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Darien Caldwell

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Everything posted by Darien Caldwell

  1. When this beta starts, is LL going to provide people with specific information about Mesh and their implementation? It's all fine and good to say: "Rigging is is attachment based; if you import a mesh with compatible bone weight information, you will be able to use it as an attachment that will animate along with your standard avatar." But without the documentation to explain how it's done, it doesn't help. The documentation should come well in advance of the beta, so people have time to read it, understand it, and begin implementing it.
  2. From first-hand experience I can say this is a big understatement. I've been on three sides of this fence. I think what most people don't realize is that often the most profound improvements get no reaction whatsoever from anyone outside the company. It takes someone gifted to successfully complain about things going right. : )
  3. Classic example of why not to sell your company. Maybe something LL should think about themselves.
  4. Hollie Wood makes some great cars. Look her up in-world. : )
  5. I find it hard to get excited, as https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-19964 still isn't fixed. Come on now, bring thousands of users joy and fix this bug.
  6. Mesh support was announced pretty much exactly one year ago. Plenty of time to choose a 3D modeling application and get familiar with it. At least two of those applications have been available free of charge: Blender and Wings 3D. Maybe they slipped below your radar because they are made by those open-source hippies that you so despise. Anyway, there is no excuse for creators who chose to twiddle their thumbs for the past 12 months. You either want to make money or you don't. There is one big issue that makes your statement very fallacious. LL put anyone and everyone involved with mesh under a NDA. So no creator was able to make any decisions about what to buy or what to learn. People haven't had 1 year. A few months maybe, and only because the NDA was dropped for 1 day by accident, and some info leaked out. The NDA is probably the single biggest problem I have with the Mesh project. Nothing regarding Mesh should have ever been under an NDA. Then your statement would be truthful.
  7. I see. Thanks for the additional Info. A triangle still has to have 3 vertices, so there's still a rough analogy to number of vertices as compared to number of triangles. Personally I'm satisfied enough with the current numbers to say the world isn't ending. Barring LL making a huge change to the 4k = 1 prim ratio that is.
  8. Well, this is what i've gleaned from the people talking about it. Which considering the NDA is lifted, i'm not seeing many talk so far. There are two key factors, how many K of data =1 prim, and how many k of data = 1 vertice. LL will set the first, and I think it's clear 4k per prim is not set in stone yet. The second is completely under the control of the creator. I can think of a lot of ways to optimize the upload file to reduce the number of bytes per vertice. So milage may vary. I'm just doing rough math to get perspective. Now if LL would give us hard numbers, we could do some very hard calculations. : )
  9. Actually my numbers are way off. I misunderstood about what they meant as a limit. it's actually vertices they are limiting, not upload size. it's a 64k Vertice limit (65535 for those keeping count) but 4k of upload size per prim (4096 to be exact) if you make a broad assumption that 1 vertice uses 30 bytes in the file, the file size for a 65535 vertice item would be 30x65535= 1966050 bytes / 1024 = 1920k of data. 1920k of data / 4k per prim = 480 prims. of course the actual size is probably greater, especially with UV maps. Someone reported a 64k vertice file would be around 8.75 megs. (8750k / 4k per prim = 2188 prims ) I feel much better now.
  10. Well, if what people are saying in the SL Beta group is true, meshes will give you 200 prims worth of vertices for the cost of 15 prims. Basically, prim limits just went out the window. New Era indeed. I'm kind of disappointed they set the limit so low. (4k upload = 1 prim, 60k upload limit = 15 prims). The limit should be based on vertices, and be quite a bit higher. Otherwise using meshes will be the way to get around prim limits in a big way. And that's only going to increase lag. Prim limits are really just a way to limit vertices, after all.
  11. Would you be so happy if your 243 prim gun was already perfected, fully functional and on the market? If it was one of your best selling items, and the introduction of mesh slaughtered your sales because someone else beat you to the market with a better-looking, two-prim version of your primmy gun? Well there are a couple fallacies here. First off, people don't really care much about prim count when it comes to attachments. Second is, The more detailed a mesh is, the more prims it will count as. So a gun that's 'better looking' than a full prim gun is probably going to count for a hefty number of prims anyway. possibly even more prims. Although, that's the thing I'm still waiting to see, is the vertice/prim ratio. Not sure why LL keeps beating around the bush about it.
  12. In what I'm sure was a complete coincidence, AC3D just added Collada support as of Sept 10th. If you used AC3D for sculpts, you can now use it for mesh. http://www.inivis.com/
  13. you don't need a supercomputer to run SL. You do need a computer that's slightly better than a 286 with EGA graphics. It amazing to me the crappy computers people buy. And it saddens me that companies try to pawn off poorly designed PCs on people. But that's the downside to a free market. People are free to make crap, and people are free to buy it. If you're not spending at least 600 dollars on your PC, you're probably getting crap.
  14. Sounds like steps in the right direction. Thanks for listening and hearing.
  15. Thanks. It is a wonderful looking build.
  16. The story I hear is that there was a website exploit on the Lindex page which allowed large volumes of lindens to be 'created'. If this rumor is true, it would explain the sudden increase, and why Quick Buy and Sell were (and maybe still are) disabled. Of course there's no way to know if the rumor is true, and I don't expect LL will ever admit that if it was. But it's certainly food for thought.
  17. I keep finding these posts irritating from the aspect that the pictures are so tiny. I click on these thumbnails to see bigger pictures, and behold, the floater that opens is exactly the same size as the thumbnail! There is a popular phrase, "Pictures or it didn't happen". Please provide better pictures. Thanks.
  18. Well... It certainly does match the blog and the rest of the SL website in both style and form.
  19. What makes SL unique is the fact that everyone can create. Every other strength that SL has there's another type of MMO out there that has something similar, from land ownership, to content sales, to music sharing and socializing, ... It is this "Everyone can create" thing that sets the SL type of MMO apart. And the tools we have for content creation are STALE. We need mesh, we need windlight finished, and we need a viewer UI that is less baffling spacially and semantically. You are right *and* you are wrong. We need new tools, but *not* at the expense of the old ones. LL's basic argument is, in order to make room for new tools, that carry new *options*, they must reduce the functionality and reduce the *options* of existing tools. This is Wrong-Think from the Labs. It's only natural as you add new things, new options will come with it. Complexity Grows. It's something that LL and *any company* must contend with. You don't see Microsoft whining they must remove and reduce options in Excel. Their users wouldn't stand for it. And neither will we. Every option that people rely on, http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-19964 for example, is a necessity. It can't just be decided that "we need to make room, so bump, away it goes." That's not even design, that's chaos.
  20. Yes, I know from the SLCC talk that the Devs feel there are too many controls in the viewer. Which is what I suspect led to some options being dropped, such as http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-19964 (LL Internal: http://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-21193 ) However, Things like this are simply too important to do away with completely. Is the above a 50/50? Probably not. But it's important enough to many people, that it should exist, somewhere. Especially seeing as the code for it is already in the viewer. Would I object to it being on the Dev menu rather than the inventory pane? No. But It should be available.
  21. If there's one thing LL needs, is someone with some marketing sense. I hope you're really, really good.
  22. Yes, I wouldn't really worry about rendering cost too much. It's kind of an arbitrary number. As long as you're not lagging when you look at yourself, it's probably fine. : ) (waits for the tofu prim eaters to come naysay)
  23. Unfortunately that's impossible to say. The textures on the avatar will consume some bandwidth, until they are finished downloading. As the avatar moves, it will generate messages to your viewer, telling the viewer how it moved, these use bandwidth. But the most bandwidth has little to do with avatars directly at all. It's all mostly texture/sound downloads, and 'event' messages when something changes in the environment. The larger your draw distance, the more 'events' the viewer will be notified about, the more textures that will be downloaded, and the more bandwidth you will use.
  24. Limits are by script memory. From my understanding the target for *overall* script memory per sim will be 200 megs. That will have to be divided amongst avatars (attachment memory pool) and parcels (land memory pool). The 100,000 $L question is how these pools will be allocated. LL hasn't given an indication yet. But having sat down and did my own math, i just know likely nobody will be very happy about the new limits. To give either group a sizable pool, will come at the expense of the other.
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