ChinRey

Could you tell us a bit more about your problem? I'm not going to say the uploader is good - it's a shoddy pile of poorly designed and poorly thought out "features" - but I've never had or heard of anybody having problems like that.

There's a lot of mesh prefabs on the market, some good, some bad, some requiring special texturing skills, some geared towards the traditional reim builders. I make and sell some of the good stuff geared towards traditional prim builders myself so I may be blowing my own trumpet here but I honestly don't see that as significantly different from prim building. And it certainly isn't significantly different from building with sculpts using bought sculpt maps. I sometimes get to see what some of my customers make from my prefabs (and even from my presumably complete builds) and I'm often amazed by the creativity and ingnenuity they show. Very often they've found some brand new uses for my meshes that I wouldn't have dreamed of myself. If what they don't do isn't good, honest inworld building, I don't know what is.

I think that sums it up. No matter what people may think of TMP, fact is, it requries special appliers and it simply isn't big enough a market for it to be worth the bother for clothes creators. It's not about boycotting, it's simply sound business practice not to waste time and effort on marginal markets with little return.

A scripter once went to Sansar to make the most wonderful car. It looked like a dream, was featured on Steam, but never could get very far.

Me too, but we're not going to tell them that, are we? Let's keep them on their toes. I'm still puzzled as to why the navmesh affects avatar walking height though. There doesn't seem to be any reason for it, it just makes things a little bit more complicated.

Sorry about posting two replies, I should have read the OP more thoroughly before submitting and since Rolig already has given me a like, I don't don't want to edit to add, since she may not like this: That's technical skills again. If you understand how land impact is calculated and how to control it, you can always reduce it down to a fraction of the prim count a similar traditional build would have had. If you don't know what you're doing, anything can happen. This applies to traditional prim/sculpt builds too, not just mesh, since they too can often use the land impact system and if done right they nearly always benefit from it. Apart from the lag issue, think of it as poetry. Prim building is haiku. It's a very strict framework and it seems there's not much you can do within it. But if you are really good at it and are able to use the frame not as a limitation but as a trigger for your creativity, you can work miracles. Mesh building is modern poetry. Anything goes and it can be very hard to tell what is artistically good or bad. Sculpts are somewhere inbetween - pop song lyrics perhaps. It can be good, it can be bad and it's usually easy to see the difference. Oh yes, there are. Not as many as there used to be perhaps but there still are. There's more to it than that, much, much more. Unfortunately far too many people who believe they are mesh creators and/or manage to trick others into believing they are, seem to believe the same as you do.

Mesh builds in SL tend to be laggier than prim and sculpt ones, yes, but it's not an absolute rule and it's not right to say that mesh is inherently laggier. I've done quite a lot of tests on the impact various items have on the frame rate. Very roughly and very simplified, if we rate objects' lagginess on a scale from 1 to 10 where 1 is the lowest lag: Meshes can be anything from 1 to 10 Prims are usually 2 to 4 but can be higher Sculpts ... 5 to 6 Mesh gives you far more control over how an object is made and that means if you know what you're doing you can optimize it for better performance than prims and sculpts. But it also means there are far more ways to mess things up so the technical skills of the mesh maker becomes important. Unfortunately, although things have improved a lot recently, technical skills are still in short supply among mesh makers in Second Life so SL mesh in general do tend towards the laggy end of the scale. --- When it comes load time and reliability - how long it takes for an item to appear in the first place and how high the risk for render failure is: Prims load faster and are less prone to render failure than mesh or sculpts Mesh loads considerably faster than sculpts Sculpts seem to be less prone to render failure than mesh but if so, there's very little difference. --- Textures are at least as important as the basic geometry for an item's lagginess. Without going into details, there is a very strong tendency among mesh makers today to use texturing methods that require more and higher resolution textures than the methods traditionally used by prim and sculpt builders. That can be a very significant factor and it may well be the main reason why modern mesh builds in SL tend to be laggier than similar looking traditional prim and sculpt ones.

That is very interesting. Now that you mention it, I think I've had similar issues once or twice in the past but never really thought about it. Does it happen only when you try to rez close to those walls or all over the floor?

Awwww, you're in for a nasty surprise! I never had to accept the ToS on the beta grid though. Maybe it's because I agreed to it on the website, not in the viewer? You may want to file a suport case or possibly a JIRA and ask LL to take a look.

Oh. I got the info that LL wanted navmesh to replace the old ground physics and that the old ground physics is a height field from an earlier thread in the forum - can't remember when or who said it. Nobody contradicted it back then so I assumed it was true. Avatars are limited both by the navmesh and the regular ground physics (whatever that may be) though:

That is a very valid point. Surprising as it may seem, it turns ut that nobody at Linden Lab were into numerology so although my and Rhonda's explanation is of course the deep reason in a cosmic persepective, it can't have been what they had in mind. Since the number of attachments is no longer linked to the number of attachment points, the only reason they can have had for keeping the 38 limit is to control avatar load and it doesn't do that job very well. You can wear a single attachment that bogs down an entire sim and you can have 38 attachments with hardly any noticeable load at all. We can't just scrap the whole thing though because it's one of the very few mechanisms SL has to maintain even the most rudimentary control of avatar lag. The best solution might be to replace it with a hard limit based one the total load of the attachments, not the number of them. For some reason I have a feeling LL don't have the courage to do that.

Glad to have that clarified. Nah. I prefer to ask questions to clear up possible misunderstandings

You can log on to https://secondlife.com and agree to the new ToS there. I hope a fairly long lesson is ok? HAVOK and Bullet and ubODE (the two common physics engines on the OS Grid) are all based on the ODE engine, an old open source phsyics engine and the one originally used by Second Life. They all prefer to work with bodies rather than with surfaces but they can handle both and they support seven different basic physics models. Sorted by how hard they are to handle for the physics engine, they are: Sphere Cube Capsule (a cylinder capped with two semispheres) Triangle (three vertices and a triangle between them) Cylinder Convex hull (the same as the convex hull we can assign in the viewer except for one crucial detail: the physics shape we upload can be assembled from several convex hulls, not just one) Triangle list (that's the same as a mesh really: a bunch of vertices with triangles stretched between them) The triangle and triangle list are surface shapes. The phsyics engine checks if you are passing somewhere between the vertices. If you are, it pushes you off in one specific direction (the direction the normals are pointing), meaning you can sometimes pass through a triangle in one direction but not the other. The other are all bodies. The physics engine checks if you are inside it and if you are, it throws you out the shortest way. ------- When LL introduced mesh, they decided this was a bit to complicated so they limited our options to only three of the least efficient shapes: triangle, convex hull and triangle list. ------- If you don't analyze the physics, the uploader will simply use your physics mesh as a triangle list or a single triangle. --- A single triangle will always have a physics weight of 0.2. That is the lowest physics weight you can possibly get with a mesh but it's hardly a useable shape. --- The calculated physics weight of a triangle list depends on the number, shape and size of the triangles. For some rather unclear reasons LL decided that small triangles and long and narrow triangles are heavier on the physics engine than large ones. This is the reason why you sometimes get those huge LI peaks. When the triangles get really small or really narrow, the calculated physics weight (not necessarily the actual one) gets seriously high. This is also the reason why you sometimes get those doorways you can't wak through. LL decided to "fix" the bloated weight issue by introducing a minimum size for triangle physics. An object that is smaller than that size will automatically be converted to a convex hull even if you choose prim as the physics shape. In their wisdom they decided to base that size limit on the object's total size rather than on the individual triangles in the physics model: Any object with triangle physics and a size of 0.5 m or less along any of the three axises will always be treated as a single convex hull, even if you have set the physics shape to prim. An yes, you're right, that doesn't make any sense whatsoever but that's how they decided to do it. For good measure, there's also an extra quirk there: if the dimension along one of the axises is zero, the SL software will treat it as if it is 1 m in that direction and suddenly triangle list physics work just fine again. Oh, and one more quirk: As I said, triangle physics is directional so the normals are quite important. Smooth normals can sometimes cause problems here. Not often but changing all the normals to flat ones before you export the physics model is easy and quick to do and a good safety measure. And a third quirk: If the size difference between the triangles in a triangle list is too big, the uploader will tell you something about degenrate triangles, scribble some ugly black lines over the preview and flatly refuse to upload your mesh ------- If you analyze the physics, the uploader will convert the mesh model you made into convex hulls. Each convex hull will usually have a physics weight of 0.36 although some more complex shapes may be a little bit higher. Physics weight of hulls are independent of size. All those uploader settings allow you to tweak how the model is converted to hulls but really, if you use analyzed physics for a build and want to avoid too many gray hairs, make the physics model in Blender (or your perferred modelling software) from easily identifiable convex hull shapes and keep a little bit of space between each shape so there's absolutely no doubt how it is to be split up. You probably want to stick to simple shapes - mainly cubes, maybe an occasional pyramid or prism or single triangle (a single triangle can also be defined as a convex hull) - but you may also want to try more complex hulls every now and then. After you have analyzed the physics, check that the number of hulls listed is correct. If it isn't, you can usually fix it with a little bit of % simplification. One peculiarity with hulls is that they can't be too close to each other or to other physics shapes. There has to be a very small gap between. If you walk on a surface with hull physics you may notice you hover slightly higher than when you walk on other surfaces. ------- All of the above should be reasonably understandable (even though all of it doesn't necessarily make sense). I don't think anybody has been able to fully explain the non-rezzable surface problem though but it's fairly easy to demonstrate and to avoid once you're aware of it. Imagine your physics model is made from a single cube. That's simple. Analyze it and it becomes a single hull. Upload it and you can rez on it, no problem. Now remove one of the sides of the cube so you get one with an opening in it. Analyze it and it becomes a single hull. Upload it and everything seems fine until you try to rez something on top of it. For some reason that's not possible and there's nothing in the HAVOK documentation that mentions anything like that. You can rez on a triangle physics surface, you can rez on a "normal" hull surface and on all the other five basic shapes. There is no shape no. 8 that acts as peculiar as that. But in any case, there are two fairly simple solutions: One is to use triangle list physics. Ideally you want to use that for walkable surfaces anyway because you get more precise elevation height when you walk across it than you do with hulls. The other solution is to make sure there are no holes in the hulls. If you choose "Solid" as the analyze method, the uploader will try to close those holes for you. That's the easiest way and why I mentioned it in my first post. But the uploader has a lot of peculiar quirks and ideally you want it to do as little as possible. The safe way is to make sure there are no such holes to start with and it's not that much harder to do it that way. ------- The basics of the physics models are the same for (nearly) all objects in Second Life so for the sake of completeness: A sculpt has a single hull as its physics model. It's the convex hull of a torus with curve resolution 9. That may sound like a strange choice and it is. There is a reason though, not a particularly good reason but there is one. Prims use the simple light weight physics shapes whenever possible. When those models don't fit, they use hull or triangle list physics. Not always exactly the same way as mesh but usually close enough. Avatars use a capsule. Vehicles and other moving objects with triangle list phsyics are converted to capsules when they move but not when they stand still However, according to Arton (and he knows all about this), vehicles with hull physics won't change when they move. The ground is weird to put it mildly. The original ground physics of Second Life is a height field. That's really a separate physics engine that checks if you are below a certain height. If you are, you're pushed upwards. From what I understand, that height field engine is quite a bit heavier on the server than the regular physics engine so Linden Lab wanted to get rid of it. When they introduced HAVOK, they decided to do something about it so they added the NavMesh, a triangle list physics shape that follows the ground and can also integrate other objects in the sim. This is the physics pathfinding objects follow and I'm fairly sure it was the physics avatars were supposed to follow too. Unfortunately they made it a bit to simple so it doesn't track the ground precisely enough and they also forgot the underwater areas - there is no navmesh on the seabed. The result was that they had to keep the old height field physics on top of their shiny new navmesh. Oh well.

It happens when the mesh is uploaded with faulty analyzed physics and yes, that error message is rather misleading.It can also happen under certain circumstances when you try to rez on sculpts and the reason is that the software (not sure if it's viewer or server side) has trouble figuring out the physics shape of the surface. There are several solutions to the problem but the easy one - for those who don't want to spend time learning about how mesh physics work - is to choose "Solid" rather than "Surface" as the analyze method when you upload the mesh.

No it wouldn't. I have plenty of Real Life™ experience with that stuff so you can take my word for it.

Oh yes, I'm all with you there. My reply was about the futility of telling people who don't want to listen things they absolutely don't want to hear and as often as not don't even seem to be able to comprehend.

Ummm... I'm trying to read between the lines here so maybe I miss some point. Please correct me if I'm wrong. You call the official viewer the "Virtual Inferiority Viewer". I assume that means you think it's a piece of rubbish. Then in an earlier post you seem to believe that the official viewer opens popup windows where you click and not where you last put them, which would mean you have absolutely no clue whatsoever what the official viewer is, how it works and what it does and doesn't do. It may be just me but I can't get this to fit together into anything coherent.

Lighting a candle may be better but cursing the dark is always easier, more popular on the internet and more effective if you want to win an election.

Maybe I misunderstood but I think Prokofy was talking about the menu, not the popup window. A popup menu appears where you click on the screen in the SL viewer, in all tpv viewers and in all other computer programs I've ever seen.

I think @Oz Linden answered that at last week's TPV meeting: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0DS0-cDMmg&feature=youtu.be&t=17m00s) That's Linden Lab's opinion anyway. Second Life has been going away a little bit at a time for a while of course and it will continue to do so in the foreseeable future but as long as those bits are little, there's no need to panic.

Sorry, I don't speak English but from the other replies it seems "shinies" means Great New Features... A resource accounting system that enocurages efficient content (not just low lag and/or low prim but content that actually makes the most out of available resources) is on top of my list. I think that would be the biggest single improvement possible and the only ones in SL who wouldn't benefit from it, are ripped items resellers who would never be able to learn how to optimize their loot for SL. A sensible user interface is next. We have had occasional discussions about how the newcomer tutorials are designed but the problem isn't actually how they are made, the problem is that they are needed at all. Next is... Oh no, there are so many things, I can't list them all. I'm surprised nobody's mentioned mirrors yet though. (Edit: Woops, Canoro mentioned mirros in the original post! how could I overlook that? Sorry.)

Me too.

Of course!

I suppose you mean the edit window, not the menu? Those popup windows are always in the way no matter where I put them. They ought to be floating in the air outside the computer screen, that's the only good solution. But I've been told there are some technical problems with that.

You're right of course, we shouldn't make fun of how people choose to present their avis in SL. But it's still a very interesting phenomenon because there doesn't seem to be any obvious reason why this particular style has become as common as it is among SL users and even more common among SL clothes designers. I know a few people who were into the style early and I have a pretty good idea why they did it. They wanted the shock effect, they wanted to be different and they wanted to test the limits of their Tangos and Brazilias. And since they all have a wicked sense of humor, I suspect they also wanted to parody the not very well proportioned avatars you usually see in SL. I also know a few people who are seriously into the gansta style and it's easy to understand why they go for it. None of those reasons apply to the majority of exaggerated curves avatars today though and I'm genuinely curious about why.