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Is there anyone else who feels the same as I do about having a Second Life withour mesh?


GaryPreston
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I have been active in SL for 8 years now and seen the move from classic to mesh. With the arrival of mesh I was at first very dubious about the outcome. It seems now a great improvement for objects which take up far fewer prims and a relief to parcel owners.

When mesh avatars came along, however, this was a different ballgame. Although there is an improvement in appearance and avatar movement these avatars are becoming so relatively complicated that they take very long to rez properly with the result that even with the newest viewer updates others have to wait ages whilst looking at clothes on an invisible avatar or an invisible head which exposes a rather ghastly looking brain and eyes, sometimes with jaws with teeth hanging down to the thighs and which is a very ugly sight. Maybe in time this will be sorted but at the moment do we have to put up with all this? Please understand that i have no problem with the progress of mesh and those who are content with these irks. it just isn't my cup of tea till it is sorted.

I'm interested to know if there is anyone else out there who feels we would enjoy the Second Life experience far more if there were to be a parallel alternative which admitted no mesh avatars, or even no mesh, and gave us back our classic avatars, of which I still use one and am very happy with it as i still get comments on how good it looks. I would personally welcome that, at least until the mesh avatar rezzing problem is sorted. I know it is a retrograde, or at least a standstill step, but I see it only as an alternative or temporary possibility.

I would welcome your views.

Thanks for reading.

 

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The answer section is really not a good place for this. Go to the forum, for discussions and seeking out people.

I personally don't want to go without mesh anymore. I prefer it in any aspect of my Second Life. And I have no special problem with it either. It won't go away ever, so you either get used to it or maybe leave SL and check out Open Sim, where you may have less activity, but you can feel like its 2009 again.

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Gary, maybe you just need to update your graphics card.

Also, have you noticed that Mesh avatars (and mesh clothes) often have a LOWER complexity than traditional avatars with old style prim and sculpty clothing attachments?

It's still possible, of course, to assemble an outfit that has an enormous complexity.  I notice this in particular on some store models, who dress their avatars up to the point that they look like a monochrome jelly doll to almost everyone.

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GaryPreston wrote:

I'm interested to know if there is anyone else out there who feels we would enjoy the Second Life experience far more if there were to be a parallel alternative which admitted no mesh avatars, or even no mesh, and gave us back our classic avatars

 

1. Nothing is stopping you from still staying classic.

2. That people are loading slowly suggests there is something wrong with your configuration. Maybe bump your draw distance down so that you are not loading the entire region? Also check - if you use firestorm - that you don't have your bandwidth too high, the lower you can make that the better, 512-800 is a good amount.

3. If you really want no-mesh go to opensim. If you can't find a suitable world you are fully able to make your own grid there that has no mesh.

4. As you are clearly just thinking of Adult Humans, have you thought about the impact to people whose avatar would/could not exist without mesh?

 

My amazing Teegle horse avatar and my amazing TWI wolf avatar are simply not possible in prims.

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I find the opposite.

With mesh I rarely have a render weight higher than 30,000, back before mesh my render weight with flexi hair and flexi dresses would often be above 300,000.

I just have not seen the lag you used to get at clubs where you rubberband across the dancefloor, bumping in to people barely able to walk amongst all the grey textured people.

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If the alternative, mesh-free Second Life also had legacy name options, I'd go there in a heartbeat. 

Miss the days when the sandboxes were full of people making things with prims and when you could hold objects without  half your body disappearing.

And think of all those years of system avatar clothes, being trashed or unused in your inventories...what a waste

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GaryPreston wrote:

Although there is an improvement in appearance and avatar movement these avatars are becoming so relatively complicated that they take very long to rez properly with the result that even with the newest viewer updates others have to wait ages whilst looking at clothes on an invisible avatar  {snip}

More often I see topless avatars waiting for their clothes to res.  I'm not complaining, tho.

Spawn point camping is not just for FPS any more. :)

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Each person has the right to contruct their avatar as they wish.  You have a right to stay with the legacy avatar and system clothes etc., if that's what makes you happy.  Other's have the right to use mesh if they want to.  There are plenty of people that feel like you do and prefer legacy avatars.  But the one's I've talked to have never told me they think mesh shouldn't be allowed. 

I've been in SL a long time and remember the days that it took a long time for legacy avatars to rez.  Also, I must point out, not everyone has a problem with mesh rezzing either. 

To each his own, live and let live, is what SL has always been about.  Don't try to change it now.

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GaryPreston wrote:

I'm interested to know if there is anyone else out there who feels we would enjoy the Second Life experience far more if there were to be a parallel alternative which admitted no mesh avatars, or even no mesh.


I don't think it's mesh as such. Mesh is the standard building material for most virtual environments and has been so for a long time. It's the horrendously poor implementation of mesh in Second Life that is the issue. SL's rendering code for mesh is just a crude and clumsy hack of the sculpt rendering code which again is a crude and clumsy hack of the prim rendering code. Such a bodged job is bound to cause problems of course and a poor LoD system, inadequate resource accounting and lack of proper documentation don't exactly improve the matter.

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Amethyst Jetaime wrote:

I've been in SL a long time and remember the days that it took a long time for legacy avatars to rez.

Yeah, I was gonna say: back when there were no mesh avatars, we had all kinds of delays and failures to rez. Some of us remember the ever so stylish black-on-white "Missing Texture" scrawled over avatar surfaces that failed to bake.

But mesh avatar components are just one recent addition to a much bigger problem that dooms Second Life to never again acquire more than a trickle of new users:

It's just way too complicated to assemble a presentable, customized human avatar now.

Oh, sure, there are the starter avatars and they're better than they used to be, for sure, but hardly anybody wants to stay in those standard-issue avatars for long -- and those outfits are far from ideal starting points for customization.

And oh, sure, you can get ready-made, fully configured "outfits" that simply replace one avatar with another -- some of those are furries or mechs or whatever -- and all together they'll satisfy a few drops in that new user trickle.

I've been dressing my avatar for a long, long time, and it's a major undertaking now to find compatible clothing items and put together an outfit. And it gets more difficult all the time.

(Bento adds a whole extra level of crazy operating complication, once one tries to actually use it expressively. But that's a whole other rant.)

It's impossible to solve this with Second Life partly because it needs to maintain compatibility with the old, pre-mesh avatars. But only partly. Even a fully mesh avatar masking all system components, and ignoring the ridiculous kludginess of shape adjustment now, it's a newbie-defeating task to merely assemble a passable outfit that's more original than an off-the-shelf clone. That specific task had better be orders of magnitude simpler in Sansar or it's game-over before they begin.

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Aethelwine wrote:

With mesh I rarely have a render weight higher than 30,000, back before mesh my render weight with flexi hair and flexi dresses would often be above 300,000.

Those numbers are lying. The render weight formula is heavily biased towards giving fitted mesh lower calculated than actual render weight.

Even so, it seems the main rendering problem with fitted mesh isn't gpu but rather cpu related and that won't show up in the render cost as such of course.

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Rhonda Huntress wrote:

More often I see topless avatars waiting for their clothes to res.  I'm not complaining, tho.

Oh yes. I wonder what the people with those heavy fitmesh avis would say if they knew how many others actually see them naked in SL. :D

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ChinRey wrote:


Lindal Kidd wrote:

Gary, maybe you just need to update your graphics card.

Me too!

Ummm, if I understand you right, you're offering to pay for it? I take donations for my new gpu in Linden dollars so no transfer problems.
^_^

She is just pointing out, that part of Garys problems might come from an ageing computer. But of course, since Gary and you might need a new graphic card, nobody should have nice things.

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Syo Emerald wrote:

She is just pointing out, that part of Garys problems might come from an ageing computer. But of course, since Gary and you might need a new graphic card, nobody should have nice things.

No, it's more than that, Syo. It's a question who Second Life is for. It doesn't have much appeal to the regular gaming and graphics crowd with high performance game computers because, let's face it, the graphics here are rubbish by today's standards. It does still have appeal to more "casual" users of virtual realities but generally not enough that it's worth a three digit number of dollars in extra hardware.

What that  flippant "buy a better computer" answer ultimately means is that Second Life is only for the established users. And not only that, it's only for the established users who are still interested enough to keep spending significant amounts of money on hardware upgrades just for the sake of Second Life.

Second Life can and probably will survive for many years just on the momentum of the past but unless the hardware requirements can be lowered so it becomes accessible to more people, it doesn't really have a future.

It's not as if the hardware requirements are for "nice things" either. Ninety percent of the gpu power used in SL is wasted on poor software and worse content. Have you ever been to other more modern and better made virtual realities? Have you noticed how much better the graphics are and how much lower the hardware requirements are? I keep mentioning the Unigine Benchmarks here because they really are what the titles say, benchmarks for VR performance. 256 sims worth of simulation with a graphics quality way beyond our wildest dreams of what can be achieved in SL and they still have noticeably lower gpu and cpu load than a typical SL scene.

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Nothing wrong with using non mesh avi's and non mesh cloths. For one thing not everyone can aford a 2500L mesh body. Two, when dancing on a pole that requires 2 piece outfits easily taken off. As for the rendering, I find a mix of mesh with non mesh is good such as mesh hair and non mesh loths and shape. When I build I still build old school non mesh and people still buy them.

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ChinRey wrote:


Syo Emerald wrote:

She is just pointing out, that part of Garys problems might come from an ageing computer. But of course, since Gary and you might need a new graphic card, nobody should have nice things.

No, it's more than that, Syo. It's a question who Second Life is for. It doesn't have much appeal to the regular gaming and graphics crowd with high performance game computers because, let's face it, the graphics here are rubbish by today's standards. It does still have appeal to more "casual" users of virtual realities but generally not enough that it's worth a three digit number of dollars in extra hardware.

What that  flippant "buy a better computer" answer ultimately means is that Second Life is only for the established users. And not only that, it's only for the established users who are still interested enough to keep spending significant amounts of money on hardware upgrades just for the sake of Second Life.

Second Life can and probably will survive for many years just on the momentum of the past but unless the hardware requirements can be lowered so it becomes accessible to more people, it doesn't really have a future.

It's not as if the hardware requirements are for "nice things" either. Ninety percent of the gpu power used in SL is wasted on poor software and worse content. Have you ever been to other more modern and better made virtual realities? Have you noticed how much better the graphics are and how much lower the hardware requirements are? I keep mentioning the Unigine Benchmarks here because they really are what the titles say, benchmarks for VR performance. 256 sims worth of simulation with a graphics quality way beyond our wildest dreams of what can be achieved in SL and they still have noticeably lower gpu and cpu load than a typical SL scene.

All of Gary's problems are concerned with mesh bodies loading slowly. No other game that I know of has this problem because their assets are pre-loaded, and therefore limited to what are or can be pre-loaded. If you somehow were able to watch the loading process in those games it would probably look pretty scary. The loading process of Second Life is one of the things we have to live with to allow the widest range of assets -- for instance, if someone considers themself One of the Best Mesh Makers in Second Life but can't convince other game developers that they are, they'll never have their work seen in any other game. Second Life gives them the ability to have their work seen (and judged, but that's another point.)

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Theresa Tennyson wrote:

All of Gary's problems are concerned with mesh bodies
loading slowly. 

Yes but then the discussion sidetracked into the gpu issue and that's what I replied to. Initial loading is of course mainly the main processor's job so a better graphics processor won't help much there.

 


Theresa Tennyson wrote:

The loading process of Second Life is one of the things we have to live with to allow the widest range of assets

But the question still is, who is willing to live with it? No matter how you explain it, the fact is, Second Life does not perform as well as it should or as well as it promises. That's what people see when they arrive here and that's what matters. Asset loading time doesn't explain the excessive cpu load anyway.

 


Theresa Tennyson wrote:p>if someone considers themself One of the Best Mesh Makers in Second Life but can't convince other game developers that they are, they'll never have their work seen in any other game.

I met an "other game developer" a few weeks ago. Somebody who's working full time making models for games and movies and thought a line of mesh clothes in Second Life could be a nice way to expand his business. The very first thing he asked me was why are mesh clothes in Second Life so high poly?

 


Theresa Tennyson wrote:

... they'll never have their work seen in any other game. Second Life gives them the ability to have their work seen (and judged, but that's another point.)

Yes but let's face it, that is interesting to those people and to their friends. Anybody else couldn't care less.

This is another sidetrack but since you mention it, I absolutely agree that one of the great advantages of Second Life is that it's open for hobby creators. Building with mesh is far more complicated and more frustrating than building with prims, partly because mesh is more complicated in itself but also because of the poor documentation and implementation in Second Life. That hurts the hobbyists more than the professionals. Prim building is a far more even playing field where technical skills and experience play a lesser role. I think we're loosing the hobby builder aspect of Second Life and that is very sad. Once upon a time all newcomers were taught how to build, today they are taught how to shop. This paradigm shift from user as creator to user as consumer has gone all but unnoticed yet it may be the most profound change in SL ever.

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ChinRey wrote:


Syo Emerald wrote:

She is just pointing out, that part of Garys problems might come from an ageing computer. But of course, since Gary and you might need a new graphic card, nobody should have nice things.

No, it's more than that, Syo.

As for this thread, its exactly that. He has problems with loading/rezzing and because of that, he wants mesh to be gone. Not more, not less than that.

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Will toss in that I have an extreme problem with textures and objects I Rez loading extremely slowly. Since I spend all day rezzing and waiting, it is a real problem. But I discovered that it only happens on Firestorm, which is an older build because my quite powerful iMac has even worse problems on a newer FS. But as a builder, The LL viewer is far more crippling. 

So as always, I just suck it up, grit my teeth and soldier on. That is SL, always has been, always will be.

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Syo Emerald wrote:

No. He never was. From the first moment Second Life existed, he was never going to be the only one.

That's true. Second Life was never for the "ordinary people", that was just a marketing hype. I'm not quite as new to Second Life as my current avatars and I do remember the early days even though I didn't stay for long back then.

There is a very important difference though. Back in the first years Second Life was something new and exciting and it was cutting edge technology with lots of appeal to the "computer geeks". It isn't today. Everybody else have caught up and raced past.

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