PE seems high now, is this the new normal?

[WADE1 Jya]

Any mesh I upload now (only tried very simple block-shapes this time) equals minimum 2 prim equiv?

If several meshes are linked this 2:1 ratio breaks down, but still mesh is worse than prim:

5 simple meshes = 6 prim equiv.

4 simple meshes = 5 prim equiv.

3 simple meshes = 4 prim equiv.... etc

I uploaded some work before (much earlier in the beta) & my much more complex meshes (back then) only counted as 1 prim.

How can a 4-triangle pyramid = 2 prim? :matte-motes-stress:

This should count as like 0.01 of a parametric prim.

Is creating something with fractional (mesh < 1 prim) prim equiv. possible anymore? It should be.

Am I doing something wrong now or is this considered normal?

Hope not cause if so this makes mesh very unnecessarily crippled.

[Nix Manx]

Unfortunately the 2PE is the lowest it will ever go, its a hard limit even if you upload a cube, however, once you start making more complex models the PE is comparable and if you optimise your mesh (remove vertice and tris you dont need) and use a very basic lowest LOD you can get a very convincing model with much lower PE compared to an identical prim model.

To give you an example, I designed a basic house that came to 19 prims, after i had optimised it, it went down to 13 prims without losing its shape at all.

The thing with mesh that I've noticed over this past few weeks since I started making them, is that there are a lot of little tricks to pushing down your PE, one thing im currently testing is windows and doors, i know it sounds silly but with them built into the mesh the PE starts going up dramatically, so im testing if its worth while uploading the windows and doors as seperate meshes and linking them inworld, ive no idea if it will push down the PE but initial results seems to suggest i can get 20 PE with seperate windows and doors, compared to 30PE increase if i have them built into the mesh.

So far my little project has resulted in a 80PE mesh house compared to a 168 Prim house (its almost identical)

The best thing to do is play around with different ideas about how you want to construct your model, and settle with what makes you comfortable.

 

[FireFox Bancroft]

I uploaded a 8 vert cube that only had 2 tri's per side and it was still 2 prims worth. You can't get any more optimized than that with a cube. Compare that to SL's default cube prim that has 64 verts and I dunno how many tri's and it's worth only 1 prim. The whole double cost thing is because certain people think it's unfair for us to be able to upload higher-quality low-lag models in SL and sell them for far cheaper than their 2048 prim parcel-eating L$4500 monstrosity.

 

The whole point of Mesh was to reduce the amount of prim-usage on sims but this is cancelled out by tthe PE.

[WADE1 Jya]

OK getting happier here now :matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

I'm now managing to get my animals into SL with the final PE of their mesh linksets equal to 2PE.... funny thing here is if I unlink it... every mesh in the linkset also equals 2PE seperately! :matte-motes-impatient:

So 2PE + 2PE + 2PE + 2PE = 2PE   ??? :matte-motes-silly:

That proves the formula makes no sense.

Reality looks to be that I am dealing with a fractional PE count for each mesh in this linkset.... & yes I too think this is just crippling mesh a little for no reason. Luckily, even with this double+ counting method, at least it is still possible to make models with superior PE to prim.... although the PE count for mesh sure is looking very fake.

Also noticed that with some of my models the importer will estimate the model as 1.5PE or some such on the import screen, but once uploaded into SL PE always equals 2? ....this count is so fake :matte-motes-asleep-2:

 

[Gaia Clary]

Here is my personal opinion (well, what else ? ;-)

The main reason why everything looks so nonesense like:

Massive lack of (easy to understand) information. It is not correct to throw an entire new system into the masses, how good and awesome it ever may be, and then rely on the masses to create the documentation by themself. IMHO this is a very wrong understanding of community support. For me that goes the wrong way ;-)

Having said this, PE makes a lot of sense to me. I am not satisfied with a few issues about it, but it makes a lot of sense (to me). Even linking prims together to get lower PE makes sense, when you know where a linkset behaves differently from a set of isolated prims, and what that means to the end users.

Also (for me) the Wiki is not very well understandable, it lacks information and a clear structure. And it is even not clear if the information we see there is officially correct. Everything is just floating and based on "rumours and a few knowing people's assumptions" (ok, there IS some information created by LL in the Wiki, and if you dig long enough you will some answers, even if you might not fully understand them (like me too) ...

So is it so astonishing, that we see such a huge amount of "i don't get it" ... ???

I doubt that even all tutorial makers in the world will be able to fully document "meshes" as long as all our requests for defining the beast are just not answered (in depth). LL stated that they will add documentation as soon as mesh is  developed. That is NOW, no ?

So... Please help us. Hey, we are your paying customers... we have a right to be informed... i guess at least... no ?

[Charlar Linden]

Regarding more and better documentation - I hear you. Writing up concise, correct and clear (3 C's!) documentation is a professional level task for something like this. Our intrepid doc team has been feverishly working, but they only have 2 hands each so it can seem like slow going.

We lean on some of our more caring and involved members, like you Gaia, to fill in the blanks. Your Kettle Quest series made my jaw drop. Awesome.

We have some highly technical documentation now (Nerd alert); our next step is to distill that down to something that a normal resident creator (and then a normal resident) can fully grok.

All the questions and answers that have been posted to this forum are helping us understand what we need to communicate.

Alright, I need to go write up an explanation of Prim count and PE...

Charlar