Why does this IRK me at present?

[Sy Beck]

Those familiar with the community sponsored/paid for project to implement a Parametric Mesh Deformer, to be coded by ex LL employee Qarl Linden, would have been delighted some weeks ago to hear that the community raised the $5400 required target to pay for the project.

For those who are unaware, in short, it will enable mesh clothes to wrap to your avatar shape rather than at the moment your avatar being reshaped to fit the clothes.  This was an operation left out by LL in the introduction of mesh and put on the back burner to be done at some later date, which was never stated apart from soon...ish.

Good news then?  Well yes, for all those residents who poured their own RL $ (not Linden $) into it happening so that residents could enjoy far superior mesh clothing that would fit to them.  Now today as you will see from the link provided above LL have come to the party...

(extract from project webpage)

Karl has begun working on the code and was contacted recently by LL in order to facilitate development of this feature. He will be working directly with LL from this point forward to supply them with code as the project moves forward, allowing them to check the feature with compatibility for the official LL releases as he progresses so that when it is done it can quickly and easily be included without weeks of additional testing. They contacted him directly to expedite the process and work together from the start of this, which means it will be working correctly and will make it a lot easier for TPV's and other grids to implement once it is done! [END]

My point in this post is that while welcoming LL's intervention to expedite the process,why did it have to take a group of generous residentsto find and secure a credible coder and then raise what is a paltry, compared to LL's resources, $5400 themselves to get LL ($75m profit last year) to do what would we would have expected to be a prime feature in the introduction of mesh?

In other threads at the moment the value of a resident as a beneficial contributor to SL in it's success and future well being is being fiercely debated and contested.  I humbly submit this as a prime example of what residents knew what was required and who then went out and sought the skills and provided the finance for LL's and the residents ultimate benefit.

Thank you Maxwell Graf, thank you Karl Stiefvater and thank you to everybody who donated their $.

And thank you LL for catching up and aiding the project.

 

[Carole Franizzi]

Jaw dropped a tad here. I had no idea....

[Braydon Randt]

Do we asume then  that LL are going to be adding to the contribution from the community or is it a " errm Karl,  we know we sacked you  ..  and we know that you are doing this for your client the SL community at large,  but do you think we can jump on this bandwagon"

 

[Sy Beck]

---

Braydon Randt wrote:

Do we asume then  that LL are going to be adding to the contribution from the community or is it a " errm Karl,  we know we sacked you  ..  and we know that you are doing this for your client the SL community at large,  but do you think we can jump on this bandwagon"

 

---

I only know what I've read.  I just thought it was a point worth raising.

[Sy Beck]

I think it reinforces and adds to the equally valid arguments you've made elsewhere madame.

[Carole Franizzi]

Well I genuinely had no idea that SLers dipped into their pockets for whip-rounds to collect funds for technical developments. How very odd.... How many millions did you say??

[Celestiall Nightfire]

Excellent post Sy. 

I contributed last month after I heard about the effort through Ishy. (Ishtara)   Also, I had been part of the Mesh test group, and word spread through that group. 

But, yeah...where's the effort from the Lab to ensure that a wholly-grid-changing-shiny...like mesh...can actually be used by the residents?    Instead, the effort is coming from the residents themselves.

[Venus Petrov]

I had heard of this effort and nice of LL to crash the party.  They would have made those using mesh for new content oh so much happier had they done this from the get-go.  So, does this mean that the agreement made with the resident group is null and void and funds are returned or ?

 

[Ariel Vuissent]

Wasn't there an official Linden post awhile ago that said they were tabling the mesh issue to deal with bugs? Or did I completely misread that post? I seem to recall something to that effect...Maybe now that someone else is going to do all the hard work for them and has already raised the money, they want some of the glory for themselves...

[Eve Greymoon]

Where did my post go? It was on topic and everything!

 

Thank you for the link to the keynote adress Sy I hadn't seen that.  What he said though was not profit, he said, I believe, "top line" is 75m. I believe that's in refernce to revenues not profits, or did I misunderstand? 

 

I do understand the frustration with the mesh and mesh deformer not being implemented at time of release.  And yes,the community shouldn't have to pay for it. There are finite resources as I said before.  From the address you linked me to, it looks like bug fixes are the focus until the end of the year.  Both new and old have to be worked with. 

[Sy Beck]

Hmm, I did post this to the Mesh Forum as I thought it would be of interest to them, but I can't find it now.  Shame, because a lot of them paid for it.

[Sy Beck]

I referenced the same link in another thread Eve regarding a different topic and did say there that I was unclear whether it was operational, gross or net profit.  He does say that it was a good year though and my point was it's only $5400.

[Sy Beck]

---

Ariel Vuissent wrote:

Wasn't there an official Linden post awhile ago that said they were tabling the mesh issue to deal with bugs? Or did I completely misread that post? I seem to recall something to that effect...Maybe now that someone else is going to do all the hard work for them and has already raised the money, they want some of the glory for themselves...

---

As I understand there are a lot of issues to be addressed regarding mesh, but a significant amount of creators believed this was a necessary thing to sell mesh to residents.  Therefore they took matters into their own hands.

[Emma Geraln]

When I heard about this I thought it was a great piece of community involvement. To be honest I don't see it as people doing something LL should have done. I see it as people paying to get something done sooner. 

[wiked Anton]

applauds the residents who went to all this trouble, but they shouldn't have had to, this all should have been taken care of by LL......and it totally pi__es me off that they continually seek the profit and feel to supply less and les, or at least shirk responsibility for their product. we maya a well just send them money every month for doing next to nothing

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

---

wiked Anton wrote:

applauds the residents who went to all this trouble, but they shouldn't have had to, this all should have been taken care of by LL......and it totally pi__es me off that they continually seek the profit and feel to supply less and les, or at least shirk responsibility for their product. we maya a well just send them money every month for doing next to nothing

---

Supply less and less? I don't see how you can state that, at all. The last year LL has given us mesh and a V2/V3 viewer that's very usable. Also I've noticed performance gains, although that might be something not everyone is experiencing. If LL makes 75M, which I doubt (that sounds more like revenues than nett profit) they wouldn't care about the 5400. The thing is they have other priorities.

Now a PART of the community wanted deformable rigged mesh. I think it's great that can now be developed, thanks to a number of people paying for it. But they did so because THEY wanted it. And by raising the money they have shown LL they are serious. Even now it's going to be done outside the LL office, it's going to cost LL quite some resources to implement it into the viewer. That will probably cost a lot more than 5400.

[Nalates Urriah]

There are a number of ‘shoulds’ in this thread. Not a lot about what is actually happening.

I follow the mesh user group and have for some time. You can see my summaries of the meetings and mesh development in SL Mesh Related. The latest, Week 45, has a section on the Deformer Project on page 2.

The Lindens made what I consider and understandable mistake when implementing mesh. During the Closed Beta and the following Open Beta phases participants were mostly interested in building objects other than clothes (rigged mesh). At some point in the development process the decision was made mesh deformation was not a priority for initial release. For the time and resources available other parts of mesh implementation are/were more important.

In hindsight that decision was not the best possible. But, that is the advantage of hindsight.

With a development path set and Lab management committed to time lines, there is no way to rectify the mistake. Maxwell found a way around the Lab’s limited resources and time line commitments that suit his and many others purposes. Karl was willing to do the work for pay, Maxwell was willing to try and raise the money, and a number of people felt it worth their money to contribute. The community is doing a similar thing with the Kirsten Viewer.

The Lindens have made clear what their interest is and what they have time to do. To be able to accept the code, they cannot allow it to break existing things, it must be backward compatible.  There is also the forward compatibility issues with things we don’t even know about. So, the Lindens have approached to Karl to try and make sure everything is compatible.

Don’t expect the Lindens to sit down and start writing code. I suspect they are pressed to even get time to review the code and coordinate compatibility with past, existing, and future developments.

If this is something that irks one, they probably have expectations that don’t match the reality. That doesn’t mean they are not reasonable expectations… it just means they don’t fit the reality of limited resources and this scenario of human behavior… the history of the mesh project. Fortunately we are free to proceed as we wish and allow others to be irked.