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Why is there so much high-poly mesh in SL?


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1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

There are limits, even to SL

NO!!!

 

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

telling a very large percentage of the population that almost every mesh based avatar construction item they have bought in the last 5 years is OUTLAWED

You mean five days, right? Anything older than that is soooooo last week you wouldn't be caught dead wearing it. :P

 

But seriously:

1 hour ago, Klytyna said:

Realistically, the "cures" are WORSE than the disease, and time would be better spent finding ways to improve the systems ability to render what we have, rather than wishing that it had all been made differently years ago and too far back and too common, to reasonably change at this point.

They have already announced they are going to do something. I may be wrong but I think only two of the options I listed are realistic.

One is that last symbolic upgrade. The render cost formula already includes a 1.2 (according to the official docs) multiplier for rigged mesh. Change that to 1.21, release it as the biggest revolution since Jesus walked on water and they have done "something".

The other realistic alternative is to soften the blow with some variant of the mix.

But with that issue and few other big ones unresolved, am I the only one to feel we are arguing how to fix a dripping water tap in the midts of a flood here?

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8 hours ago, Elvina Ewing said:

huh?? ChinRey were extensively explaining the triple LoD bug on fitted mesh and she wrote earlier in this thread that because of these LoD bugs lower LoDs rarely get used at all. See page 2 of this thread. So, are you telling me it is NOT true?? Guys you are confusing me very much now. :S I repeat, i only make fitted mesh and this is what we were talking about. Optimizing fitted mesh.

yes you definitely should, if i am talking about the app you use and i never have. Like, if i would be talking about Blender. However, i wasn't, but i was talking about 3ds max, the app i have more experience in using, apparently.

The bug that exists does mean that many people do indeed ignore LODs on fitted mesh, but that does not make it right, which is what I was (over) reacting to. With luck early next year we will see the ArcTan changes land and we'll get more "encouragement" to do it right. Rey is right that LOD switching occurs less than it should on fitted mesh, which is even worse when you consider that a lot of fitted mesh throws all caution to the wind in terms of triangle count and thus the render cost because there is no effective control point (like we have with LI). There have already been some changes made that will appear with Animesh that affect the way that your avatar bounding box is calculated. This is a (half-hearted to my mind) attempt to reduce the boost that worn mesh gets from the scale of the avatar to which it is attached. There will be more to come. We don't yet have any clear idea how or what, but Oz seems to want to get to a point where the cost of rendering an item  (in LI or complexity or maybe some new metric) more correctly reflects the true impact on a "typical" (whatever that is) machine. 

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1 hour ago, ChinRey said:

NO!!!

 

You mean five days, right? Anything older than that is soooooo last week you wouldn't be caught dead wearing it. :P

 

But seriously:

They have already announced they are going to do something. I may be wrong but I think only two of the options I listed are realistic.

One is that last symbolic upgrade. The render cost formula already includes a 1.2 (according to the official docs) multiplier for rigged mesh. Change that to 1.21, release it as the biggest revolution since Jesus walked on water and they have done "something".

The other realistic alternative is to soften the blow with some variant of the mix.

But with that issue and few other big ones unresolved, am I the only one to feel we are arguing how to fix a dripping water tap in the midts of a flood here?

The forum software is doing weird crap, I swear when you quoted in the past it would nest the quotes...in any case.

There is definitely a rock and a hard place being negotiated between on this. Oz seems intent on encouraging better content going forward and also updating the accounting. This is about as hard as negotiating Brexit and equally likely to end up unresolved sadly. 

In terms of "fixing things" making it easier to produce good content through some of the tooling changes we have discussed here is key. As new content appears if it can be shown to be appreciably better than the old then over time people will self-police. Sadly that previous sentence requires a lot of pixie dust to make it a reality, but there is a willingness to have a go. 

The second part, one that I'd be keen to examine, is better ways for a user to identify content that causes them to slow down. Your bottle-neck will be different to my bottle-neck and if we can find a way to show where the slowdowns in a scene are and make the controls to then filter/tune those items to be less intrusive then we are arming users with the ability to help themselves and we have a way forward. Jelly-dolls was intended to do this. Some love it, some hate it, my personal view is that it fails because it "corrupts" the view of the person affected and has no feedback to the user causing the problem. The typical exchange is:

"Hey Fred, why are you all weirdly coloured"
"You need to turn up you complexity limit Daphne"

Which is the same stupid mindset as "set LOD factor to the large number I plucked out of the air to see my stuff properly"

If the tool was reliable (sadly today complexity is not) then the viewer could say "Fred is slowing you down by 5 fps" (or whatever), and (though I doubt this would ever happen) it could send a message to Fred saying your current outfit is above the recommended level of complexity and is causing an average slowdown of "3fps" for users in this region. 

A lot of wishful thinking in that, and there are better ways I am sure, I don't think continually whacking creators over the head with a large stick is going to help without educating users and setting/managing expectations.

Today we have a marketplace that demands weekly/monthly new products, at prices per unit that equate to less than a cheap coffee. This mindset does not leave space for the creator to take lots of time optimising products, or at least those that do, are likely to have made the choice to step away from the mad churn of shopping events. Making it easier to optimise mesh using the inbuilt tools will never meet the levels of those willing and able to do the job manually, and that will then always leave a nice space for the artisans of efficient content to ply their trade, but having those tools at least reach a minimum bar and making it far less justifiable for people to "game" the accounting would benefit all of us in the medium to long term.

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I believe the approach that animeshs where using, where you essentially pay your complexity/LI with the higher lod, and then you get penalised for using more than a percentage of that for your lower lods was a good approach, it negates any of the lod scalping benefits and also discourage pumping two million triangles in your high lod, and since you get a free allocation for your lower lods, you essentially have no excuse to have nothing there.

Edited by Kyrah Abattoir
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40 minutes ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

I believe the approach that animeshs where using, where you essentially pay your complexity/LI with the higher lod, and then you get penalised for using more than a percentage of that for your lower lods was a good approach, it negates any of the lod scalping benefits and also discourage pumping two million triangles in your high lod.

Oh no, that is a very bad idea!

It requires standardized simplification amounts and that's not possible. Some meshes need to keep all the details for the medium, and even low models. Other meshes can be drastically reduced even at medium LoD with no noticeable visual degradation. What you end up with with such a rigid system are some meshes that are poorly optimized because ocne you get below that limit there's no need to go any further and some meshes with dodgy LoD models because the maker reduced the model below the threshold with no concern about the looks.

Even if it was possible to define such standards, how would LL know where they were?

Take a look at Linden Department of Public Works - the Moles. LDPW worries a lot about lag. They're really trying hard to keep their builds as low lag as possible and unlike commercial content creators, they have no reason to cheat the system. Yet they don't optimise their LoD models very much. They would have optimised if they had been aware of the possibilities. But they aren't, so they don't and that I think, goes for LL as a whole.

Edit:

To illustrate this, get a copy of the latest Premium gift, the Haunted campsite, then compare the tree there to the similar one I'm giving away for free here:

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/7-LI-dead-tree-OPQ-Nightmare-Tree-01s/15703344

Compare the land impact, the LoD and the render weight. That's the difference between relatively (not very) high optimisation and Mole style optimisation. A realistic level, achievable to most builders, would probably be somewhere halfway between the two.

If the standard triangle counts for the LoD models are set at the level of that Mole tree, there would be no incitement for builders to optimise at all, since once you get under those numbers, there's no more LI to save.

Edited by ChinRey
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20 hours ago, ChinRey said:

There is a chance the bug will be fixed some day. If/when that happens, fitmesh makers will have serious problems unless they have prepared for it and made sure their meshes work well even without it.

What you do is your choice.

 

23 hours ago, Kyrah Abattoir said:

Said LOD bug is in the process of being fixed. That and the various ways to exploit the complexity calculation algorythm.

It's sad that some people only understand the stick.

The self-important and self-righteous clique of tech elitist here seem to forget that there is a whole world out there of hobbyist (and not so) mesh creators who have absolutely no idea of the existence of such a thing as fitted mesh LoD bug at all. I know i didn't 3 days ago, and i only accidentally stumbled upon this thread when i came to this part of forum (which i never visit) looking for info about something completely different. Apparently, the sky is falling down, and i am convinced that a major part of mesh creators out there are not even aware of that. I am not sure why and how all of you are so sure that every mesh creator knows and cheats.

I will say it again and this will be my last time - i have no intentions of changing anything at all in my workflow. Had i not come to this part of the forum 3 days ago and read this thread, i would have never even known of such a thing as fitted mesh LoD bug, and so i will continue behaving like i never did. Everything that happens (or doesn't) concerning this bug is on LL. I, along with other unaware mesh creators out there, are not to blame for this mess.

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17 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I think it will be cool if most mesh avatars turn into a mess of broken triangles at a distance.

Well it will encourage folks to crank the LOD-factor to 11 again, asides trolls no one would want that xD

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3 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

You don’t think it will encourage better low LoD content? I iz lion, not troll!

Not for ages as it would break tons of existing stuff. Quite the contrary, if the avatar LOD-factor slider must be cranked up for fitmesh to reappear folks will not see why they should not crank up the objects one too... (well guessing fitmesh is linked to avatar LOD slider but who knows for sure until the Lab does that - better we never have to find out)

Edited by Fionalein
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2 hours ago, Elvina Ewing said:

The self-important and self-righteous clique of tech elitist here seem to forget that there is a whole world out there of hobbyist (and not so) mesh creators who have absolutely no idea of the existence of such a thing as fitted mesh LoD bug at all.

I'm not self-righteous, Elvina, I'm just stating the facts and as I clearly say: what you do about it, is your choice.

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1 hour ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I think it will be cool if most mesh avatars turn into a mess of broken triangles at a distance.

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

Well it will encourage folks to crank the LOD-factor to 11 again, asides trolls no one would want that xD

1 hour ago, Fionalein said:

Not for ages as it would break tons of existing stuff. Quite the contrary, if the avatar LOD-factor slider must be cranked up for fitmesh to reappear folks will not see why they should not crank up the objects one too... (well guessing fitmesh is linked to avatar LOD slider but who knows for sure until the Lab does that - better we never have to find out)

...

In 2020...

Worthless Linden wrote:

"Welcome to NEW IMPROVED 2020 Edition SL! We here at the Lab, working closely with the two loudest assholes amongst the 5 nobodies at the weekly waste-of-time meetings on the Beta Grid, have revamped SL with a Hella Kewl NEW Feature!

As of now, ALL the mesh you spent tens of thousands of L$ on over the last 5 years is now ruined forever, your avatars will look like crap, even if textured with Bake-Fail-on-Mesh, so since you had already taken a giant leap backwards in rendering technology with BFoM... Now is the time to return to the caves, and dress the way The Blessed St. Philip intended...

Ruth the World! ! ! ! ! !

For those of you who INSIST on wearing avatars designed LESS than 15 years ago...

Eventually new improved LoD mesh might become available from the merchants who didn't give up in disgust and ragequit from the Grid, please feel free to spend tens of thousands of L$ buying such items if and when they become available. 

Especially as we increased MP sales tax to 30% and outlawed in-world tax free shopping to help cover the loss of land revenue caused by 50 % of the population rage quitting at the destruction of their wardrobes...

...

We here hope you enjoy our new look for SL..."

...

Some noob wrote:

"Argh my eyz r bleedin, wot r dees gaym char ment 2 look lyk, dis r so suk, it look lyk it r frum 2003, dis gaym r suk, i go bak to mah Sontendsoft PlayCubeTwo an play 'Italian plumbers vs the Croco-turtles of Doom 27' wot r a tripple A title from real gaymz compny hoo noing wot dey r doin"

...

Meanwhile back here in 2018...

Yeah SL has problems, but... Concentrating on the almost unfixable instead of looking for better solutions, because some clueless, self important, Beta Grid Butthole convinced a Linden to propose a feature that was poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly implemented, and poorly documented...

Like for example the bloody awful mess that was "RCI JellyDoll AutoBlob with Inaccurate Nagwear...

"Warning - SL has detected you are WEARING A HUD... Huds may have textures on... Danger!"

What bloody idiot made THAT rubbish a standard RCI post login notification?

or 

"Warning, you have removed a system clothing alpha layer (rci impact zero) and replaced it with a different system clothing alpha layer (rci impact zero). Your avatar RCI has changed! DANGER- Some avatars near you might no longer be able to see you properly because of this..."

All this worthless crap did was unleash a tidal wave of tech-illiterate arvc bigot vigillantes, clamouring for blood...

And encourage that whole 2-assholes-from-5-nobodies group to suggest even more insanity.

Meh...

 

Edited by Klytyna
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20 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

...

In 2020...

Worthless Linden wrote:

"Welcome to NEW IMPROVED 2020 Edition SL! We here at the Lab, working closely with the two loudest assholes amongst the 5 nobodies at the weekly waste-of-time meetings on the Beta Grid, have revamped SL with a Hella Kewl NEW Feature!

As of now, ALL the mesh you spent tens of thousands of L$ on over the last 5 years is now ruined forever, your avatars will look like crap, even if textured with Bake-Fail-on-Mesh, so since you had already taken a giant leap backwards in rendering technology with BFoM... Now is the time to return to the caves, and dress the way The Blessed St. Philip intended...

Ruth the World! ! ! ! ! !

For those of you who INSIST on wearing avatars designed LESS than 15 years ago...

Eventually new improved LoD mesh might become available from the merchants who didn't give up in disgust and ragequit from the Grid, please feel free to spend tens of thousands of L$ buying such items if and when they become available. 

Especially as we increased MP sales tax to 30% and outlawed in-world tax free shopping to help cover the loss of land revenue caused by 50 % of the population rage quitting at the destruction of their wardrobes...

...

We here hope you enjoy our new look for SL..."

...

Some noob wrote:

"Argh my eyz r bleedin, wot r dees gaym char ment 2 look lyk, dis r so suk, it look lyk it r frum 2003, dis gaym r suk, i go bak to mah Sontendsoft PlayCubeTwo an play 'Italian plumbers vs the Croco-turtles of Doom 27' wot r a tripple A title from real gaymz compny hoo noing wot dey r doin"

...

Meanwhile back here in 2018...

Yeah SL has problems, but... Concentrating on the almost unfixable instead of looking for better solutions, because some clueless, self important, Beta Grid Butthole convinced a Linden to propose a feature that was poorly conceived, poorly planned, poorly implemented, and poorly documented...

Like for example the bloody awful mess that was "RCI JellyDoll AutoBlob with Inaccurate Nagwear...

"Warning - SL has detected you are WEARING A HUD... Huds may have textures on... Danger!"

What bloody idiot made THAT rubbish a standard RCI post login notification?

or 

"Warning, you have removed a system clothing alpha layer (rci impact zero) and replaced it with a different system clothing alpha layer (rci impact zero). Your avatar RCI has changed! DANGER- Some avatars near you might no longer be able to see you properly because of this..."

All this worthless crap did was unleash a tidal wave of tech-illiterate arvc bigot vigillantes, clamouring for blood...

And encourage that whole 2-assholes-from-5-nobodies group to suggest even more insanity.

Meh...

 

But broken triangle piles AFK clubs will be more popular than ever, because Rule 34!

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1 minute ago, Love Zhaoying said:

But broken triangle piles AFK clubs will be more popular than ever, because Rule 34!

Seriously though, this whole "lod bug witchhunt" thing really annoys me...

Much as I might roll my eyes at people making crap mesh with bloody awful auto-lods...

...

Your old 2003 system avi doesn't really display any lod effects at all...

But we weren't happy with those and started adding prims to ourselves, for shoes and hair and skirts...

And eventually we added unrigged mesh pieces, and those DID LoD, really badly...

People made LoDs for things but even so, you'd find that your unrigged mesh short bob cut hair would LoD to invisibility at less than 15 m range, unless people around you had their lodfactors set to 4, so...

Content creators started linking small unrigged mesh pieces that would Lod out of sight on their own to bloody great alpha blend root prims, to DELIBERATELY avoid, evade, and circumvent the lod system.

And the 2-buttholes-from-5-nobodies said NOTHING...

Along came rigged and then fitted mesh...

The Lod Levels NEVER displayed on these... So some creators figured, "What the hell, they don't do anything and increase storage size and bandwidth usage, leave them out", and nobody cared, because the stuff loaded and thus rezzed slightly faster without that unused 75% lod overhead.

And the 2-buttholes-from-5-nobodies said NOTHING...

Now, admittedly, some (many?) mesh makers were putting way too many tris in their base meshes, BUT, NOT including the lods that were never used, ACTUALLY made things better not worse, as you weren't downloading an extra 75 % of those too-many-tris in the form of never used LoDs.

As the system existed, and still exists, NOT including never-used-lods in a fitted mesh is actually the RIGHT thing to do, from a purely technical "don't waste storage and transmission bandwidth" standpoint.

NOTE:  Correctly leaving out never-used-lods is NOT a justification for using too-many-tris.

But then along came "Autoblob", and meaningless RCI scores... and Now we can't get the 2-buttholes-from-5-nobodies crew to shut up.

...

And RCI scores ARE meaningless...

The RCI for a naked bald ruthed system avi is... 1000

Export that avi from SL, and reimport as fitted mesh, minus the hair, eyes and the dreadful "onion layer" skirt mesh.

Wear the untextured fitted mesh system-avi-reimport over your system avi with an alpha

The reimported SL avatar, cut down in tris, has an RCI of about 1700

Add 3 textures, head upper torso and lower torso, less than the number used on a system avi, and they are supposed to carry a 1000 rci surcharge per texture

So, wearing 90% of a system avi, reimported as mesh, with 50% of the textures carries an RCI penalty of what? 

 4700 ish? Compared to the utterly fraudulent 1000 claimed for the system avi it's self.

Same polygon density, same textures, with noticable reductions in both tri count and texture usage, and its 4.7 times harder to render?

...

The RCI Autoblob feature with added "tech-illiterate ARC bigots" Witchhunts (tm) is one of the most MORONIC and over abused features in recent SL history...

So lets give a big thank you to whoever the 2-buttholes-from-5-nobodies were, that suggested this rubbish in the first place.

I remember AutoBlob Day well, I had been using Black Dragon, so I'd seen and discovered how bloody worthless autoBlob was back in January that year, but come summer and the "Official Release" in the SL Viewer and FS...

Suddenly the Grid was filled with people screaming "mah viewer r broken! ur all blobs!", and it was people like me who had to EXPLAIN this crap and how to deal with it to them, because the documentation, and announcements were EVERYTHING we've come to expect from LL's release of 2-from-5 BetaSnob suggested anti-features.
 

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5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

I enjoyed your rant, especially how you kept incorporating the word “butthole”. Because I’m immature.

Being British, working class, and old, I can easily think of far more appropriate terminology, but...

The Forums Auto-Censor, being PG-Murican, wouldn't allow 95% of it...
 

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2 minutes ago, Klytyna said:

Being British, working class, and old, I can easily think of far more appropriate terminology, but...

The Forums Auto-Censor, being PG-Murican, wouldn't allow 95% of it...
 

I wonder if it would catch swear words that are Brit-centric (not used in ‘Murica).

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19 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

If I shorten it to: It's too late to close the barn door after the pony horse has fled.

The horse fled in 2008 and may well have died from old age by now.

Something needs to be done, but simply encouraging the tech-illiterate witchhunts based of meaningless numbers isn't what's needed.

Nor is encouraging a large chunk of SL's slowly declining user base to rage quit all in a rush with heavy handed, poorly planned, poorly implemented, new draconian gulag rules what's needed either.

A new render engine? Hard to make sure all the viewers get updated correctly by changeover day.

Run some amazing new automated lod generator through the entire asset database to re-lod everything. Not going to happen any time soon, time and money and technology prevent this.

Close SL, delete 95 % of it's users and assets, and spend 12 months re-writing it as an Unreal Engine based MMORPGFPS combat simulator on the SonTendSoft PlayCubeTwo for the console peasant market? Let's not and say we did.

Switch to 128 bit Trinary based Quantum computers using FTL Galactic Broadband, hmmm the "subject to availability" terms on that seem to exclude our planet for now.

Hard to say what the right answer is... But that doesn't mean we can't spot the WRONG answer when it has a sign over it in 10 ft high neon letters saying "Clueless Rubbish", which seems to characterise most of the ARC bigot suggestions so far.

EDIT:

20 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

after the pony horse has fled

5b2ffa9291e36_HorsingAround2a.png.b60d047067474c0142324992adda24c3.png


 

Edited by Klytyna
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I slowly begin to wonder if this isn't saying

"I set my bet on the wrong mesh bodies when designing and now I try to lobby the ones I don't produce for out of business"

somewhere between the lines..

 

In this case the Lab should definatelly not get involved in this issue!

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Just now, Fionalein said:

I slowly begin to wonder if this isn't saying

"I set my bet on the wrong mesh bodies when designing and now I try to lobby the ones I don't produce for out of business"

somewhere between the lines..


 

In this case the Lab should definatelly not get involved in this issue!

Well done!

One of the loudest proponents of BakeFail-on-Mesh WAS a skin vendor, with a huge stockpile of old system skins that weren't worth making appliers for...

Another planned to produce the Grids FIRST specifically designed BakeFail Compatible mesh body, and corner the market on BakeFail Day and drive all the other brands out of business. fortunately for SL, THAT worthless buffoon has buggered off to Project Stupid, pretty much permanently.

One of the loudest ARC Bigots is a Furry, who wears a customised low poly, low detail fursona, based on rigged mesh thats about 5 or 6 years old, baggy trousers, baggy hoody, trainers, and seems to hate people in tight fitting clothing who look remotely HUMAN, and even seems to hate OTHER furry avis who don't use the same mesh base as them...

Others, who have complained about Brand X Bodies being "too high in ARC" are... Associated with brands that almost nobody buys...

...

THIS is why I LOATH these 2-from-5 person suggestion based Beta-Grid features, and the bloody meetings that produce them.

Somebody with a FAILED store goes to a meeting, shouts about "the evils of..." and convinced a Linden who should know better, to implement some bloody awful idea that exists purely to revive the commercial fortunes of the Beta-Grid shouter.



 

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