Mesh impractical for existing products

[Aargle Zymurgy]

OK, after mesh officially hit the streets, I thought I'd jump on the bandwagon.  The results were great.  I got a much nicer game case.  Joy turned to sorrow when I realized I've got no way I can get this to my existing customers.  People with a lot of popular product out there (such as Stroker Serpentine (sex-gen beds), Vickie Greenwood (sculpt studio), vehicle makers, etc.) have got the following problems:

• I'm sure someone would propose this, but you can't just exchange old for new.  For some creators, they'd be 24/7 doing manual exchanges.  Also, many products have significant configuration issues and that creates a new difficulty for anyone swapping.  Exchanges work if you've got a few hundred of a product out there, but not when there are thousands.
• I sell my items mod so customers can customize.  They can re-shape quite a few of the basic prims and re-texture them.  However, one thing you can't do is turn an existing prim into a mesh item.  An adventurous owner can try to make one and then put the scripts from one object to another, but one thing the owner can't port between the two is the script PIN for updating, because that's a secret known only to me.
• And speaking of those updates, not only can you not manually update a prim to mesh, you can't programmatically update it either.  I can understand hesitation on LL's part to allow this or someone would set out to animate mesh  which would push sims far too hard.  However, like loading URLs, imposing a 3 second script delay would allow developers to retrofit existing customers with new designs but put a damper on using scripts for animations.

As things are, I can't update existing customers, so I've immediately lost interest in creating mesh for other projects.  I'd be interested to hear what other creators of scripted items think about the whole thing.

P.S. I almost captioned this "Mesh? Meh!" :-)

 

[Relapse Gauntley]

Mesh does come with it's fair share of problems, but it isn't impractical. It's simply designed for other purposes. I'm having some issues with the architect design aspect of it -- as I said on these forums before Mesh came to the grid.

 

We'll just have to see what happens.

[Acheron Gloom]

Why can't you port the remote access PIN through the script?

Its just a function you run.

 

And why do you need to update your 'hundreds' or 'thousands' of old content? Just release new content using mesh, if mesh would be the best option. I am a strong proponent of mesh, but there are still places where sculpts or prims are useful.

And of course you can't magically turn prims/sculpts into mesh, it doesn't work like that.

[Vivienne Schell]

Replacing everything by 3D object imports is a waste of time, in fact. These objects probably are suitable for SOME stuff (as non-human avatars and other attachments), but considered the fact that they let bandwidth explode (if not low poly) and therefore frame rates drop, that almost no one will downgrade to V3 only for seeing a "mesh", that they are way to prim costy for doing anything BIG, that full body import clothes look as worse as the old system skirt does on any used human avatar body, and...and...and, stick to your guns until the "mesh" propaganda has calmed down and we´ll see what it really can be good for. I personally doubt that more than a few very experienced and skilled 3D designers working on RL professional level (like Loki and the like) will be able to make something really noteworthy with such imports. Which probably will be a touch nicer than the already marvelous sculpted stuff these persons brought to SL before.

Mesh will definately not be the next big thing, that´s for sure. The recent outstanding improvements on server lag are MUCH more noteworthy on the positive side than allowing unrevised 3D object imports with a basically destructive legal/technical potential.

[Medhue Simoni]

Sorry, but I don't have a problem at all updating customers with mesh items. Some of my products have thousands of customer that have purchased them. Bigdeal, get the list of purchasers, throw them into a notecard and have a script send them all updates.

As far as everything else, there are creative ways to do everything. I think you just need some time to contemplate in it.

[Vivienne Schell]

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Acheron Gloom wrote:

Why can't you port the remote access PIN through the script?

Its just a function you run.

 

And why do you need to update your 'hundreds' or 'thousands' of old content? Just release new content using mesh, if mesh would be the best option. I am a strong proponent of mesh, but there are still places where sculpts or prims are useful.

 

And of course you can't magically turn prims/sculpts into mesh, it doesn't work like that.

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Sooner or later someone will come up with a conversion tool. That´s just a matter of time, either in-world or desktop based. It happened with prim > sculpt before. And many skilled prim builds will still beat the hell out of a lot of imports made by people who think that their Blender tool makes a good 3D creator.

[Vivienne Schell]

Are your animations convertible into mesh?

:matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

[Medhue Simoni]

There are very few items in a virtual world that animation can not be a part of, or that animation should not be an essential part of.:matte-motes-sunglasses-1:

[Ciaran Laval]

Why on earth would you want to convert all your products to mesh? Prims are mesh, they work, they are lovely, there's no need to convert existing items to mesh, they already are Mesh.

[Nacy Nightfire]

I have alot of expensive software that have free updates to a point, but any new overhaul requires a new cash outlay. And mesh is a big new overhaul of the building system.  We've all experienced this with RL products and software and accept it.  Another example is the IPad and IPhone.  Folks who want the newest greatest model will just have to buy it again.  Meanwhile their older version still works fine - I've read that 70 percent of IPad2 owners are new customers to the Ipad.

So although its very thoughtful to think of your old customers and redo your work, I don't exactly know why you would do this.  Perhaps give your customers a free mesh gift or a gift card for future purchases if you feel like it.

I don't build as a business, so I'm talking more from a customer's point of view.  I'd want to buy new things, not get a replacement of the old stuff.  Alot of that stuff is just sitting in people's inventories forgotten, since we all want change and novelty.  If I bought a sculpty based dog a year or two ago, I'd buy a new mesh one if I liked it better (well I'd make one ) but if I saw an exceptionally well made one, I'd buy it without thinking my old one needed free updating.

[Drongle McMahon]

"Why on earth would you want to convert all your products to mesh? ..."

Also, unless they are all undistorted box prims, they will be much more expensive, both in prim equivalents and in that you have to pay upload costs! If you don't believe me, make a simple box mesh and link it to your prims. That way you can see what their PE really is!  Probably best to do this in an empty sandbox and with an expendable copy. The PE can easily cause returns on smaller parcels, and in the worst case can be more than a full regions worth. (I just tried this to check nothing had changed, three tiny hollow profile-cut 4-turn toruses linked to one plain mesh cube => more than 15000 PE => returned and unrezzable).

[Josh Susanto]

I intend to experiment with providing mesh versions of some items, eventually, but not until the market for mesh products has essentially stabilized.

But I will not consider these to be "updates", because this would seem to imply that there's something defective or deficient about the existing product; an implication with which I must strongly disagree.

If you offer something as both mesh and nonmesh, it gives the customer more choices.

Why not just do that?