Plant Carpenter

A clever person flushed with cash would have a few VC firms fully capitalized and in his/her back pocket, to act as proxies in efforts to move into competitive markets, or quell any potential conflicts that might otherwise arise simply by co-opting them though third-party acquisition. Anyone remember the old days, when that mightily funded VC firm funded by Paul Allen, or some such, pumped $135,000,000 into that failing Canadian software company Corel, to make it's anti-competitive complaints go quietly away amidst the Fed's ongoing antitrust litigation? Just tossing around a few ideas.

Not sure what you're saying Nacy. Most of the MMO games I'm familiar with use object trees. WoW is mostly old tech whereas Rift is quite new and its trees and foliage reflect that enhanced state. So, I'm not sure where the matte or flat panel references you mention fit in. Even SL has dimensional trees (licensed from Speedtree from 2006 or before?). I'm just saying that that from a render cost standpoint a 25 prim, fully scalable, sculpted tree doesn't seem to make sense relative to a 5 prim mesh version, particularly where each mesh object has fewer faces than any of the individual 25 sculpted prims. Why should the mesh tree have an 85 PE then? Maybe I'm missing something. What's the difference in rendering cost between identically shaped and scaled objects when one uses a sculpted texture and another is a mesh? If there is one and it's significant, then that probably explains the PE difference. If not, or negligible, then I kind of assume the PE is about preventing willy nilly 2 million polygon mesh uploads. Like I was saying. It is what it is until LL decides to change it. It's a big disadvantage to be stuck with sculpts however.

Spent a good part of the day reading up on the PE issue and it seems clear that LL doesn't want big builds using mesh. I guess that makes sense. It's not hard to imagine what might happen if people could upload huge mesh items (without the constraints PE enforces). That said, it doesn't make much sense to see a 20m mesh build using 2/3 the faces of like sculpts and have the mesh produce an 85 PE tree when the sculpt tree uses 5 prims at any scale. Even the least efficient 1 sculpt per tree limb, branch, trunk approach produces a tree with less than 25 prims and at any scale. Seems a bit crazy and way outdated to make meshes so much less efficient, ie high PE ratios. Personally, seems like a fixed, non-scaleable mesh/size alternative makes sense. The other issue I've seen argued regarding PE is in selling larger mesh items. How do you sell a scaleable 10m, 20 PE tree to someone who then scales the tree to 25m only to find they've used 80 prims on their prim limited land without getting questions, complaints, etc? That issue alone, absent grid wide user education, seems to relegate meshes to niche for large item builders. It is what it is. I'm back to sculpteds having wasted a week working out the (in)efficiencies of meshes.

I had such high hopes for mesh. Meshes do free you from the incredibly cumbersome aspect ratio restraints sculpts require. But when I see a 25m sculpted tree show as 3 prims only to become 50 even when uploaded as an enhanced efficiency mesh using fewer faces I get incredibly discouraged. What's the point of building for mesh with false equivalences like this?

Working Seems I did a clean install of the latest beta a couple of days ago thinking it was newest mesh viewer build when it wasn't even a mesh viewer. I would swear I saw "mesh" used in the "About" window. Probably got confused with the version number passing 2.8 though. Anyway, works. Me happy Can't wait to see what some do with vegetation. Lots possible now without the sculptie and megaprim restrictions. Fun explorations ahead, and more dimensional realism. Yay! Thanks Charlar.

Had meshes working for some time, and as recent as 2 days ago. The enablement went away. Not sure I'm getting what the fix is from this thread, but would like to get back up and running so I can work on conversions and testing. Would love to get the sim I rent enabled as well, Fleur dAlouette