Melissa Yeuxdoux

According to The Making of Second Llife: Notes from the New World, the slider limits were set up to avoid things like a pointless height arms race. Remember the Monty Python sketch with the TV MC whose height fetish escalates into "Flaming Star--the story of one man's search for vengeance in the raw and violent world of international archeology"? ("Eleven foot six?! Damn you!") In the case of breast size, SL comes nowhere near accomodating RL variation (and for that matter, enforces a symmetry that doesn't exist in RL), much less people's fantasies. Arm length constraints prevent proportionality for taller avatars (hence the well-known "T. rex avatar" syndrome). Worse still, the imposed limits cause interactions between sliders that make adjustment difficult, and force hacks that shouldn't be necessary. You want really long legs? You'll have to settle for a short torso and a short neck, thanks to the height constraint. Do you have proportions you like that you want to keep at different heights, say if sometimes you want to enjoy sims where they strive for consistent use of size, like 1920s Berlin? Good luck. If there were a simple scaling slider for the avatar it would be easy, but there isn't (despite its being proposed). There are lower bounds as well as upper bounds; if you want to be Mlle. Polaire in one of the Paris sims, it will take a hack to get her waistline. If you want to be a Tinker Bell style fairy, you can--thanks to people who had to do a lot of work to overcome the limits the sliders impose.

Gomen nasai, Watanabe-san. It was early, and I was in a hurry to get ready for RL work. Thank you very much for tracking the link down and posting it!

The post includes a slide show that I suspect accompanied the presentation at the Game Developer Conference. Do I have a realistic hope that SL can benefit from what they describe?

LL gets to decide what's "shared experience" at their whim. You're right; two avatars standing side by side can have widely differing graphics settings, draw distance, Windlight settings, and perceived position of the sun/moon, but that is deemed not to be a "shared experience" issue, while the mesh deformer is. At least with some third-party viewers I can choose not to render selected objects, so I can see or photograph the Eiffel Tower without all the stores cluttering its base while someone standing next to me does see them... but at least so far, LL doesn't consider that a "shared experience" issue.

One thing to point out: the FPS you achieve isn't just a matter of your computer, but will depend on the build, how many people are there, and your settings. Take a look at Penny Patton's blog post in which a single tiny object using multiple large textures (which made no sense given the object's size) took the frame rae she saw in the sim down from 75+ to 5.

Worked like a charm. Thank you; I've posted to my blog linking to this thread. Since I can't post a comment on the JIRA entry, I'll say simply that this gets rid of the issue that makes a 64-bit Linux build necessary, i.e. no streaming media, though I do wish they'd go ahead and do one for efficiency's sake and so people new to Linux don't give up; with a 64-bit version (and yes, people are now recommending that those wishing to use Linux install a 64-bit version if their processor supports it) it will Just Work. Thanks again; I'm in your debt.

Hi. In the JIRA entry on the mesh deformer, people have brought up the issue of builders creating needlessly high polygon count items. (Kind of like "this digital camera must be great, it has five petapixels!") I don't want to reward that kind of behavior, and I don't want the overhead such items needlessly induce. (Here I wish to join the chorus of gratitude for Codewarrior Congrejo's excellent thread on topology.) So... as a consumer, how can I know before I buy which are the products whose makers have done their work and put polygons to their best and most efficient use? If an in-store model is wearing a garment, can I right click on it and find out polygon counts? Do I have to count on reviewers or the sellers?

If I may ask, what exactly is "the community"? If it's SL users in general, I suspect, though I don't know, that the majority of them are consumers, not builders. Not that there's anything wrong with that... but to contribute to the cause, you don't just have to be a builder, but one who is adept at creating meshes. (I hope their tribe will increase, but as this drags on, hope is fading.) Nonetheless, those aware of the mesh deformer are, I also suspect, highly interested in it, having found that without it, mesh clothes makers might as well put up a sign reading "Procrustes's Mesh Clothing," because it's utterly impractical to fill out the combinatorial explosion needed to fit everyone.

"Orthogonal is one of the open source cult words, Qie, did you realize that?" Probably not, because it is no such thing--unless you have some evidence that nobody else has ever heard of that Adriaan van Wijngaarden, the inventor of two-level grammars (now called "van Wijngaarden grammars" after their inventor) and head of the committee that developed Algol 68 back in the 60s and 70s, somehow originated the open source "cult", unnoticed, a decade or so before Stallman started the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation was created. Vectors are "orthogonal" if they're at right angles to one another--more abstract systems define an "inner product", analogous to the vector dot product, so that two things in those systems are called "orthogonal" if their inner product is zero, or a set of things if each two of them are orthogonal. More important for the computer science usage of the term, orthogonal vectors are "linearly independent"; you can't add up multiples of some to get one of the others. By analogy, features of a program or programming language are "orthogonal" if they don't have arbitrary limitations, they can be combined as you will.

I use 64-bit Linux as well (Now Ubuntu 12.04). The shell script that runs the actual SL client binary, as far as I can tell, always puts that message out if it detects 64-bit Linux, whether the client actually succeeds in running or not. If the client actually comes up and runs, don't worry about the message. If, OTOH, it isn't running, please post a followup with more info about what happened. Be sure to save the output; try something like secondlife 2>&1 | tee save.log to start up the client. If you take the problem to the JIRA, they'll want that output.

Desirable as STORM-1800, "The vertex weights of the default mesh could be better", is, is it really multiple improvements?

This is one of the topics that the JIRA mesh deformer entry explicitly says to bring up here insteaed of there, so... I'll bring it up. There are some SL residents who want avatars of a sort the stock shape does not support. Let's start simple with humanoid avatars, such as those who wish to be virtual bodybuilders, those who dream of having figures like Mlle. Polaire, or those like me who wish to, shall we say, have an unusually high center of mass. The canonical solution so far has been attachments, but that cuts one off from most of the vast cornucopia of SL fashion. (For the well-endowed ladies of Second Life, I am happy to say that for at least a couple of years, an ever-growing number of clothiers have catered to us, but the nature of attachments makes for issues with consistent textures and lighting where the attachments join the avatar shape.) Mesh avatars avoid the issues of the join of avatar shape to attachment by not using attachments, but so far they are still limited for available clothing. Finally, mesh avatars have the same issue as mesh clothing--because they're the same darn thing, differing only in how much of the stock avatar you hide. Without the mesh deformer, clothiers have to either forget about mesh, replace the signs on their stores with something like "Procrustes Mesh Clothing", or suffer the combinatorial explosion that RL clothes makers can't avoid, i.e. making a bunch of different sizes of everything. With the mesh deformer, this isn't an issue--for those using the stock avatar shape. Mesh avatars do get deformed by the mesh deformer, BUT--those deformations appear to be tied to the stock avatar shape. Try them on a mesh avatar and the results are, to say the least, weird. Unless something is done to make non-skeletal sliders do something that makes sense for the shapes defined by mesh avatars, mesh avatar makers are stuck with the combinatorial explosion--and if we don't like showing up at an event with the same dress someone else is wearing there, you can imagine what it's like to have the same whole body as someone else!) One can leave the stock avatar head and neck exposed so that at least can be customized, but that shouldn't be necessary. So... what would be involved in letting one specify just what the non-skeletal slider settings do for a given mesh avatar? (And if one can do that, would that help make it possible to wear stock avatar clothing on mesh avatars? Having an inventory full of clothing you might as well kiss goodbye if you adopt a mesh avatar is a serious discouragement for those thinking of trying a mesh avatar out.)

Actually, if the Windows version works under WINE with reasonable performance, I'd be tempted to recommend it to people running 64-bit Linux because of the issues with Second Life and streaming media under 64-bit Linux.

Thanks, Innula; Tateru's post is well worth reading... but as she remarks, the text of the agreement does not define "shared experience".

"A shared experience change is one that modifies the definition of the elements that make up the virtual world, or how they behave, in such a way that users on other viewers don’t experience the same virtual reality. "This rule does not affect changes to rendering, user interface, or the controls a viewer offers for interacting with the world." So does a "derender" feature count as a change to rendering, or is it forbidden because not seeing something that others see means that they aren't experiencing the same virtual reality?

By all means, please, Linden Lab, define explicitly what is meant by "altering the shared experience". Firestorm lets me choose to not see an object, so I don't have to see bothersome billboards, objects that are spoiling my snapshot composition, someone who's bothering me... or whatever. That means I don't see those things and others do (unless they use Firestorm and choose to also not see them). Is that an alteration of the shared experience? (Goodness knows that was one of the arguments against the Emerald breast physics code.)

"This is sad because creating avatars which can be fully modified by the shape, would be pretty huge. Pretty dang revolutionary." Indeed it would. As a member of the SL prim breast community, I would be ecstatic if I could get the figure I want without having to use attachments, and also not be cut off from what I hope will be the new center of SL couture, mesh clothing. (And it's not just breasts--if running into someone dressed exactly like you is an embarrassment, how much more so if the other person looks exactly like you!) I hope that mesh avatar makers will try out clients with the mesh deformer code and make mesh avatars that work and play well with it. UPDATE: I didn't explicitly say it here, but in my mind, where the sky is lime green, I was imagining a world in which mesh clothing would fit any humanoid mesh avatar--that's going to require some way to map from one mesh avatar surface to another, so that mesh clothing for one mesh avatar can be worn by another. That, of course, is another problem, though OTOH, wouldn't that be the same kind of mapping the mesh deformer does?

That's the problem with Second Life clothing. It's not really one size fits all, it's one size fits the shape the designer used when creating it. Textures stretch or squish to match one's shape, but in RL, patterned cloth for a larger size would have more replications of the pattern instead. To do it right, clothing should be able to read your shape parameters and adapt when you put it on. I submitted a JIRA entry, VWR-10839, for this, but nothing's come of it yet.

The other day I was in a store waiting for a sign to rez; I think it described how to use the store's vendors. As it slowly rendered and the text became more legible at a leisurely pace, I had to wonder how it was created. Is it the canonical board with a texture, so that the client has to load a 2^n x 2^n graphics file to paint the board, or is there a way to keep the text on a sign as text for rendering at the client? I suspect the latter is true, since there's been HTML on a prim for a while. So the real question is--what is making that sign take so long to show up in legible form? Maybe it just looks like the old days in which an interleaved GIF file took forever to download and sat there as a barely recognizable blur until all the data arrived, and the real bottleneck is somewhere else. What is best practice for text-only or text-mostly billboards in SL?

Yes, I do have shadows enabled. It may be that there are case issues; the system is in an Apevia X-QPack 2 case, which is a Micro ATX case and doesn't have a spot for a fan on the side.. I can feel the air being pulled in in front and blown out in back; the power supply intake fan is right over the graphics card, and should be pulling hot air away from it and blowing it out the back as well.

That seems to pretty much match what I see now, though it seems to have to really be idle (i.e. screen blanked) for 38 C; more often it hovers in the low 40s. I had nvidia-settings running in the background so I could see the temperature and the fan %, and I kind of wonder about the fan. It sits there at 40% until the temp gets around 70C, and then goes up, I think ending up at--shucks, was it near 50%? I think so--when, while in Second Life, the rendering gets hard core and the temperature is around 80C. So I'm wondering whether the fan should ramp up somewhat before then, and I'm still puzzled about why the temperatures should be higher than they were when I first installed the card. Is 80C is 180F, and that seems awfully hot. Can I change the temperature -> fan % mapping in Liinux?

I'm noticing something that's kind of scary. I bit the bullet and upgraded to a PNY VCGGTX560TXPB 560 Ti graphics card. When I first got it, it ran amazingly cool--hardly going into the 50s (Celsius) when running SL, and when not doing anything graphics intensive it wasn't much above room temperature.. I'd hear the fan come on when I was in SL, but it wasn't irritatingly noisy. Now, it seems to be running a good bit warmer--the fan doesn't come on until it's pushing 80 degrees Celsius. I know of nothing I've intentionally done to affect the fan control. Just today I maxed my system out on RAM, in part to see whether an SL RAM leak issue would make the client suck down 15+ GB before crashing (it didn't)... but sitting here, again doing nothing graphics intensive, the exhaust from the fans at the rear (power supply and 120 mm case fan) is at room temperature as far as I can tell. If the RAM were driving up the case temperature, wouldn't I notice it all the time? I'm running 64-bit Ubuntu 11.04, which I keep up to date, with nVidia's proprietary driver (270.41.06)--has anyone else noticed a change in fan speed adjustment who's running current Ubuntu? P.S. Yes, I do blow the dust out of my system periodically.

I submitted a jIRA request, SVC-7188, having to do with this. You should be able to mount your inventory as a networked file system, so you can use whatever file manipulation techniques you know and love and have learned from long experience with your computer/OS of choice (including the command line if that's your preference. How many times would you have liked to be able to use file name pattern matching on your inventory?). If you copy an image to it, you get billed L$10. If you're the creator of something, you should be able to back it up to your computer.

Are there transcripts of the mesh meetings for those who can't be there? If LL is considering other ways to solve the same problem, great--they should say so, not just tag the only proposed solution that we are aware of as something that they may do... someday.... That,. especially after previously marking it as something to be done in "sprint 28", certainly makes it look like they don't think the issue is particularly important--though without some way to make mesh accomodate avatar shapes, mesh clothing is worthless for the vast majority. Procrustes would be proud.

People will make better decisions about purchases with more information... how can one find out about the efficiency of a product in SL before committing L$ to it? Second Life needs something like Underwriters Laboratories--submit your products to them and get approval or not, and display their emblem with approved products.