No Threat from Meshes

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Medhue Simoni wrote:

Actually, prims are laggy too, compared to the same thing in mesh, even a cube.

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ROFL - you really are painting yourself as the King of the Meshanistas if you are going to start debating if even prim cubes should be considered to be replaced because a Mesh is more lag efficient than a prim cube.

hmmmm a rezzed Mesh Cube can be twisted, tapered, sheered, sliced, hollowed, cut?  Not to mention that a Prim can be instantly created at will.

No one is arguring with your Medhue that Mesh is cool and will eventually have a significant factor in SL in about 4 -  6 months and the years to come.  But to promote MESH so evangelically and using argunements of LAG as a major reason for mesh to be better considered.... thats a deadend argument.

Made is absolutely right.... And her point is based on years of SL history of buying decisiosn....  The best clothing and castles and building and landscapes are bought .... NOT BECAUSE OF ITS LAG EFFICIENCY.... its because the most popular products in SL look awaesome - regardless of lag.

You are proof yourself that you said you bought and installed a mountain that used 100 prims !  Extremely Sim Bloat vs much more efficient builds... but you bought it.  Why?  Because it looked good.

What does this mean?

Builds will be mad and meshes SHOULD be made to look good - not because they are lag efficient.   If LL makes PE more fair to mesh - I will make a mesh terrain and use 4000 or 6000 vertices to make a much more realistic looking landscape.  If not, then LL is forcing creators and landscapers to keep using much more LAGGY sculpty builds that allow us to use many more vertices at a massively less cost to our sims.

This is LL's fault.  They have penalized MESH.  I hope some day them rethink PE formula so that I could make a cost effective high resolution photo-realistic mesh landscape.  I could even build them now and if a rare customer want to buy them - even if it costs 500PE Prim to rez.... great.

 

[Dartagan Shepherd]

Mesh is sort of an oddity. When was SL opened for business? 2003?

So you have this 3D world and it takes us up until 2011 for it to support of all things ... a 3D format, and very limited at that. Something that should have been there all along, and something that most other game/world development tools and environments provide out of the box early on.

Disclaimer, this has nothing at all to do with the fact that people have learned to produce some really great things with sculpties, and make them work, SL users will always take any tool and push it it to the limits, that's a great thing.

But ... sculpties are an absolutely horrible implementation of 3D, especially early on when it was designed as a NURBs kind of thing, with some really insane limitations. Always hated the term "perfect" UV map when referring to them, there's nothing perfect about a full space UV, with no holes in the mesh, etc.

They were badly done, and didn't resemble anything out there in the 3D world. Brought in an architectural engineer in the early days of sculpties and he was constantly annoyed at how insanely childish it was compared to "real" 3D and CAD tools, for instance. Nothing that any professional in the industry had any respect for. It was basically a really inept workaround as an excuse to not have to implement real 3D, and the lack of technical skills to pull off real 3D.

So here's the important part, mesh is in one sense a do over of something that was done very wrong from the start. Mesh  should have been done properly the way that the rest of the world handles 3D from the very beginning. So in that sense sculpties were a mistake and only now we're recovering from that mistake.

But really, it's inevitable that mesh will "eventually" get here, it should have been here in 2005, in a 3D world.

6 years after the fact, that's finally getting fixed, although it will take more years for developers of a 3D world, to handle anything close to the power of the standardized 3D file format that they're using with Mesh.

Mesh isn't a threat, but neither are sculpties "better" by any stretch. If a 3D world were designed with proper 3D from the start, we wouldn't have a dividing line between sculpt fans and mesh fans.

Just another instance of LL creating its own problems by thinking they can do strange things differently than the way the rest of the world does them. Comes back again to a management problem. The LL small team style of "wouldn't it be cool if ...".

Define management. define cool, would have to say no, it generally isn't very innovative or cool. So now users have to participate another dance with old features that can't be easily deprecated to finally do something the right way.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Dart this is getting almost SAPPY but I totally agree with you on how LL has placed mesh into a bad situation.

No one is arguing that Sculpties were a poorly thought out strategy by the LL Strategists.  i.e. they should have had much more forethought and visionary planning on what was the right long term approach of introducing a technology that should have been as native to SL as the concepts of a PRIM.

But, instead they put in a poor inefficient and extremely complex solution of Sculpties.

Now that sculpties have been entrenched into SL, they finally decide to deploy the RIGHT technology called MESH which is fundamentally far superior to Sculpty - even though there are many technical glitches for LL to figure out on how Mesh works with all things PRIM. 

The problem is - as you clearly have restated and what I have been trying to tell Medhue and others - that in LL's attempt to do all that is right and strategic with MESH, they have allowed the old inefficient models of SCULPTY to maintain its non-penalizing PE cost structure.  i.e. if a Mesh is PE costed on 1024 vertices and it could cost anywhere up to 60-100 PE, and yet a Sculpty with its inherent 1024 vertices is 1 PRIM.  Straight economics puts MESH at a huge disadvantage over sculpty on vertices count.

Of course there is no easy answer to the corner that LL painted themselves into once again for poor strategic thinking.  But this is the world Mesh is entering.  And for me - as much as I love the theoretical superior benefits of Mesh over Sculpty, I am not a Meshanista and therefor I can see this situation much more pragmatically.  I will use what is most effective for me and my customers.

So until LL makes the PE costs more level between mesh and sculpty - I see no risk on continuing to sell Sculpty terrains that wont hit my customers with unreasonable 100+ prim hits to their land simply for rezzing a mountain.

What I think LL should have done in being more strategic regarding Mesh deployment was for at least the first 12 months to make the PE costs of mesh a firesale cost that is equivilent to sculpties.  This would have drastically sped up the adoption rate of mesh on the grid by the sculpty makers.  Then once both are well established on the grid, come up with a plan to engage fair PE for both.

[Pamela Galli]

Really, I don't know which is worse, all this sappy lovefest in the forums now or the usual slugfest.

[Madeliefste Oh]

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Toysoldier Thor wrote:

What I think LL should have done in being more strategic regarding Mesh deployment was for at least the first 12 months to make the PE costs of mesh a firesale cost that is equivilent to sculpties.  This would have drastically sped up the adoption rate of mesh on the grid by the sculpty makers.  Then once both are well established on the grid, come up with a plan to engage fair PE for both.

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Ofcourse you can have your opinion and state it here, other merchants might find in interesting to read. But when you want to have influence on the strategy, this the wrong place and the wrong time.

You don't want to participate in beta testing, because you don't want to risk losing time by bugs that are not filtered out yet. But beta testing is not only about finding bugs for LL, it's gives you also the possibility to contribute from your perspective as a merchant in SL. You can have influence on the way things will be done finally. Of course your voice is just one among hundreds of others, but still there is the chance that your opinion is considered valuable for the whole mesh implementation.

[Toysoldier Thor]

But Made as much as I agree with what you are saying, I have seen / heard actual MESH BETA residents tell the LL team that the PE cost for mesh - although understandable in theory and for future execution - are unreasonable and not competitive to the Sculpties that LL wants to see replaced.  What was LL 's response to these strong complaints from the Beta members..... "sound of crickets".  Too bad this is the way we are going to go - we know better.

As for LL strategy development - both past and current - please do not deceive yourself into thinking that the Beta testers of Mesh, DD, or any LL initiative have anymore than token influence over the plans LL has established well before there even was a beta program announced.

Just look at Brooke's DD strategy and solution development.  When did Brooke announce and invite merchants into the DD beta?  It was well after Brooke's team had already developed the foundation of what was in their head in complete secret.  If they would have involveed Merchants during the "requirements" phase or even the "solution architecture" stage, then a lot of what our TRUE CUSTOMER NEEDS were for DD would have been included in the DD design.

So, now all you DD beta testers are just that - QA TESTERS for LL.  You are all nothing more than LL's cheap / free labor to do whatever QA testing that they have no reourcing or skills to do themselves.

 

[Alisha Matova]

Have you tried uploading a mesh yet? PE/land costs are much lower than your guesstimates.

 

I am wondering, though. How would this thread be going if mesh was cheaper than sculpts and prims...?

Or to put it another way, maybe they weighted mesh heavier to keep existing sl businesses in business.

 

[Madeliefste Oh]

Sure, participating in beta testing is not such a thing as sitting on Rod's chair or on the chair of some team leader at the lab. It is mainly about fine tuning details that fit the bigger picture that is already drawn.

For DD I didn't want to participate either. With mesh I had the idea I can only gain knowledge by participating, but with DD I have something to lose, I put my merchandise at risk. For DD I think about the same as you. I'm glad that there are brave merchants who do want to participate and help to solve the bugs. I do hope they are all filtered out before the first product will be sold from my inventory in stead of my magic box. I just don't want to put a source of income at risk by experimenting with an unfinished product.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

And the reality to the level of risk that all us Merchants face in the coming months with LL's ongoing behind-the-scene deployment of DD has now been exposed for all to see this past week.

This is why some of us Merchants in spring were concerned / extremely concerned when we started piecing together the magnitude of what LL Commerce Team was trying to accomplish with DD.

The current DD solution (for as much as we have pieced together on the little that Brooke trickles to us) would be a complex undertaking even for a very mature, season, experienced and well resourced Development Shop.  It had risks right from the beginning considering the old spagetti system crap that LL had evolved to date that needs fundamental shifting.

But to place this complex solution in the hands of a company / development team that has a well-entrench proven history of immature development and QA skills increased this risk by orders of magnitude.  For us that could be honest and open about it in the forums - we called this risk as we saw it.  The rest just sat quiet or even defended DD's solution as well as downgraded the level of risk.

Well the chickens have come home to roost now.  We all now see the trouble we are all in with the impending DD deployment.  And even this week with Darrius asking on the forums for Brooke to finally open up and answer some serious questions about DD, so far not one response from anyone of her team to answer questions.

Sadly, even for us that were not formal BETA testers of DD, as we all witnessed last week, LL will make us all Beta Testers anyway.  They will push poorly tested code into production like last week and they dont care one bit how it impacts all us Merchants.  My sales since Tuesday are basically near zero each day (worse than the past 6 weeks when LL damaged my MP sales on Aug 1).

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Alisha Matova wrote:

Have you tried uploading a mesh yet? PE/land costs are much lower than your guesstimates.

 

I am wondering, though. How would this thread be going if mesh was cheaper than sculpts and prims...?

Or to put it another way, maybe they weighted mesh heavier to keep existing sl businesses in business.

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Easy answer from me.... if LL took the approach of saying "for the next 18 month all Mesh will have a 1 prim cost to rez - just like a sculpty or a prim" then this would completely change my strategy.  This would make my sculpty landscapes at major risk against much more beautifully designed higher rezzed meshed landscapes and I would risk losing sales to far better looking mesh terrains at no rezzing penalty over a sculpty.

Medhue has already provded us an example in this thread.  a mesh using only 1/2 the vertices that I am allowed to build with a scullpy (i.e. 600 vertices mesh vs a 1024 vertices sculpty) already had a PE of 30 prim.  With 30 prims, I would have the verices equivelent of 30 sculpty OR 30,700.

I dont want to build a mesh mountain or terrain with half the vertices that a sculpty already allowed me.  My dream and excitment of mesh was that I could finally break the shackles of horrid vertices limits of sculpties and use 4K or even 10K vertices for a terrain object.  But according to Medhue.... that is simply stupid dreaming and it would cost a PE arm and a leg.

So there you go.... mesh is currently no risk to my sculpty landscapes.

[Harm Xue]

And that is the fundamental difference between your posts and most of everyone else in here: It's all about your business.

I understand the concern, it's just a very narrow way to look at everything that affects us all. And I see how it would concern me, if I had to compete with mesh having a physics layer that can finally be matched to the actual visual of the terrain the avatar is walking on. That is an incredible plus, to me, it already outweighs the added PE cost.

[Alisha Matova]

Good. I never said otherwise. Just passing on what I have learned.

 

My point was, LL was very smart weighting mesh heavier(and only slightly heavier if modeled smartly) than existing content. If mesh was cheaper a whole lot of existing non mesh content would be devalued.

 

Secretly, I'm just trying to convert you.=P. Mesh has sooo many advantages over sculpts it is not even funny. You are obviously creative, you'll find a way to get 4000 verts in for reasonable prims counts.

Hint. Since you are making large objects, they will send their Highest LOD to people's viewers more often, thus cost more prims. So... Make your large terrain objects out of smaller meshes. Upload as a scene with clean physics file. Boing! Low PE large mesh.

[Toysoldier Thor]

Alisha,

On Saturday I did watch pretty much all the videos created by the JAZZ team.  I actually stayed awake through all but the 2nd last video on the Caldren Challenge set of videos.  So I have a better understanding on these LOD details and I was already thinking how "my customers" of my mesh maps could use my mesh components to build their solutions on their lands.... like possibly several smaller models.  But this idea has its own issues... like the fact that if one were to build a mountain out of several smaller sized mesh objects, and since it is a mountain that can be seen from most of the sim (as mountains in rl often are),  your idea would likely end up that the mountain tops in the distance will look like degraded LOD 1 blobs instead of a beautiful actual mountain peak or canyon when seen from afar.

There is a reason why from all I have heard / read about mesh.... larger landscape mesh objects will not be SL Grid cost effective vs a sculpty for now.  Its not that a mesh technically wouldnt be able to look amazing.... its that in order to look amazing, the sim/parcel owner will have to spend a major part of his alloted prim budget to rez it.

But anyway.... Mesh will come and I will adapt to mesh on SL when the marketplace and SL grid mainstream is ready to adopt it whole heartedly.  Until then I will let the Meshanista's promote the Mesh and work out all the current glitches and sell to a very small marketplace.

 

[Toysoldier Thor]

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Harm Xue wrote:

And that is the fundamental difference between your posts and most of everyone else in here: It's all about your business.

I understand the concern, it's just a very narrow way to look at everything that affects us all. And I see how it would concern me, if I had to compete with mesh having a physics layer that can finally be matched to the actual visual of the terrain the avatar is walking on. That is an incredible plus, to me, it already outweighs the added PE cost.

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Well of course my posts are about MY BUSINESS.  This thread is all about if mesh is a threat to sculpties and the current sculpty market.  I am not trying to influence you.  If you want to abandon anything sculpty and build and sell everything in mesh and strip your sim of all things laggy and replace them with all the meshes on the market.... that is completely your call.

Most Mesh creators that will be selling mesh in the SL market are likely current Sculpty creators / merchants.  I am one of them.  I am speaking as a merchant that has made 98% of all my SL revenue over the past 2 years from selling sculpties packs.

My view on how mesh will impact my direction, strategy, etc. is based on my business in SL.   I dont make sculpties and mesh just because its fun.  I do it because its fun AND I can make money.

[Alisha Matova]

Re lod of multi mesh object: with full control over each LOD level, all sorts of neatness is possible now. Your mountain could be a much much simpler model at that level, or a facade, or invisible, or even a bunneh rabbit (lol), only growing into a detailed mountain when people are close enough to see them.

Very fun to play with. For instance I made some simple grass that is invisible at lowest lod and grows progressively as you walk up to it.

[Ciaran Laval]

The latest project viewer is much more user friendly too when it comes to LOD, that was what finally helped me get my head around LOD, for items that need to be viewed well from further away you can use the previous level of detail, this of course has cost implications but then you yourself can decide what's best or whether it will work.

There are also dropdowns for the type of item you're uploading, building components, clothing etc. I'd advise people to go play with the project viewer and use the beta grid, this saves money for a start!

[Mikki Miles]

the dropdowns have no effect on the uploaded items, it's just for gathering infos for LL

[Medhue Simoni]

As far as I've seen, if your PE is too high, then there is something you don't understand. I've been a regular on the beta grid and mesh grid for almost a year now, and when I talk to the other regulars that make totally different things than me, they are not complaining about PE. Some might bitch a little about the sizing penalty, and I still think that is a valid complaint. Or the scripting penalty, which is annoying. Besides those tho, If you try to make a mesh that is comparable to a sculpt, not in total verts, cause most sculpts are wasting tons of verts, but in look and design, you will get a comparable 1 prim value, or so. If you are really good, and do everything possible, you can get 2 or 3 times as many verts in a mesh and it still cost 1 prim. Mesh and LL implementation of it is not solely based in total verts or triangles, You could use a ton of verts, and just do everything else, LODs, and Physic boxes at their pure minimums and get ridiculously low PE for the amounts of verts.

The bottom line is tho, if you are getting higher PEs than you think you should, 1 of 2 things is happening. Either your expectations go way beyond what is or should be possible/allowable, or you do not quite understand all the factors that are making the PE high.

Why am I supporting mesh so enthusiastically? For the same reason I promote the animation program that I use, cause it is the best. Cause I love playing with it. Cause I know people like me will love playing with it. Cause I wake up every day wondering what crazily complexed thing I'm going to make today using mesh. Cause it is only possible with mesh.

Does it help me if every1 runs out and makes mesh? Probably not. Mesh is going to happen anyways, way quicker than many can even imagine. Heck, all the people that bought those mesh clothing builder kits are probably close to releasing those soon. I've already bought quite a few mesh clothing items, as I don't really plan on making them.

[Bonadea Avedon]

actualy there are more viewers than just v3 and firestorm dolphin and kirstens also support mesh

[Ciaran Laval]

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Mikki Miles wrote:

the dropdowns have no effect on the uploaded items, it's just for gathering infos for LL

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Thanks, I have only  uploaded building components so didn't know if choosing the other menus would change some of the defaults or something.

[Ciaran Laval]

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Bonadea Avedon wrote:

actualy there are more viewers than just v3 and firestorm dolphin and kirstens also support mesh

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and Phoenix

http://hg.phoenixviewer.com/phoenix-sg/

 

[Pamela Galli]

Here is a discussion that only confirms what I think most people have understood:

 

http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Stolen-Mesh/td-p/1103883

 

Page after page of stuff imported, and probably legally. In the past if people wanted to copy things they mostly stuck to stuff that was already inworld -- now they have a vast repository of mesh outside of SL, the creators of which are not in SL to monitor or file DMCAs.  I would think many, many people will see the advantage of importing ready made mesh or mesh they have modified but not created -- why reinvent the wheel when so many wheels are already out there?

[Vivienne Schell]

Agreed. And as soon as the Protect IP Act passes US congress, Second Life could be dust. By encouraging and even charging people for making a content and IP theft paradise out of Second Life - even more than ever before by allowing unrevised object imports - they set Second Life onto the taget list of a business which is very capable of protecting itself - and all but fond of paying money to Linden Lab for opening a Second Life Turbosquid or opening a Second Life World of Warcraft.