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Prim Equivalence Explained


Runitai Linden
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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

 

I do agree with you that Mesh is an ADDITIONAL technology and will always be.  I could have been a sculpty replacement technology in the years to come but that wont be the case.

Yes, backwards compatibility. There is no need to ban sculpts from SL, just a need to ban the use of them in places where they don't make sense. nobody will lag out because of 2048 faces you see in the distance as a mountainscape. People will get poor performance from 200 sculpted prim boots using a sculpt for every metal lacing ring and every other lace and every metal stud.

It will take time, even most builders aren't that well informed, maybe LL should address that some more, although handing over the tool is usually how SL works and I think it works well. If even a lot of builders are ignorant about the new possibilities and limitations, you can't expect customers embracing it right away. Right away that is, eventually they will.

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I agree with you on the EVENTUALLY.   This slowwww adoption of Mesh I predicted last August (I said Q2 2012 but now even I think I was far too optimistic) was so easy to predict for those that looked at the world pragmatically.

An amazing new technology that replaces a HUGELY entrenched older technology will take a ton of time, promotion, education, bug fixing, culture & systems adoption, etc. before you can start to turn the tide and move this new technology to reach a CRITICAL MASS of Adoption.

LL has so far done very little to help move Mesh to become the new norm.  All your Mesh Loving builders that have lived and breathed Mesh duing LL's long closed beta and have been deep dive mesh modeling techies might think the LL has done everything in their powers to promote MESH.    Guess what?  They havent.

Outside your insulated Mesh community that you all live in within SL.... a larg majority of SL residents still either have not even heard of Mesh, or have heard the name but have no clue what Mesh is, or they dont care about mesh because they have no technical smarts to understant the technical superiority of mesh. 

Since LL has done little to promote the culture of it, most SL Residents have not even upgraded their viewers to see mesh.  I have realized just how resistant SL residents are about mesh when this past couple weeks when I wanted to show my first mesh models to all my friends.... more than 1/2 could not see it since they didnt have the latest mesh viewers nor were they inspired to upgrade the viewers to see my models.  I know this infuriates you all and you are puzzled but this is how most of the SL Population is.  They wont change unless something inspires them to change.

LL has not promoted mesh to the big public.  They have made mesh development hugely more complex to import into SL than sculpties.  They have not taken the bull by the horns and educated all the Sculpty creators / Merchants to better understand mesh and incent them to start creating mesh.   And they penalize builders with larger upload costs then sculpties.  The least they could have done is not charge an UPLOAD fee to further influence quicker adoption.

So again... although you all believe LL has done everything to speed up adoption of Mesh..... SORRY... NOT TRUE.

The 1000's of Sculpty makes have countless Sculpty products on the market and 100% comfort on how to make more sculpty products very quickly.  And they costs to create and the lower and fix costs keep them making more sculpties.  Many of us Sculpty Creators will slowly move to Mesh over 2012 and into 2013.  But until we do this... Mesh adoption will be very slow.

It will eventually take over as the dominent technology over sculpties... but not for a couple years.  LL could easily speed this up but we all know LL is not a Customer Smart company.  They are a culture of Tech Geeks that just like to sit in their Labs and develop new features and throw it over the fence and go on to the next feature.  They dont even like fixing old tech bugs on Jira...

So... Mesh will evolve... just not as fast as you all would dream it could.

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I guess that last post wasn't directly ment for me...

Anyway, we agree that mesh is the better building block, given an exception here and there. You see more than I do, probably because of the different objects we usually encounter.

The change taking a long time is not an issue I think. Embracement takes a long time, especially when people are used to something, sculpts in this case. RL and SL are no different regarding that. We still build with bricks, how medieval is that? It might be best for everyone if SL eases into mesh, but that doesn't mean we don't need enthusiastic mesh builders. Any tree makers around? :)

There are some holes in the mesh implementation, but did you write a jira or did you just complain to the people making good use of the new possibilities?

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"They wont change unless something inspires them to change."

Exactly. If anyone is determined to accelerate mesh adoption, they have to make stuff must-have enough to get people to make the changes. It's up to mesh propopnents to do the convincing. Not for me; I am much too lazy.

"The least they could have done is not charge an UPLOAD fee"

The beta upload fees were MUCH higher when they were introduced towards the end of the closed beta. When everyone told them that would make mesh dead in the water on release, they set the current values, supposedly as a temporary measure (see kb). I hope they don't go back to the higher fees. There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some are already much too high. My 1089 vertex sculpty-like landscape physics shape, with just boxes for visible mesh, was L$ 53. I don't know the algorithm or the motivations behind it.

I think it should be a L$ 10 fixed rate, like textures and everything else (if I remember that right).

 

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

I agree with you on the EVENTUALLY.   This slowwww adoption of Mesh I predicted last August (I said Q2 2012 but now even I think I was far too optimistic) was so easy to predict for those that looked at the world pragmatically.


I'm selling meshes since september. The first monthes they did do nothing but catch dust on the selves. This has changed since December, since then they started selling much better. Guess this has to do with the meshviewer Phoenix release. Also I often get customer request to make things. Few months ago, when I asked a customer "Do you mind if I make it in mesh in stead of sculpt" the answer was always: "No, I want a sculpty". That has also changed in a few months time. People still start asking for sculpties, but when I think that a mesh is better for what they want (which is not always the case) and I explain them why I remark that people are more and more open for the mesh alternative, and some are even very enthousiastic about it.

In my sales since January this year I see no signifaction difference between the sales of sculpties and the sales of mesh, they both sell as well. Some meshes are doing better then others, but that is the same with sculpts. 

I don't know how it is along the rest of the grid, but the adoption of mesh by customers is has been going must faster then I had expected.

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

"They wont change unless something inspires them to change."

Exactly. If anyone is determined to accelerate mesh adoption, they have to make stuff must-have enough to get people to make the changes. It's up to mesh propopnents to do the convincing. Not for me; I am much too lazy.

"The least they could have done is not charge an UPLOAD fee"

The beta upload fees were MUCH higher when they were introduced towards the end of the closed beta. When everyone told them that would make mesh dead in the water on release, they set the current values, supposedly as a temporary measure (
). I hope they don't go back to the higher fees. There would be much wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some are already much too high. My 1089 vertex sculpty-like landscape physics shape, with just boxes for visible mesh, was L$ 53. I don't know the algorithm or the motivations behind it.

I think it should be a L$ 10 fixed rate, like textures and everything else (if I remember that right).

 

I totally agree with you on the upload fee.  At minimum LL should be doing everything possible to encourage development of Mesh by setting the upload to a fixed 10L like most other imports. 

At best IF LL really had some Business Smarts (and most of us know that Customer Service, Business Smarts, and Business Development Strategy are major weaknesses for LL), they should have gone hard on promoting Mesh to the general builder / merchant community and throw the Merchants a big incentive of FREE MESH UPLOADS for 2012... then return to a 10L per upload in 2013.

To me LL is double dip gouging their customers.  They already are charging heavy LI charges on rezzing the mesh but then also discourages mesh development by penalizing builders from creating mesh with the highest upload fees of all import fess.

I am not even sure how upload fees are calculated and why they are charged.  Uploading is a 1 time event.  Why would there be a formula to charge you 53L to upload a mesh?  Mine were all under 20L but I am not even sure what factors calculate a higher upload and what the logic was for doing this?

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

They already are charging heavy LI charges on rezzing the mesh but then also discourages mesh development by penalizing builders from creating mesh with the highest upload fees of all import fess.

When are you going to stop spreading this lie? Just because you are getting a higher landimpact, doesn't mean that's the case for all objects. It's not even the case for most objects. In plenty of cases (if not most) a L$ 30 mesh can replace more than 4 sculpties so it is actually cheaper to upload or rezz.

I agree on the upload charge, for "embracement" reasons it should be free, even if it is for only a limited time. I don't know the algorithm for the upload charge, but again, it's not rocket science. The less geometry and UV maps and whatnot you use, the lower the costs will be. Strangely enough never under L$ 11. They could simplify this and give polygon limits or vertex limits in blocks of L$10.

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The algorithm is one of the problems. The physics effect on the fee does not change with size. It can't, because if it did people would circumvent it by uploading at the cheapest size and scaling inworld. It looks like it uses the worst-case size to calculate the fee. That's why my 64x64 shape with 2048 triangles is L$53, while it's full-size (triangle-based) physics weight is lower than the weight of many models that have much lower upload fees. So if the weight is comensurate with resource consumpotion, then the fee is not.

You also nearly identify another problem. If you upload a whole load of models together in one dae, the fee can be much lower than uploading them separately. Surely that's not sensible?

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Drongle McMahon wrote:

 

You also nearly identify another problem. If you upload a whole load of models together in one dae, the fee can be much lower than uploading them separately. Surely that's not sensible?

If you upload a whole bunch of models in one dae, how do you get your LoDs in? never tried...

and if somehow the datatraffic of uploading itself is included in the upload fee, it is sensible... anyway I don't really care if an upload costs 1 cent or 2, but they could make it more transparent or "simple", I fully agree on that.

i think physics are left out of the upload or have a set value. That means the fee is based on data traffic between server and viewer. (That ofcourse kind of includes the renderweight, but without the scale factor, which makes sense).

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Oh no. I am sure the physcs has a big effect. The data traffic is the same whether they are together or separate, except for some relatively small per-session overhead, I guess. You just upload a scene with multiple meshes, the same number in each LOD file. As far as I have been able to make out, which one goes with which is determined by the order of the geometry tags in the collada file. In Blender 2.49 this is in turn determined by the alphabetical ordert of the object names, and is therefor easy to control. Other Blender versions and other software is likely to be different and may not offer a way of controlling the order. (Gaia's stuff will fix this for the later Blenders, I think). I have had rare occasions where the rule appeared not to have been followed, but that may have been error on my part. The objects arrive as a coalesced or linked object, depending on sizes. Their relative locations are as they were in the scene. If they are linked, you just unlink them and there you are.

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Yes physics are ofcourse depending on geometry, I'm sure that's included, size has some, but little impact on the physics as far as I know.... btw I wasn't talking about the linked multi mesh upload, just single ones.

...Don't ask me how I mistake apples for pears, but I apparantly do from time to time:)

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