantly, losslessly, so it would still be more efficient in those regards. it also requires more instructions (processor clock cycles) for OpenGL to convert an image to a usable geometry. images have no check for corruption whereas zip, rar, and gzip do, if an image is corrupted in transmission it will still be sent to OpenGL and possibly be the cause of a crash, with the compression routines mentioned a simple checksum can determine if a file was corrupted in transmission and set to not send corrupted data to OpenGL, giving an additional stability benefit of using meshes if coded properly.

[Dogboat Taurog]

 

---

Charolotte Caxton wrote:

Dogboat, I have to wonder, where do you get the idea that the majority of the Residents are opposed to this? From what I have read, it seems that most are for better graphic content, not against it.

---

 

im sure we would all like better graphics, problem is you need a good graphical PC and a good line.

which in my experience isnt many people.

everthings still grey, still rezzing, i cant see me, i cant see you, where am i,  am i wearing clothes wheres my hair etc.

[ac14 Hutson]

Too late. They are already on the road to brining technology games have used since 1995 to SL. If you cant be bothered to learn how to make new content then move out of the way for those that can.

[leliel Mirihi]

 

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

 

im sure we would all like better graphics, problem is you need a good graphical PC and a good line.

which in my experience isnt many people.

---

Yeah except that meshes will be faster to render than sculpties. People have pointed this fact out to you at least 5 times in this thread and yet you still refuse to believe it.

---

everthings still grey, still rezzing, i cant see me, i cant see you, where am i,  am i wearing clothes wheres my hair etc.

---

That's funny, I don't have those problems...on viewer 2.

I think Dogboat's arguments can be summed up as: haters gonna hate.

 

[Dogboat Taurog]

 

---

leliel Mirihi wrote:

 

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

 

im sure we would all like better graphics, problem is you need a good graphical PC and a good line.

which in my experience isnt many people.

---

Yeah except that meshes will be faster to render than sculpties. People have pointed this fact out to you at least 5 times in this thread and yet you still refuse to believe it.

---

everthings still grey, still rezzing, i cant see me, i cant see you, where am i,  am i wearing clothes wheres my hair etc.

---

That's funny, I don't have those problems...on viewer 2.

I think Dogboat's arguments can be summed up as: haters gonna hate.

 

---

 

i dont think you quite understand, what i am saying is, and listen carefully, performance is not as good on viewer 2 for people with older pcs, and you need V2 to view meshes, correct?

its a little more complicated than "haters gonna hate" isnt it?

why do you think so many people still choose snowglobe based TPV's?

duh.

[leliel Mirihi]

 

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

 

i dont think you quite understand, what i am saying is, and listen carefully, performance is not as good on viewer 2 for people with older pcs, and you need V2 to view meshes, correct?

---

 

Can you define older PCs? Because I can fully believe, and honestly don't care, that viewer 2 doesn't run well on machines made before 2006. Massive disclaimer! I do not mean machines that were manufactured in 2006 using a GPU from 2000.

I have occasionally heard reports of people with modern (2007+) machines that can't run v2, but since other people with similarly old machines can run v2 I think those are just random bugs and the like. Not some conspiracy by LL to force everyone to upgrade.

 

---

its a little more complicated than "haters gonna hate" isnt it?

---

I don't know, your whole argument seems to center around "V2 is bad, mkay". This thread is about meshes, not v2. You have completely ignored the fact that TPVs will support meshes the same as they have supported everything else just so you can rant about how v2 will kill SL.

 

---

duh.

---

Yeah whatever.

 

 

[Dogboat Taurog]

 

---

leliel Mirihi wrote:

 

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

 

i dont think you quite understand, what i am saying is, and listen carefully, performance is not as good on viewer 2 for people with older pcs, and you need V2 to view meshes, correct?

---

 

Can you define older PCs? Because I can fully believe, and honestly don't care, that viewer 2 doesn't run well on machines made before 2006. Massive disclaimer! I do not mean machines that were manufactured in 2006 using a GPU from 2000.

I have occasionally heard reports of people with modern (2007+) machines that can't run v2, but since other people with similarly old machines can run v2 I think those are just random bugs and the like. Not some conspiracy by LL to force everyone to upgrade.

 

---

its a little more complicated than "haters gonna hate" isnt it?

---

I don't know, your whole argument seems to center around "V2 is bad, mkay". This thread is about meshes, not v2. You have completely ignored the fact that TPVs will support meshes the same as they have supported everything else just so you can rant about how v2 will kill SL.

 

---

duh.

---

Yeah whatever.

 

 

---

 

not mentioning something isn't ignoring it.

the core of V2 is slower, firestorm  is slower, thats why so many people use phoenix.

im not hating V2, its just slower than what we have now and i have a fairly high spec PC.

its not about hating its about the average user in SL, most have PCs that dont run graphic games particularly well. i get the feeling that you are a young kid that mummy and daddy has bought a top spec PC for.

but this isnt about you or me, its about the future of SL.

[Opensource Obscure]

---

Dogboat Taurog wrote:

the core of V2 is slower, firestorm  is slower, thats why so many people use phoenix.

im not hating V2, its just slower than what we have now and i have a fairly high spec PC.

---

? 

slower

? Maybe for you. Not for me.

i get the feeling that you are a young kid that mummy and daddy has bought a top spec PC for

That's indeed a very adult comment. 

Thanks for contributing to this forum!