Vivienne Daguerre Posted July 4, 2011 Author Share Posted July 4, 2011 Another piece of advice I would give would be this: Do not link mixed builds of prims, sculpts and mesh. This will in many or most cases (not sure at this point) result in an increased prim cost. Instead, pick them up and sell them as coalesced objects. Make sure they are copiable for your customer will likely mess things up if they have to take the item back into inventory to rez it later somewhere else. Or, you can package these items with rez faux, rez foo, builder's buddy or other like scripts to make it easier for the customer to rez them in world and move them about.This is going to be a big annoyance to people, not being able to link parts into objects without the prim count exploding. People will work around it this way, so it does not mean you will see less of the high cost things in world. However, Linden Lab should prepare for an angry backlash on this one and brace themselves to deal with complaints about the inconvenience of not being able to link mixed tool objects. Once they do finalize their accounting, and I fear that this may be it, we should start an advice to builders thread so we are prepared to answer questions that will inevitably come to us as beta testers of mesh. Once it is all finalized, ready to go to the main grid, I will write a blog with a review of mesh and recommendations for its use. As things stand right now, I would have to say it is good for a very limited range of use. All in all, it is a disappointment. I hope someone at Linden Lab spots the potential for a Public Relations mess and steps in to fix this. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaia Clary Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 So that would mean, mesh fails due to pricing, not due to technology ? Can it be that this is a wonderfull example for missfit to market ? Or the true plans are somewhat different. I tried to play the "if i where a Linden..." game. And this helped me to understand what might go on here. Of course my thoughts are highly speculative (i have no numbers on which i can back my arguments), so be kind with me and don't beat me for having the wrong ideas in my mind ;-) ( I am no merchant, no Landlord, and no Linden) So... When i where a Linden with a technical focus, then my main concern would be to reduce data traffic. Hence i would focus on getting the amount of data to be sent to viewers as low as possible. Now as a matter of fact, Sculpties need less data to be transfered. They have only one texture, the UV-layout is fixed, the number of verts is 1089 at maximum, they have no vertex normals to be transfered... So when i where a LL with technical focus, then i would propagate Sculpted Prims. When i where a Linden with a sense for market, i would ask myself which sort of stuff is mostly wanted ? Buildings ? Environments ? 3D sculpturing ? Clothing ? Avatar attachments ? ... I realy have no idea about the numbers, but it appears to me that Avatar's most interest is to look good... realy i do not know if this is true, but i think that many many users of SL do not have land. So if they ever buy something, then it is Avatar-attachments. Hence if i where a LL i would look deeply into that area. And i would see that meshes could give me a lot of benefits here regarding fighting lag... Ok, lets expand the game : When i where a Region owner, then i want to get my Land looking better than the land of my neighbour ... I want my house to look good, i want to give a nice environment to my friends and visitors, the best of the best is just good enough for me. If i had a shop, i want my visitors to talk about my shop and i want them to get back not only because my stuff is the best of all, but also my shop must look accordingly. If i had a mall, i want my renters to be happy and paying. So i might (hypotheticaly)... not care about prims. I have enough prims and i just use half of them anyways, so if i can get something that looks better, i might not care about the PE... So i will buy this phantastic stunning ultra cool looking statue of this old roman emperor, well ok it costs 200 Prims... but why not ? it looks soooo coooool .... I WANT it. If i where a poor land owner with a bit of land and limitted prim count, then i would want to limit my costs and rezz as many stuff as i can for as low prims as possible. OK i will buy this 1 prim full interior Sculpty, and this cool 1 Prim Piano and i am happy. I do not mind that it is not realy the nicest of everything. Its mine and its cool. so i can live with Prims and Sculpties. Hey, the builders are GOOOD in Sculpted Prims. So why bother with high cost stuff ? If i where here to just chat and look around whats going on, then i would be mostly interested in getting nice clothes, nice attachments... This nice looking jewelery, i would not care about putting on shoes with 60000 Triangles for each of them (because i do not know about such technical issues) , but if that other shoe looks so much better, i would prefer that one. i do not care about the material it is made off... Oh, myabe i WOULD care and heck, mesh is cool, so my mesh shoe looks better than my sculpty shoe. anyways, 200 Prims both ... so pfff... hey, the new one makes me walk faster... (less lag ;-) ) So i am happy with mesh (maybe without knowing) ... enough ... So i could imagine that mesh (on avatar) replaces high lagging sculpted attachments by lower lagging rigged attachments. And mesh (on ground) opens up different markets (architectural-, highest precision, machinima environments, Artwork) , and does NOT replace existing markets. Does that make any sense ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Vivienne Daguerre Posted July 4, 2011 Author Share Posted July 4, 2011 Another piece of crucial advice: Provide prominent warnings to your customers to not attempt to link modifiable mixed tool objects. If they are unaware of the bizarre and senseless accounting system, they may think "Oh, the maker should have linked these. Don't know why he didn't." If they link them, the prim count may explode (especially if there is a torus in the mix) and carefully placed objects may be returned to them from their parcels. You should include this warning on the vendor graphic, on the SLX website, perhaps on separate signs placed in your store, and on a notecard included with the item.Linden Lab may wish to put a feature in the viewer that was in some third party viewers to "Return to last coordinates" so things from lost and found can be placed easily back at their original locations. If not, they should have extra staff on hand to handle sim roll back requests and deal with complaints. Unfortunately, we as content creators have to be prepared to deal with angry customer backlash on this one too. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
guY Ralior Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 I waited for a while to start working with mesh in SL as for me it is something I work with everyday at work. I was thinking that they would get all the bugs out then I would give it a go. On my first time logging on mesh grid to test my pipeline I uploaded a simple cylinder, it came in micro in size and was 2 prim already. Then knowing that mesh does not have a 10' x 10' limitation of course the next thing is lets make it big, I stopped making it bigger when it reached 26 prims I am not sure of the size of it at that point but def not 64m, and for me test over there is on reason to build with mesh. With the same sculpted piece I can make it 10 x 10 and it's only 1, I can stack them or make them part of a radius for a much larger diameter cylinder so in just basic terms mesh doesn't make sense that way. Sculpties still take the cake there in the present accounting system regardless of the demand on the system, that isn't affecting me other than lag at certain times, the Ls being drained from the wallet is affecting me more and something I am much more likely to do something about. To much lag I just log off, but the prims or PEs don't stop having to be paid for when I log off. BUT for me mesh is awesome and I think it will be for anybody looking at it this way in that now I can create anything I want not just avatars but characters and all the stuff that they will have on them, that now if done are so many pieces and look funny with all the seams but I and a lot still use them cause they want the look. If we ever get to change the skeleton and use normal maps its over, SL as far as the avatar side is gonna take a huge leap and I can't wait and hope desperately that happens. You gotta start somewhere and hopefully this is the start. This does not take into account lag or server demand or anything just purely looking at the numbers I already do to make sure I don't go over prim budget and can still build if needed. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 Three comments in answer to some recent posts... We are stuck with the basaic characteristics of the PE mechanism, but not necessarily with the values of the parameters in the equations. These take no effort at all to change. There is already far more work needed to fix serious bugs in the calculations than would be required for parameter changes. If the developers were to claim they don't have the resource to change parameters, those claims would be disingenuous to say the least. I don't think they did make such claims. The data size for download of sculpt maps is much less than the bytes in the uncompressed image. Lossless compression does not mean no compression. Prpoerly made sculpt maps, where the unused pixels (at least just under 3/4) are not interpolated but are the same colour as used pixels, are highly compressible. While it is true that mesh could save a great deal of gpu strain compared to sculpties of the same shapes, there is no incentive to use them that way. Attachment designers are free to replace a 20480 triangle ten-sculpty boot with a 100,000 triangle mesh because it looks nicer. There is nothing to stop them doing that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dain Shan Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 Im aware of that. Maybe i choosed the wrong words again. As for Sculpt maps .. The memory Monitor for my DRAM on the GPU tells me other things. As for the Attachments .. you are right. Nothing will, at the moment, stop that. Even more reason to point out the flaws Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 That gpu memory monitor sounds good. Can I get one (nvidia GT440)? I was mentioning compression only thinking about bandwidth issues. I don't know whether images can still be compressed in gpu mamory ar whether they have to be completely uncompressed there. Anyone? If I remember correctly, the code that generates the triangle list from the sculpt map includes the culling of zero area (and very tiny*) triangles before vthe triangle list is passed to the gpu. Sculpties using vertex squeezing to make sharp edges and LOD resistance will have lots of zero area triangles. Thus we are perhaps being more unfair to those sculpties than they deserve when we say they consume 2048 renedered triangles. *I remember a post about parts of a multi-sculpty shoe that disappeared for this reason when the vertex columns were too close together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pandorah Ashdene Posted July 4, 2011 Share Posted July 4, 2011 Marcthur Goosson wrote: ... (I also found a bug: texture faces switching when changing LOD) ... You might have stumbled over that one: https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/CTS-603? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Medhue Simoni Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 arton Rotaru wrote: In the Mesh Viewer we can set almost 10GB for cache. That's not a TB, but better than before. If you ask me, it should be a gig by default, or at least half, and a clear cache button. Granted, I have my own sim, which is never that crowded, and I don't use alot of prims. That said, the only time I see any delay at all, it has to do with things loading. We've had 6 person capture the flag battles with half of us decked out as monsters, with lots of particles. We had to move from flag to flag, and there were also half a dozen people in my store. I had my cached turned way up and I was almost lag free the whole time, with graphics at a decent level, no shadows, but a 128 draw distance. Oh, and we were all using 27 prim sculpty automatic AKs. So, our huds are all working, our weapons, health packs being used, ammo rezzers rezzing, flags counting, players dying, paritcles everywhere and most of the delays were rezzing and loading issues. If my cache was low tho, I would have seen delays until everything rezzed. I just feel like our default cache was set at a time when 80 gigs was alot. The average pc game is 6 gigs now. I think people can expect to set aside a couple gigs for a place like SL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 I believe it is 1024MB by default now (though, I'm not sure about that). But a Clear Cache button is there for sure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chodai Yoshikawa Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Hi all, It seems that PE is here to stay with only small possible tweaks after hitting the main grid. Hopefully Drongle's PE calculation posts will help clean up their estimation and reporting code. For normal builds on a sim it appears single sculpty with scripts wins over single mesh even without script. For more complex builds where texture/UV and LOD benefits come into play then mesh looks better ( although probably at higher PE cost slightly , provided not linked with other prim types). Not much we can do about this now if the Lindens are going to implement PE as it currrently is. One area still up for grabs (as far as I know...who knows what the Lindens are cooking) is the attachment cost of mesh vs prims/sculpties. The metric used here is ARC. The Lindens have stated that the ARC is wrong at the moment when wearing mesh and will be changed after the start of main grid operations. Attachments are lower in sim costs due to physics being turned off, but still suffer the transfer/server costs with each asset compared to prims. Multiple sculpy attachements have a higher transfer cost over prims and may or may not be more than the mesh equivilent depending upon design. Viewer rendering costs however can be made lower with properly designed mesh and LODS over prims and sculpts I feel. The Lindens have the opportunity here to present the *actual* costs of sculpty and prim types in conjunction with mesh in the determination of ARC I think. They can't/don't/won't intoduce these costs to sculpties/prims on normal builds as it will break a lot of things. They can here I feel as the effect is less devastating. I hope that they do the following with ARC: * Accurately represent costs of the prim/sculpt/mesh as attachment in the ARC * LIMIT the ARC able to be worn by an avatar to XXXX (ie attempt to wear anything that raises the number over that fails with message) This will level the playing field for mesh in the field of attachements at least, rewarding those who build well and those users that purchase low load attachments. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dain Shan Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Ok why did my post about DRAM mon itoring deleted ? Drongle.. can i send you that via other means ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Maybe it's not just a monitor? :matte-motes-agape: Never mind. I can do without it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Dain Shan Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 I know what you mean.. and no Its only a Monitor, no deconding and saving is possible with this one Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Charlar Linden Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 This is a little off-topic, but after reading this thread I just wanted to... thank all of you contributing to this thread as well as those participating in this forum and the mesh beta program for the mature, thoughtful tone of your communications. You've had a tremendous positive impact on mesh development, and the manner that you help those who want to learn is both admirable and a testament to the core nature of Second Life. Charlar Linden Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 Vivienne Daguerre wrote: the barrel is so low poly that it looks very clunky and chunky. I took the low poly barrel out and linked in the better looking sculpted barrel. The total linkset count was still 8 prims, unchanged. It looks like there is no advantage at all in using very low poly meshes over sculpties. If the Lindens want us to use sculpties over mesh, then this accounting system is the way to go. I would suggest it is not a good idea, for more sculpties over mesh means a more intensive drain on resources. That's what bugs me the most about the current mesh accounting. To me it makes not much sense introducing mesh to Second Life and have it penalised so that we only can build even clunkier objects, to get a reasonable prim count, than existing content, while SL has to compete more and more with other, in the meantime amazing looking games and entertainment like PS3, XBox, or PC games. IMHO mesh should be the tool to make Second Life look stunning in the future. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 The spaceship(s) i use to test mesh flying works great so not all is lost. As long as it is attachments and vehicles then mesh is great. Only structures that must be rezzed on land appear to be burned by LL. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 Yup I know. I made a mesh car and a mesh boat myself during the open beta. Only thing is, watching the prim count increasing more and more, over the month was a bit frustrating. The first version of my car was 27 prims 6 month ago. Right now it is 90 PE with countless optimisations inbetween. So having it rezzed on our homestaed will be difficult. :matte-motes-impatient: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ann Otoole Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 rez it on LL land to use it. Costs zero. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arton Rotaru Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 yah, but I like it so much, I want to take it with me in my bed, you know.. :matte-motes-bashful-cute-2: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mikki Miles Posted July 6, 2011 Share Posted July 6, 2011 your mesh sink went up to 10 now... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gearsawe Stonecutter Posted July 8, 2011 Share Posted July 8, 2011 A couple months ago I was thrilled with mesh made a fun little interactive chalk board device had 222 links in it, all mesh, only two scripts. The prim cost was 111 now the PE is 224. Now find it hard to believe someone will buy as is. There are still many things I can do with mesh which were not possible with normal prims. I now don't care as much to optimize low poly stuff since it offers no benefit to cost and only causes visual problems in the end. Sure it is nice of me to do so and the only selling point is it will render fast on your machine! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaia Clary Posted July 8, 2011 Share Posted July 8, 2011 Gearsawe Stonecutter wrote: I now don't care as much to optimize low poly stuff since it offers no benefit to cost and only causes visual problems in the end. Sure it is nice of me to do so and the only selling point is it will render fast on your machine! From what i found regarding costs: Reducing the lowest visible LOD has high impact on resource costs. In fact it is the only way to get streaming costs down to reasonable numbers. I found that using a billboard-like approach for the lowest visible LOD gives very acceptable look, and reduces the Streaming costs. Please note that the lowest visible LOD varies with object size! For small objects up to a Bounding Box radius of ~5.43 meters (the distance between BBOX center and the BBOX corners) you can optimize the lowest LOD. If your meshes get bigger, then the lowest LOD is no longer used and the next higher LOD rules the price, and so forth until your mesh BBOX radius exceeds the size of ~43.4 meter where only the highest LOD is taken into account. Here is a table summarizing the numbers: BBOX-Radius (smallest) BBOX-Radius (biggest) max cubic BBOX (example) Lowest visible LOD Comment > 0 5.43 <6,6,6> LOWEST Costs can be reduce best with meshes <= this size 5.43 10.86 <12.5,12.5,12.5> LOW 10.86 43.4 <50,50,50> MEDIUM 43.4 > 43.4 HIGH Objects above this size only use highest LOD from any distance. So slicing up a huge object into many smaller parts and import them as a link set would be an option for making buildings etc. with less PE (i refer to Drongle's experiments on that) Always add a physics mesh, because the default setting uses the medium mesh as physics shape and creates a fitting Convex hull, which will probably yield very high physics costs. Better use the lowest LOD for physics or generate your own physics mesh. Optimize your object so that it looks good with medium LOD. Keep HIghes LOD for nice to haves but not realy needed details. This seems to make the overall behaviour of the objects much smoother regarding look from a distance. Give up Quad-centric modelling. It appears to me that Triangle centric modelling gives better ways for optimizing at least the streaming costs. Not that i say "only use triangles". Quads are good for texturing, but triangles are good for reducing. So you will have to find out what goes best with your particular object. But do not avoid triangles !!! Learn how to make optimal UV-maps. You can get rid of MANY faces if you make a proper UV-mapping. And you can enhance the look of your mesh significantly if you know how to unwrap. Collecting many mesh objects into one linkset reduces the PE per mesh. If you physics cost for a link set rules the PE, then set children in your linkset to physics type NONE wherever possible. That may reduce physics cost again. I am not sure but from my very first experiments with upload costs i guess you can get back to reasonable costs per mesh when you upload a scene with many objects. So you can distribute the base cost of 150 L$ over all objects in the import. You later can unlink them again and use them as you like (but take care of point 3.) above) I am not filled with ehthusiasm when i see what is happening with mesh. But i would rather first check out the features before going into criticism. And it would realy help us to get some constructive input from the LL about where they want us to use mesh and in which way they want us to use mesh. And why they want us to do so. So maybe the intention behind all this is to move from single object productions to scenic development ? And maybe we will see entire scenes to get into the market and not single objects... Or partial scenes plus a bunch of buyable props intended to be linked into a scene ? All that seems to be supported by the new accounting. And please forgive me if i am too optimistic. But i must keep myself in a good mood somehow ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Drongle McMahon Posted July 8, 2011 Share Posted July 8, 2011 "1. Reducing the lowest LOD has high impact on resource costs...." Just to extend that (current cost parameters, numbers may change) - This is very size-dependent. This is the case for meshes up to 5.43 m radius (that is roughly a 6x6x6 bounding box), and the effect of the lowest LOD reduces as you approach that limit, while the low becomes more important. Above that size, the lowest LOD is irrelevant and you need to optimise the low LOD instead. Smilarly, above 10.86 (12.5x12.5x12.5) it's the medium LOD that matters, and above 43.44 (50x50x50) only the high LOD counts. Edit: bb dims corrected thanks to Gaia. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gaia Clary Posted July 8, 2011 Share Posted July 8, 2011 I have updated my earlier post and added your remark in detail. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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