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Has the introduction of Mesh stiffled creativity in SL?


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9 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

It also had a bad side too, people forget that when they go on their "The way we were" stroll down memory lane.

My memory of sandboxes back in the day is a painful one. There was constant griefing so much so that I bought enough sqm to have my own personal sandbox. Back in those times I typically owned 1/4 region just so I'd have enough prims to play undisturbed. It wasn't until premium sandboxes came into being that I gave up my personal sandbox. I reduced the number of premium accounts by 3, because I no longer needed to own my own sandbox. I do love building in the premium sandboxes now. I actually use those sandboxes often and still do stick building in them.

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12 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

My memory of sandboxes back in the day is a painful one. There was constant griefing so much so that I bought enough sqm to have my own personal sandbox. Back in those times I typically owned 1/4 region just so I'd have enough prims to play undisturbed. It wasn't until premium sandboxes came into being that I gave up my personal sandbox. I reduced the number of premium accounts by 3, because I no longer needed to own my own sandbox. I do love building in the premium sandboxes now. I actually use those sandboxes often and still do stick building in them.

I probably was doing the griefing :3

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7 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

In what sense could new rules be attached to BoM?

This will be my final attempt to explain this to you.

Remember when mesh was introduced?

Ok, good, now, mesh came with new rules. Prim limits didn't apply, now it was "Land Impact" and how Land Impact was calculated was different than how prim cost is calculated.

This happened and, at that time, absolutely ZERO existing content was affected by the new rules. The only way existing content would be affected by the new rules was if you linked it to a mesh object. Once you linked it to the mesh object, the new rules would apply to the entire link set.

The new rules were hitched to the new feature: mesh.

But it didn't stop there. Shortly after, keyframe animation was introduced. You had a new way to script moving objects like elevators. Since this feature came out after mesh, it too had the new rules hitched to it. Now ,even if you built an elevator entirely out of prims, if you used the new feature to animate it, the new rules (Land Impact) would take over.

Then materials came out. Since this too came out post-mesh, this feature also had the new rules (Land Impact) hitched to them. So if you had a prim object and you applied materials to it, the new rules would kick in. 

Now, if you took this prim elevator, removed the keyframe animation feature and materials from it, it would revert to the old rules. See?

Do you understand? This is the same way LL could introduce more new rules. Wear an attachment using the BOM feature and BAM the new rules kick in. Remove that attachment and you revert to the old rules. Same with animesh. Same with any new feature LL introduces afterwards, building on the growing list of new features that you can only take advantage of by adopting to the new rules. So over time people do, at their own pace.

Now do you understand why this:

7 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

New rule ! Takes effect July 2021 .. when we will start paying attention to it .. June 2021, and our focus wont be on compliance, it will be on how to hack as much content in so we can keep using it for as long as  possible.

is a completely nonsensical argument with absolutely no bearing on anything I've EVER said relating to this topic?  Do you see now why I keep saying your arguments make no sense? That you're shadowboxing? Do you understand me now?

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52 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

I'm excited for BoM. I can't wait to see how it shakes out; I just don't think its going to shake out the way people think it will. I.E people digging in their inventory for old clothes. People love their body shine. LOVE. IT. They aren't giving that up, kind of makes it seem like a downgrade

There's absolutely no need to give up body shine. Shine and surface texture are handled by separate files than the "diffuse" (i.e. flat, colored) textures that the bake service makes, and most of the things that BOM makes sense for don't have a real effect on the shine and skin texture needed. Worn alphas will also cut through the specular and normal textures at the same time as they cut through the diffuse textures.

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14 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Not sure about Coffee, but to me BoM and animesh (which I also agree about being completely useless with current formula, aside of attachments and even then, it's questionable given 1-2 attachment limit) are similar to your "awesome" suggestions. At best it would be pointless and not used, like animesh, at worst it would be downgrade that BoM is going to be compared to appliers.

In a year or two we should necro this thread and have a good laugh at how people thought animesh was dead on arrival and would never be used.

14 hours ago, steeljane42 said:

Either way, you keep repeating same thing over and over again and still trying to push nearly all responsability for SL's problems on creators. Limit this, limit that, add new rules, restrict everything. Maybe eventually it could have a slight positive effect,

https://pennycow.blogspot.com/2019/06/just-how-much-does-unoptimized-content.html

We're talking doubling or tripling the average user's framerates, while simultaneously running at higher graphics settings than they are now. And this isn't a theoretical maybe that we can't know unless LL actually takes the necessary steps. It's how SL works right now. You optimize content, you see the results. Clear as day. This holds true on toasters with onboard graphics as much as it does with high end gaming hardware. Everyone sees a substantial performance increase. 

 If you knew how 3D rendering works, you'd know that unoptimized content will continue to choke things up no matter what improvements LL makes on their end. Let's take your autobahn analogy and make it more accurate. We have a road that is jam packed with traffic. Hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles all trying to get through, but stuck in standstill traffic jams. 90% of the traffic are empty vehicles. Let's say buses with no passengers. Just taking up space. Choking the flow of traffic. The flow of traffic is your performance. 

You're arguing that the vehicles all need engine improvements. That if the cars could drive faster this would solve the traffic jam problem.

I'm arguing that we need to get the empty buses that account for 90% of the traffic off the road. That traffic can flow more easily when the road isn't packed bumper to bumper with buses that serve no purpose.

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51 minutes ago, Blush Bravin said:

LOL .. I really dislike body shine. I still powder my nose RL. I just outfitted both Debi and Blush in new mesh heads. First thing I did was turn off all the shine for the skin. I like it on the lips but not the skin. Also, the number one criteria for buying the mesh heads I bought was that they are already BoM enabled. :D 

I know materials is an issue for some but it's not for everyone. I'm still surprised by how many people use those super bright windlights .. guess what materials hardly even shows under those windlights. I still see people who refuse to turn on advanced lighting model because they say they lag out if they turn it on. So, yes, it's an issue for some but not everyone.

Yeah, I like a nice dewy shine. A lot of people look like they rolled around in baby oil. I'd prefer it if you could make your own and use that, but a lot of times you're stuck with what the creator gave you. I know a couple of creators that said they're holding off on an update until BoM comes out. I'm sure most of them will adapt to it in some way.

I'm not surprised at the windlight thing, there's so many and people give really bad advice when it comes to WL. I've seen many group chats when someone says "I just use CaWl or Nam's all the time" and I just cringe. There's just so much misinformation floating around out there....including about mesh.

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9 minutes ago, Theresa Tennyson said:

There's absolutely no need to give up body shine. Shine and surface texture are handled by separate files than the "diffuse" (i.e. flat, colored) textures that the bake service makes, and most of the things that BOM makes sense for don't have a real effect on the shine and skin texture needed. Worn alphas will also cut through the specular and normal textures at the same time as they cut through the diffuse textures.

I thought you had to give up materials with BoM? No? Even better! I was under the impression that materials didn't work with BoM, consider me better informed! That BoM sticky made my eyes cross when I read it.

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1 minute ago, janetosilio said:

I thought you had to give up materials with BoM? No? Even better! I was under the impression that materials didn't work with BoM, consider me better informed! That BoM sticky made my eyes cross when I read it.

It doesn't work in the sense that BOM doesn't support full material mixing, only texture mixing. you could possibly mix normal maps with it but specular maps already use their alpha channel for something.

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12 minutes ago, janetosilio said:

I thought you had to give up materials with BoM? No? Even better! I was under the impression that materials didn't work with BoM, consider me better informed! That BoM sticky made my eyes cross when I read it.

Yeah, when people say BoM doesn't work with materials, what they're saying is that there's no way to apply materials via BoM. So if you wanted to use BoM for clothing, your clothes would look painted on. Way moreso than applier based clothes, because your skin materials would still be applied to your whole body, even where your skin is replaced with the clothing texture.

I'm not as up to date on BoM as Theresa and some others, but I've been seeing things recently that have piqued my interest for it. I don't think it will replace appliers, but it will almost definitely replace makeup and tattoo layers, and will have other, more creative uses since it works with the long forgotten skin appearance sliders. So you could, for instance, make a tattoo and change the tattoo's colours via the skin sliders. Neat stuff.

ETA:

Theresa can probably confirm the lack of materials support really made me upset with the project. And for the intended purpose of getting rid of clothing layers, it's still a miss. But these other uses for it, like getting rid of alpha cuts in body meshes, have begun to change my mind on it being a total wash.

Edited by Penny Patton
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You could in theory use a BOM layer to blend normal/specular maps especially since BOM ads more texture layers than the system avatar used to have. but i'm not sure of what the result would look like.

Edited by Kyrah Abattoir
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8 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

New rule ! Takes effect July 2021 .. when we will start paying attention to it .. June 2021, and our focus wont be on compliance, it will be on how to hack as much content in so we can keep using it for as long as  possible.

Just like EEP almost got out the door before the screaming started and it was yanked back to the drawing board, dispite being in open public development for months and Rider begging on the forums for people to test and submit bug reports.

Ok, just to be clear, this still has zero bearing on my arguments regarding content optimization, but the fact that the average SL user rarely knows about a new feature coming until it's released and then everyone gets in an uproar because it's buggy and full of unforeseen consequences actually is an issue I think we can all agree LL has a problem with.

So I'm thinking, maybe when there's a feature they want more people to test before release LL could set up a system so when you log in there's a random chance you might get prompted to try out a test viewer? A brief blurb on the feature being tested and the kind of feedback they're looking for. This could be a way to get a lot more feedback before the feature is about to be released gridwide. Just a random thought.

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39 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

So I'm thinking, maybe when there's a feature they want more people to test before release LL could set up a system so when you log in there's a random chance you might get prompted to try out a test viewer? A brief blurb on the feature being tested and the kind of feedback they're looking for. This could be a way to get a lot more feedback before the feature is about to be released gridwide. Just a random thought.

After so many years of being an LL guinea pig, most people aren't interested in volunteering to be a lab rat. Can't say I blame them.

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7 minutes ago, Selene Gregoire said:

After so many years of being an LL guinea pig, most people aren't interested in volunteering to be a lab rat. Can't say I blame them.

I get that, but at the same time I suspect most SL users are pretty oblivious to it. And LL would only need a small percentage of users to agree in order to get more feedback.

 

Actually, scratch that, almost nobody is going to care enough to log into the Jira to give feedback. And only a fraction would probably feel like coming to the forum to try and hunt down a thread to provide feedback in. And none of them would show up to the in-world meetings.

Maybe what LL really needs here is a better formaat for people to submit feedback. Like when you go to log out of a project viewer it could pop up a feedback dialog.

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17 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

I get that, but at the same time I suspect most SL users are pretty oblivious to it. And LL would only need a small percentage of users to agree in order to get more feedback.

 

Actually, scratch that, almost nobody is going to care enough to log into the Jira to give feedback. And only a fraction would probably feel like coming to the forum to try and hunt down a thread to provide feedback in. And none of them would show up to the in-world meetings.

Maybe what LL really needs here is a better formaat for people to submit feedback. Like when you go to log out of a project viewer it could pop up a feedback dialog.

I think you're on the right track now. KISS Keep It Short & Simple... quick and easy.

Since LL is capable of sending gridwide messages (via local chat and region notices), they could utilize those methods to ask for volunteers and provide a link to the viewer download. Or rather to the page the download link is on and where any pertinent information would be posted. Such as anything specific to watch for, cautions about things they know are wonky but don't interfere with testing, the steps they need to take (if any). Streamline the process and give it a little "professional polish" and they may find themselves with more volunteers than they need, just like back in the day when lots of people used to complain they couldn't get into the test grid because it was full!

ok So the test grid doesn't have a set capacity but it sure sounded good! lol People used to complain about not being able to get on to <insert name of test grid that momentarily escapes me> for a number of reasons. That hasn't improved that I can see. I mean, I don't see people complaining about not being able to access nearly as much as I used to but that is an area that still needs improvement. I haven't bothered to try in several years now because I just can't be arsed to jump through hoops in order to do so. Not when I can set up a test grid on my own pc. Of course, when it comes to scripts it doesn't work so well but for pretty much everything else it works excellently.

So... what's the incentive to volunteer to be a lab rat? Besides the feel goods that comes from helping and the satisfaction of knowing you had a part in bringing a new bug feature to the grid. Something a bit more tangible.

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Prims: Evil, nasty, wicked, disgraceful conspiracy to drive users to mesh modelling for SL. :o

Mesh: Once you know how, you don't create for SL anymore because there's real world money to be made.

Conclusion: :D💲xD💲 & stress free SL ❤️

Ps: Test grid was Aditi?

Edited by Maryanne Solo
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6 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

So... what's the incentive to volunteer to be a lab rat? Besides the feel goods that comes from helping and the satisfaction of knowing you had a part in bringing a new bug feature to the grid. Something a bit more tangible.

What's the incentive in shaping the future of SL? I do wonder myself.

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13 hours ago, Selene Gregoire said:

I think you're on the right track now. KISS Keep It Short & Simple... quick and easy.

We added a feedback button to Catznip up by the L$ balance, submissions are posted directly into our JIRA. Sometimes we get bug reports, use cases, general feedback, kind words or incoherent angst about something LL did.

Of all the features and work put into a decade of Catznip, that one simple button and the web form that back it up is one of our favorite things.

 

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On 6/30/2019 at 3:37 PM, CoffeeDujour said:

Spanning a decade of TPV viewer development like it was 2 weeks, and Kirsten's only had the features it had because he lifted them from Linden dev repositories, much like Niran who took that protect over does now!

Much like i am doing now? Aha. Are you implying my Viewer is only used because it offers features that are still in development, aka "Bleeding Edge"?

That "Bleeding Edge" idea died with Nirans Viewer.

What i'm doing now is fundamentally different to what i was doing back then with Nirans Viewer which had completely different goals compared to Black Dragon now. Nirans Viewer was much more focused on continueing the spirit of Kirstens Viewer and sprinkling in some own modifications while Black Dragon is a whole different approach of the same spirit with much more focus on "self-feature-development". Aside from the extremely far and few scattered features from other Viewers, namely RLVa, Exodus Post Processing and Tofu's shader improvements almost everything deviating from the LL default has been done by me, thats the solar opposite of what Nirans Viewer was a collection of features from all Viewers (except Firestorm). Nirans Viewer was a learning experience, it was important for the development of my own coding skills which at the time i started continueing Kirstens were practically 0, i had never seen code back then, whereas now im throwing the "first ever new inworld content creation tool around since a long time in the history of SL" (namely the Poser, btw that's basically what Oz said), that is an extreme jump.

Maybe you (or more like Kitty in this context) should feel a bit more honored that i took your "do-it-yourself" approach with things and stopped taking stuff from everywhere.

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9 hours ago, CoffeeDujour said:

Damn it took you almost a week to notice, I think that'a new personal best :D

There was a time where i searched all forums and google for my name multiple times per day. Those times are long gone, i just occasionally search my name and my Viewer's name nowadays and mostly just when im really bored so unless someone mentions me: @NiranV Dean its unlikely that i will immediately respond.

Edited by NiranV Dean
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On 7/6/2019 at 2:27 AM, NiranV Dean said:

Much like i am doing now? Aha. Are you implying my Viewer is only used because it offers features that are still in development, aka "Bleeding Edge"?

That "Bleeding Edge" idea died with Nirans Viewer.

What i'm doing now is fundamentally different to what i was doing back then with Nirans Viewer which had completely different goals compared to Black Dragon now. Nirans Viewer was much more focused on continueing the spirit of Kirstens Viewer and sprinkling in some own modifications while Black Dragon is a whole different approach of the same spirit with much more focus on "self-feature-development". Aside from the extremely far and few scattered features from other Viewers, namely RLVa, Exodus Post Processing and Tofu's shader improvements almost everything deviating from the LL default has been done by me, thats the solar opposite of what Nirans Viewer was a collection of features from all Viewers (except Firestorm). Nirans Viewer was a learning experience, it was important for the development of my own coding skills which at the time i started continueing Kirstens were practically 0, i had never seen code back then, whereas now im throwing the "first ever new inworld content creation tool around since a long time in the history of SL" (namely the Poser, btw that's basically what Oz said), that is an extreme jump.

Maybe you (or more like Kitty in this context) should feel a bit more honored that i took your "do-it-yourself" approach with things and stopped taking stuff from everywhere.

I really liked Kirsten's viewer and when Nirans Viewer came along it was a pleasure to use. But Black Dragon leaves me cold. Its not that I don’t like it or think its bad, I just don’t have the skills to use it, at least that is the best I can come up with thinking about why I don’t like it. I have installed it two or three times only to just give up on it.

But seeing this post I now know why Nirans Viewer felt so good to use, it was a beautiful piece of work.

My viewer of choice now is Alchemy and I’ve been using it for well over a year now. I keep Kokua installed and updated along with the Second Life viewer but I use Alchemy 90% of the time now, but the poor thing hasn’t been updated for about two years now. I will hate to see it go away, its comfortable.

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7 hours ago, Teagan Tobias said:

My viewer of choice now is Alchemy and I’ve been using it for well over a year now. I keep Kokua installed and updated along with the Second Life viewer but I use Alchemy 90% of the time now, but the poor thing hasn’t been updated for about two years now. I will hate to see it go away, its comfortable.

Alchemy is, as far as the TPV community know, dead. You're strongly advised to start checking out other active TPV's as breaking changes will be coming.

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16 hours ago, Teagan Tobias said:

I really liked Kirsten's viewer and when Nirans Viewer came along it was a pleasure to use. But Black Dragon leaves me cold. Its not that I don’t like it or think its bad, I just don’t have the skills to use it, at least that is the best I can come up with thinking about why I don’t like it. I have installed it two or three times only to just give up on it.

But seeing this post I now know why Nirans Viewer felt so good to use, it was a beautiful piece of work.

My viewer of choice now is Alchemy and I’ve been using it for well over a year now. I keep Kokua installed and updated along with the Second Life viewer but I use Alchemy 90% of the time now, but the poor thing hasn’t been updated for about two years now. I will hate to see it go away, its comfortable.

I don't see how Nirans Viewer was "easier" to use when Nirans Viewer was a lot more technical and offered a lot less help all around, aside from overall offering basically the same UI with less consistent look and much more places "untouched" e.g still Linden UI.

I spent a lot of time polishing the usability without dumbing everything down, tooltips everywhere, explanations, a discord group for help, many extra UI features like default buttons, revert to last value, grouping of options, warnings when you are about to do something stupid... the list goes on.

Overall BD is exactly the same what NV was just more polished, less of a hastily thrown together pile of stuff.

 

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