Crazy lag because of meshes ?

[Miranda Umino]

Since today , i meet an awesome lag

 

In my statistics viewers  ( contole + shift + 1) i can see

- my bandwith is eaten to the max ( in my instance 1400 kb/s)

- in the details of networks statistics , "objects"  eat the whole bandwidth  ( 1350 kb/s in my instance , and 50kb only for textures )

 

Do you meet this problem ?

[Rusalka Writer]

Fine day for me. Mesh just disappeared so I'm restarting, but performance is fine.

[Nalates Urriah]

No... 

There is very little mesh on the grid as of now. So, unless you were in a mesh sandbox the likelyhood of mesh being the problem is pretty slim.

Tomorrow we will probably be able to get some information on how well SL is preforming with the mesh roll out now on the entire grid. 

Over the next couple of weeks we will likely see server maintenance upgrades roll out that will improve stability and improve performance. I doubt there will be any big changes, but may be. I expect a couple of weeks of poking and tweaking by the Lindens before moving to the next big project.

Direct Delivery is in progress, but 2 or 3 months away.

[Josh Susanto]

I warned you people months ago that there had to be a downside to mesh and that the downside would almost inevitably be massive lag.

Why else would LL institute a "prim equivalency" cost?

Whatever.

Nobody is taking seriously my current warnings about other things, and they won't care about what I warn them next, no matter how many times I turn out to be right. 

 

[York Jessop]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

I warned you people months ago that there had to be a downside to mesh and that the downside would almost inevitably be massive lag.

Why else would LL institute a "prim equivalency" cost?

Whatever.

Nobody is taking seriously my current warnings about other things, and they won't care about what I warn them next, no matter how many times I turn out to be right. 

 

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When most people know meshes dont cause lag in comparison to prim or scuplties then no offence but noone is going to take you seriously.

As Nalates pointed out, meshes came out within the last 24 hours, the amount of mesh objects on the grid right now will be tiny and be having zero affect on lag.

[Miranda Umino]

There is very little mesh on the grid as of now. So, unless you were in a mesh sandbox the likelyhood of mesh being the problem is pretty slim.

 

Yes , there are very few meshes actually ... except inside sandboxes ..

and i am working some scripts inside sandboxes  too ..

 

So what is your point ?

 

 

 

 

 

[Paul Hexem]

It's only been a day. There's no way it's causing any lag. Once we start seeing mesh everywhere, then we can see a performance difference.

[Baloo Uriza]

Need more information.  What's About Second Life say (the whole box, including the part where it talks about where you are).

[Tarius Auxarmes]

Not even LL is so dumb as to allow something that would terribly lag the entire grid and yes, they have the PE value to help stop people from making overly complicated things. So its no wonder people are ignoring you when you sound like you have no idea what you are talking about.

[Tristizia Demonista]

Been online with Beta-Viewer 3.0.1, actually seeing Mesh objects and performance is the same as allways.

So, no, don't met that problem.  

[Josh Susanto]

They eventually had to release mesh whether it causes lag or not, because it would only be a greater customer relations catastrophe if they were not to release it at all.

And again, if not to mitigate lag, then why the PE cost?

Few things that offer a benefit have no downside.

Assuming there's no lag from mesh, then what is the downside?

And if the lag reported is not coming from the mesh, from where is it coming?

The beta grid is a great place to "show" that mesh doesn't lag, because there's so little else compting for bandwidth on the beta grid.

Releasing mesh at a time when so much else in the system is so obviously borked seems like a pretty bad idea... but only until you consider whether this actually stands to reduce the total number of problems people will attribute to mesh.

 

 

[Baloo Uriza]

As with every other building tool so far, it's not the tool that creates the lag.  It's idiot builders who think "efficiency" was taken out of the dictionary and don't understand why fewer polygons is better.  I imagine these are people who go golfing and try for the high score for basically the same reason.

[Tarius Auxarmes]

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Baloo Uriza wrote:

As with every other building tool so far, it's not the tool that creates the lag.  It's idiot builders who think "efficiency" was taken out of the dictionary and don't understand why fewer polygons is better.  I imagine these are people who go golfing and try for the high score for basically the same reason.

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This exactly. Its not mesh thats the problem, its the idiots who dont know any better and in alot of cases, load stuff down way beyond whats needed.

Just like the person who was using over 9000 polys for like a 20 step spiral stair mesh and over half of those were all in the railing. That thread is on the second page now and has like 6 pages if you wanna go read it.

Mesh can be far more efficiant than prims or sculpties, but it requires the person who makes it to know some basics.

As for drawbacks, it will take bandwidth just like you say, but not as much as you want to think.

So, whats the drawback if I take a single tylenol for a headache? Thats usually all I need and as far as I know, there is only benefit and no drawback.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

And if the lag reported is not coming from the mesh, from where is it coming?

Releasing mesh at a time when so much else in the system is so obviously borked seems like a pretty bad idea... but only until you consider whether this actually stands to

reduce

the total number of problems people will attribute to mesh.

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What you and many other people don't understand is that Second Life has always been 100% mesh.  The base avatar, the terrain, the sky, and prims are mesh objects.  What is new is we can now add our own custom mesh objects.  Well designed mesh objects have less complexity than other one.  For exampe the base box prim has 108 triangles, cause it needs to allow for all the distortions you can apply to it.  A mesh box can be 12 triangles, so a lot less work for the graphics card.  A wall only needs 4 triangles, for inside and outside, if its part of a larger building and the edges dont show.  That is massively more efficient than your standard prim house.

On the other hand, badly made meshes can be very laggy, just like using lots of twised prim toruses are.  At least with mesh there is an incentive to be efficient through prim cost.

[York Jessop]

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Tarius Auxarmes wrote:

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Baloo Uriza wrote:

As with every other building tool so far, it's not the tool that creates the lag.  It's idiot builders who think "efficiency" was taken out of the dictionary and don't understand why fewer polygons is better.  I imagine these are people who go golfing and try for the high score for basically the same reason.

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This exactly. Its not mesh thats the problem, its the idiots who dont know any better and in alot of cases, load stuff down way beyond whats needed.

Just like the person who was using over 9000 polys for like a 20 step spiral stair mesh and over half of those were all in the railing. That thread is on the second page now and has like 6 pages if you wanna go read it.

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If you had read that thread yourself you would have realised that the person was asking for advice on how to reduce poly counts, to imply they are an idiot for creating an initial 'nurbs' based model is grossly unfair. We are all still learning how to make meshes and as you keep stating, PE counts reflect how efficient a mesh model is. Its up to the customers to decide what they want and its up to everyone else to decide if they want to visit said sims.

Just to point out, that 9000 poly mesh staircase was reduced to 1000ish after it was converted into a poly based model and after they asked for and got alot of advice about meshes, not to mention they wouldnt have been able to import it as a nurbs models anyways as its not supported.

Granted people are going to upload high poly models, and as a result will have high PE as a result but you should aim your insults at those who deserve it, not those who are trying to understand and learn about mesh.

 

[Josh Susanto]

I understand that avatars have always been mesh, and I'm happy that mesh is here so that people can make custom avatars and other things for which mesh is appropriate.

What I know many people failed to realize from the start is that mesh just isn't really good for a lot of the things they had intended to use it for. 

During the buildup to mesh release, LL conveniently allowed people to think that practically anything would be better to make with mesh.

For many, many months, I have had a really hard time trying to convince people that my own sculpties shouldn't all just be deleted to make space in people's inventories for superior mesh equivalents.

Finally, in a classic Linden bait-and-switch, they got around to mentioning their prim equivalency costs, which, really, are quite justifiable (and, to LL's credit, a major source of schadenfreude in my case).

Maybe the people who wasted so much effort to make mesh items that would be more data-efficient to make out of sculpts and other prim types are, as has been said "idiots".

OR, maybe, they're intelligent enough to build really cool mesh items, but just a little too naive to realize when LL is trying to blow smoke up all of our asses (again).

[Tarius Auxarmes]

I am not implying everyone is an idiot although I suppose I should have made my statement more specific in that its the people who dont bother seeking help on whats good and instead barrel forward thinking they are great for having done something when in reality its terrible. Sure, try stuff out and learn things, but not taking the time to at least take a look into things is just lazy.

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

I've tried two Mesh-capable viewers.

Kirstens is rendering 30% faster than Viewer 3.

It seems possible that the problem you're seeing is down to a crap Viewer release.

I'm hoping the Viewer problem can be quickly fixed. I've made and uploaded Mesh, and it is potentially very useful. I may be selling something, fairly soon, when I get the workflow sorted out. But I doubt I shall sell anything while Viewer 3 is so bad, even without Mesh present. 

 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Agreed.

It wasn't so horrible a job to make the reduced detail meshes for what I tried yesterday, and the results were far better than the automatic. The PE cost for the end result was lower, with more detail than a Sculpt and fewer texturing problems.

I still need to work on things, but this is looking good.

But the good products will still be good products, even if they don't use Mesh

 

[WolfBaginski Bearsfoot]

Let's just compare Sculpts to Meshes

I loaded the blank sculpt and got 1920 polygons all triangles.

I can adequately model the item with 288 polygons. But that's too low a level of detail to end up with a decent minimum, and that isn't triangles. 576 triangles, then. I made a minimum detail model with 32 triangles. From a distance, it's still got the same basic shape. I can double up on the maximum detail level, and still do better than the sculpt.

The Sculpt handles LOD by cutting out vertices automatically. If you use the wrong row of vertices for the edge of a hat-brim, it can all vanish. You have the be close to see the highest detail level, but I was able to keep detail without worrying about putting the edges and corners on the right row of polygons.

It is all a lot easier, as well, because all I can do with a Sculpt is move the vertices. It's not just for LOD, I can add and delete vertices as I wish.

The big gain comes with the UV mapping process.

There's a bit of jargon here, but a UV map is what often gets called a "template" in SL. It's the flatted-out version of the head and body of an avatar, which guides you when you create clothes. It's the way a spherical earth is warped to fit a flat page (and those distortions have a reason all of their own).

And "materials" are sets of polygons which are given the same texture and colour, much like the faces of a Prim.

Let's continue the example of a hat. It is, very nearly, a cylinder sitting on a flat disk, the crown and the brim. That's three or maybe four, materials visible. The Brim might have a top and bottom, but they could easily use the same part of the texture, without any problems. Like the top of the crown, they're close enough to flat, when viewed from above. The side of a crown, you can treat as a cylinder, and unwrap it. With a little care, you could use a singled chequer-board pattern, and all the squares would be the same size, undistorted.

 That's very different from a Sculpt version, where you might start with a surface such as a sphere, and the top and bottom edges of the texture map onto the points at the poles.

But Meshes aren't for everything. I kept my sample down to 1 PE, but I've heard a few things about what happens with multi-prim objects that include Meshes. A sculpt might be a better choice. What are meshes going to be like for sim-crossing, as a vehicle? But I can see the old trick of a simple vehicle, with the bodywork model worn by the driver, being used with meshes. Will that be better? And vehicles will still fail if there's too much scripting.

The bad stuff will be bad stuff, whether it uses Mesh or not.

[Phoenix Steampunk]

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Josh Susanto wrote:

What I know many people failed to realize from the start is that mesh just isn't really good for a lot of the things they had intended to use it for. 

During the buildup to mesh release, LL conveniently allowed people to think that practically anything would be better to make with mesh.

For many, many months, I have had a really hard time trying to convince people that my own sculpties shouldn't all just be deleted to make space in people's inventories for superior mesh equivalents.

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Why don't you just give some examples that prove your point? The only valid point you got on your side is the streaming cost of a 32x32x24 bit targa vs a compressed collada, but thats issue is pretty well covered by the PE algorithm and just downstream related.

I am still wondering why people keep thinking meshes would be sculpt equivalents rather than to see them as their needed substitutes. No reason to invent the wheel again when there is already a sculpt that does the same job when it comes to overall efficiency (textures included). We all know those examples like the piece of jewellery that is made out of 20 different sculpts and uses 5 1024x1024 textures for tiny details, or the jacket that is even worse when it comes to overall efficiency. For that kind of example meshes are for sure proper and superior substitutes. But on the other hand it for sure doesn't need to make a one face mesh just for the square apartment floor.

The one above summed it up quite well

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WolfBaginski Bearsfoot wrote:

 

The bad stuff will be bad stuff, whether it uses Mesh or not.

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 same goes for prim or sculpt based builds.