When will I need a mesh viewer?

[ArKahn]

Right now I use Singulairty and it works great for me. I have tried some of the mesh viewers and to be frank they suck.  I have heard that "Everything has to be switched to Mesh by Jan" but I can't find anything offical about any kind of hard date for mesh viewers.  Also, if everything has to be mesh what about all the things we have built/bought/paid for over the last year, does that just go away?  I mean we breed horses/dogs/ other animals that are not mesh... all that investment lost?

[Freecilla Kuhn]

I believe they mean mesh will be enabled in all sims.

Anyway no your wont lose any sculpty things they will stay the same. Getting a Mesh viewer means if you come across a mesh object inworld you will be able to see it however there is not a lot of mesh out there right now so it's no big deal. Later on you may notice many more people wearing inner tubes if you don't have a mesh viewer and they are wearing mesh clothes.

[Holger Gilruth]

you have answered your question allready yourself. There is nothing official

[Rolig Loon]

Don't worry about it at all.  Mesh is slowly becoming popular, but we will never have a time in SL when everything is a mesh object.  As you point out, we have many years' accumulation of pre-mesh creations in SL.  It would be impractical, to say nothing of expensive, to replace them all.  It would also be dumb.  In many situations, mesh is a more efficient use of resources and offers greater flexibility for making complex shapes.  Many, but not all.  Some objects are rather inefficient if they are made as mesh, especially if they are large objects like buildings.

The answer to your question is, "You'll need a mesh-enabled viewer if you ever want to be able to see mesh objects."   Without a viewer built on the V2 codebase, any mesh object looks like a blob.  For the near future, that will just be an annoyance for you.  You will be missing some things that others can see, but there won't be many of them for a while. Before very long, though, that annoyance will grow on you, and you'll find that SL looks less and less interesting.  More important than mesh itself, though, you'll find that all of the bugs you have been dealing with in you current viewer will never go away. They are being fixed in newer viewers, but you won't get the benefit.  You also won't benefit from other features as they are added to the new viewers but won't work in older ones.   So .... nobody's going to force you to quit using your old viewer, but you'll want to.

[Rolig Loon]

Mesh has been enabled in all sims since September.

[Holger Gilruth]

there are allready many viewer with 1.x code and mesh enabled. You dont need to use a 2.0 Viewer to see mesh

[Rolig Loon]

Phoenix will be mesh-enabled, but is not yet. As far as I know, the only V1 viewer to have mesh capability at the moment is the Cool viewer, which is not self-certified as compliant with LL's TPV policy (although Henry Beauchamp has made it a very good viewer). As I pointed out, though, there are a growing number of other features besides mesh that require the V2 codebase, so the question of when to change from a V1 viewer is complicated. In any case, the decision is purely a personal one, as it should be. We do not all expect the same things in SL, so no single viewer will be right for everyone.