TaraLi Jie

Frankly, most makers and significant users of vendors that I've talked to *DO* consider this a major bug fix. The previous calls are being left in place for the time being under the Linden Lab policy of not breaking content, but in the future will likely be marked deprecated, and eventually removed. This is a much more important fix for most people, I believe, than any other bug in the system right now. Vendors able to tell when a transaction fails, and why? Oooh, I can see LL's support costs falling rapidly! Go look at SVC-114 on the JIRA, where Intan has been sending people to post about inventory loss - I expect a number of those complaints would have never occurred, because the system would be able to tell the user *WHY* the transaction failed.

So what does happen when you apply a cut path, or hollow? How about twist, dimple, etc? Whee - you can resize, and rotate. Texturing is iffy at best, as they only have one side, I'll bet, like sculpties. The only way to change their shape is to have a script apply a *NEW* mesh to it. Can you make flexi meshes? Oh, well - enjoy your mesh-flavored Kool-Aid. I'll stick with what attracted me to SL - "It all starts with a box." Well, talk about harsh words. There is plenty of info you can read on this if you arnt lazy and simply look it up. First, why would you want to apply a pathcut or hollow or any of that stuff? When someone makes a mesh, they can take into account what they want the mesh to look liike. In this way its just like a sculpty. Whether you actually can apply any of that I do not know and dont really care to; when I make something I am going to account for how its supposed to look anyway when I make it, then I dont have to edit it much in world. Did you know that you can make regular prims change their shape with scripts, and not have to bother uploading whole separate meshes for each possible change you might want to make to that prim's shape? At least we can re-size meshes - that at least makes clothing possible. Of course, if there's some inconvenient part sticking out, we can't resize just *THAT* part of the clothes, like we can when we buy mod-able clothing. Oh, and you're not even supposed to change mesh shapes by applying a new mesh to them - you're supposed to create all the parts, and use alpha changes to make them visible or invisible. Real big advantage there. Second, meshes allow up to 8 different textures on them, so I know you are speaking about something which you have no knowledge of when you say "iffy" and betting its like sculpties. Go learn about that which you are speaking of before proclaiming criticisms. I admitted to start with that I didn't know how many faces a mesh would have, as far as in-world counted, but - Oh, wow - 8 different textures. So my d10, d12 or d20 is out of the question. And I'd certainly have found that info from the SL Wiki page on meshes - it's in the link marked "Uploading Multi-face Meshes" - oh, wait, nobody ever put that link there, and the link for uploading meshes at *all* goes off-site. And still no answer to flexi meshes - the best I can find says "no", but then again, apparently they can be "rigged" to work with the skeleton of the avatar mesh, which is fine for *clothes*, but misses the myriad other uses of flexi. Third, stuff like mesh is used all over the place(technically, your AV's body is a mesh). This is simply LLs adaptation of it so we can use it in SL. It may have all started with a box back in the past, but it hardly has to nowadays. I dont know exactly what kind of thing for boxes you have, but what brought me to SL wasnt a box fetish, it was the ability to build things and adding mesh greatly expands this. They have tacked on enough prim count penalties to mesh so that you will still see regular ole prims and sculpties around, but any properly made meshes will still be far superior in appearance to anything made from prims or even sculpties. What brought me to SL was being able to build things and see right THEN what I was building. Not build something in one program, and then see it in another one. I could do *THAT* with POVray, with much better rendering. And I'm sorry that Philip Linden has been gone from SL so long that you don't even recognize the original slogan for SL. One of his original ideas was that person X could have a build in-world, and others could make suggestions, and see the changes made as they happened. That certainly won't be happening with meshes. I don't want, or expect, the in-world editing tools to be the equal of the stand-alone programs. Hell, the stand-alone programs aren't even the equals of each other. Meshes remove the "Hummm... What if I?" of SL.

Shockwave: @Adam - well, I suppose we could shoehorn mesh editor in with the Sound creation area. Oh wait, there has NEVER been a sound creation area in the viewer. Silly me. We can stick it in the tab for the Texture editing area instead, then. Wait a minute, there has never been a texture editor either. Nor has there been a pose editor, or a BVH creator or an animation creator or a Heightfield File editor... Why so many of you blast SL for not having Photoshop built in but continue to take photos with your digital cameras that likewise doesn't have photoshop built in, completely amazes me. You cannot make a movie without a video editor and you cannot create a 3D world without learning some 3D tools either. That you can create some things with the basic tools the viewer gives you is great, I agree. But other tools from companies who have forgotten more about 3D than LL will ever learn also exist, and some of them are even free. There are lots and lots of tools already out for these well-documented standards. Your refusal to make a texture because there is no texture editor in the viewer is like saying you refuse to drive your car because Ford didn't produce the gas in the tank, either. Who cares where the gas comes from? If you don't wish to use PaintShopPro or Gimp or Audacity or Aniposer, that's your business -- nobody is saying you have to or you can't play in SL. You can keep building with your wooden blocks all you like. The rest of us who run more than one program on our computers at a time will be generating meshes that will totally revolutionize how SL looks, from realistic trees to ornate wall paneling to elaborate flying toasters. And besides, adding in all those editors would make everyone crying about the size of the download explode in indignation -- How about a nice 250Meg download every couple of nights? That is, if LL could actually build a working mesh or sound editor in the first place. Seeing how poorly they've done anything else the past 3 years, I wouldn't bet money on them delivering anything usuable. Shockwave: @Adam - well, I suppose we could shoehorn mesh editor in with the Sound creation area. Oh wait, there has NEVER been a sound creation area in the viewer. Silly me. We can stick it in the tab for the Texture editing area instead, then. Wait a minute, there has never been a texture editor either. Nor has there been a pose editor, or a BVH creator or an animation creator or a Heightfield File editor... How about in the *build box*? Where highlighting the mesh would reveal nodes you could select and drag around? Something like what could have been done for sculpties, as well? Sound editor - I'm not looking for Audacity, I'm looking for "Click to record" from the same mike I use for voice. Then a little waveform display that allows me to drag a start point and end point to chop it to just what I want, and maybe a button to expand the dynamic range. Texture Editor - We don't need Gimp/Photoshop - but a nice paintbrush-level app, with adjustable brush diameter, color, and maybe, if they're feeling really nice to us, a text tool that allows putting in a line and moving it around. Pose/animation editor - wasn't that what the puppeteering project was going to do? You'd use your mouse to move limbs around, click to record frames, etc... Nothing fancy, nothing extensive, but enough to allow beginners to do their own thing. Heightfield editor? I thought that's what the terrain editting tools worked on. Why so many of you blast SL for not having Photoshop built in but continue to take photos with your digital cameras that likewise doesn't have photoshop built in, completely amazes me. You cannot make a movie without a video editor and you cannot create a 3D world without learning some 3D tools either. That you can create some things with the basic tools the viewer gives you is great, I agree. But other tools from companies who have forgotten more about 3D than LL will ever learn also exist, and some of them are even free. There are lots and lots of tools already out for these well-documented standards. Your refusal to make a texture because there is no texture editor in the viewer is like saying you refuse to drive your car because Ford didn't produce the gas in the tank, either. Who cares where the gas comes from? If you don't wish to use PaintShopPro or Gimp or Audacity or Aniposer, that's your business -- nobody is saying you have to or you can't play in SL. You can keep building with your wooden blocks all you like. The rest of us who run more than one program on our computers at a time will be generating meshes that will totally revolutionize how SL looks, from realistic trees to ornate wall paneling to elaborate flying toasters. And besides, adding in all those editors would make everyone crying about the size of the download explode in indignation -- How about a nice 250Meg download every couple of nights? That is, if LL could actually build a working mesh or sound editor in the first place. Seeing how poorly they've done anything else the past 3 years, I wouldn't bet money on them delivering anything usuable. If they can't add a basic paint program in a few dozen K, and a minimal sound cropper/editor in another few dozen K, something's seriously wrong with the state of programming these days.

So someone will be able to import a mesh dodecahedron, which I can set the texture each side independently on with llSetTexture(3,"Runic_3.png")? And any comment on the other points made?

Linden Lab wrote: Once there, mesh objects can be manipulated in pretty much the same ways you would manipulate a regular old prim. So what does happen when you apply a cut path, or hollow? How about twist, dimple, etc? Whee - you can resize, and rotate. Texturing is iffy at best, as they only have one side, I'll bet, like sculpties. The only way to change their shape is to have a script apply a *NEW* mesh to it. Can you make flexi meshes? Oh, well - enjoy your mesh-flavored Kool-Aid. I'll stick with what attracted me to SL - "It all starts with a box."

"Nobody's removing anyone's freedom to create anything in SL, they are merely getting more options for ways to create things. JUST like when sculpties were introduced!" Except meshes aren't being created *IN* SL. They're just getting imported. Same as with sculpties. I've got 1920x1200 pixels of screen, that I *PREFER* to use to see SL - not have some little snippet of SL in the corner while I've got Blender and it's complex interface open to build some object. Hell, if I wanted a tiny viewport on the world, I'd just use Viewer 2. I get that everyone can use these wonderful free programs to create all these happy happy joy joy models that will bring about the coming of the Three Seashells, Taco Bell winning the Franchise Wars, and the unfreezing of John Spartan. That's still not creation *IN WORLD*, where it all started with a cube. That's not walking up to someone who's in the middle of creating something, and saying "Whatcha building?", and finding out the secret of making nano-prim spheres (which was one of the things that hooked me on SL - as exactly that happened to me the third or fourth day I was in world.) Instead, it's "Oh, you rezzed another dinosaur model. Cool." "Oh, no, I created that!" "And of course, you can't show me how, because you use some program on your computer." I can see the hour-long NCI class now: "Rezzing A Mesh In-World 1: How to find it in your inventory."

Like someone else who posted here, I find it kind of scary that I am somewhat in agreement with Prok. "Mesh Import has some incredibly exciting implications for inworld content creators, so we’re very keen to get as much feedback as we can; and of course, the more people that use it, the better the feature will be when we go live gridwide." - What implications for inworld content creators? Anything they can do, the mesh people can do better? Without in-world mesh creation and manipulation tools, it's going to be hard to work against them. I think the only advantage prims will have is that they'll be flexible - then again, *WILL* they even have that advantage? Honestly, I don't mind meshes in world. I didn't mind sculpties. I just wish, when sculpties had come into the world in the first place, that we'd gotten the promised in-world manipulation tools. Instead, it's a half-completed project like the windlight sharable and scriptable settings we were promised when *THAT* hit the ground, too. Will the modify permission even mean anything, with meshes, other than "Oh, I can resize this thing!"?