I was going to blog about the year of 2011, or maybe search, but instead I’ll go for Mesh, which is in theme as shortly I’ll be logging off to go and watch part 2 of the BBC’s latest television version of Great Expectations, which is what many of us have of Mesh.
However not everyone is embracing Mesh, some even strictly forbid, even the 1920s Berlin Project, whom along with a list of rules, have a no mesh sign:
Poor old Mesh. The thing is that there are valid reasons for not wanting Mesh to be on display, but at the same time those valid reasons stifle the adoption of Mesh. Wear and create Mesh and be damned I say. The 1920s Berlin project explain their no Mesh stance in a blog post, which you can read here.
The main reason is cited in the blog post I’ve linked to above:
“The main reason for this decision is that we have had several people visit our sim with mesh clothing but because most, or at least half the people in our sim do not yet use mesh viewers, to them these people with mesh look very unusual and not at all like someone they would meet in reality.”
Mesh, unlike Sculpties, doesn’t render properly in older viewers, this is an issue but we should really be encouraging people to move forward to Mesh enabled viewers rather than holding back because people don’t want to embrace it, Mesh will be good for Second Life. I do have sympathy with people who can’t use Mesh enabled viewers, but I feel that we’re at the stage now where they should accept that those blobby looking avatars and buildings are Mesh enabled and that they can’t render it, rather than holding back, just explain the situation.
The 1920s Berlin Project
Travel back in time to this big city during an amazing era. Wander down Unter den Linden, explore the dirty old back streets, see a movie at the cinema, visit the museum, enjoy cabaret, dance the Charleston in a small Tanzlokal or at the gay Eldorado club in this role-play sim with a 1920s dress code (freebies provided).
Visit in Second Life
However on the other hand other people are encouraging Mesh, Curious Kitties have a store entitled the Mesh Cafe, with the parcel description stating:
“Here you can talk with friends & other users who also use mesh! In the future there will be new & free mesh products & information so be sure to check back real soon!”
However when I teleported there I didn’t see any discussion, however I did see the store with Mesh items:
Curious Kitties SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Cutie%20Land/66/129/88
Another place supporting Mesh is Laq Decor, here you will find buildings that are made from normal prims, Mesh and Sculpts, there are notecards to tell you if the buildings only have partial Mesh and how important it is for you to take note of what parts. The parcel name also tells you that you need a Mesh enabled viewer:
“LAQ Decor – Now Open! MESH compatible viewer required!”
LAQ Decor SLURL: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/LAQ%20Decor/60/62/33
I don’t know how much, if any, of the above picture of LAQ Decor’s store is Mesh, that wasn’t stated, but they are using Mesh in their builds, you can see this on the above parcel.
This will rumble on for a while and whereas I don’t think we should shut off older viewers, people on older viewers need to realise Mesh is here on the grid and if they can’t see Mesh, that’s their problem, their Second Life experience will still be fine, plenty of people will still embrace the prim and sculpts, but it’s better for places to now embrace Mesh, not continue to hold it back.
Isn’t one of the issue with mesh, that it’s rather buggy at is stands now?
The main reason(s) for low adoption rates is not too many popular creators have jumped on it, it takes more time to make, the aformentioned bugginess and that the only V1 viewers that have it only have partial support (if I remember right).
Buggy in what way Jessicka? There are mesh bugs, I’ve reported one myself, but it’s not a showstopper.
Content creators rightly follow the market, so I can understand why they’re reluctant to unleash mesh and spend a lot of time creating Mesh items but it’s a chicken and egg situation, if content creators release it, people will want it.
At this stage, if I could make Mesh clothing, I wouldn’t, the sizing issues seem like a nightmare to me.
i haven’t used a v1 viewer in forever myself, so I’m biased here, I find the recent viewers ok, last time I went back to a viewer 1 I was lost, it’s funny how you get used to things but I do understand why people won’t change.
I dunno, I never really checked it out – I thought I had heard that there were some big upload or viewing issues with mesh – Not just the viewers that can’t see it, but like V3 viewer having upload issues – Dunno, it was a while ago when I heard it.
I think as far as the content creation goes, it’s a vicious circle. Creators are reluctant to provide content because of the effort it takes, and buyers are reluctant to buy, because their viewer may not fully support it. So not much content for buyers to see. As well as the mesh content usually comes with a premium that not a lot of people are up for.
I’d have a huge issue with sizing as well – Every outfit that had prims of any kind on them required some bit of editing for my compact little avatar for some reason.
I think how mesh has been, and how it’s coming off, is that it’s sort-of for the “higher-end” player, or for those who need props/clothing for photo’s. That’s probably another one of its issues – It doesn’t quite have that ‘every day’ feel to it >>
Give it a whirl.
My avatars are all short in that they’re normal height: 5’6″ or so in the mid, ranging from 4’10” up to 5’9″.
Mesh works great for me.
On the release version of V3, I’m getting 20-38 FPS inside of a mesh house.
Mesh outfits seem to size right to my avatar so far in terms of scale. But they don’t deform to my shape. However so far this has been a non issue.
At shops like Bare Rose, the mesh will usually come with an alpha to hide where things might poke through, and Bare Rose often packs in multiple chest options for various sizes.
Much of the ‘Mesh doesn’t work’ seems to stem from people who tried once during a buggy release, and haven’t looked against despite months of new releases, or who ‘heard’ it was buggy and then spread that around without testing for themselves. 😉
Ehh, I’ll check to see if there is some free mesh stuff. I’m not about to drop the 1USD in L I have on it, eh heh.
My avatar is about 4’6, but can be up to 5ft.
On most versions of SL in most places, I get 20+ FPS – So that’s a anything I worry about. I also don’t crash viewers either, maybe a handful of times at most in nearly 6 years.
I don’t have much Mesh myself, being it’s still starting to come up and out. Sculpties do me great. I think I do have a mesh christmas tree or something, and it worked just fine. I was pretty straightforward saying that I had only heard it was buggy – I’m not trying to spread rumours, I’m just speaking from what experience I have.
Ah see, you’re used to editing your outfits so you’d be a perfect test case for how much of a pain mesh clothing is or isn’t, I’m not at all into fiddling with outfits, it looks right or it doesn’t for me, I don’t have much patience when it comes to tweaking, until someone tells me I’m not doing it right!
You hit upon something important there too, Mesh is for the higher end person, it’s not true but as it’s new and shiny Mesh products probably demand a premium in pricing, this has always happened in SL, so I can see why some may think this way.
Oh yes yes, it’s one of the ways I learned to build in SL was editing clothes to my ever-evolving avatar.
I often just buy clothing with minimal or no prims at all – Though I have quite a number of outfits to recycle through too.
It is true at this point, that mesh is sort-of for the higher-end player if the mesh products have a high premium – One follows the other. The same speaks for regular clothing, except there is a vast majority of clothing that is affordable for many if not most players.
I think the “bugginess” commentary that did / is doing the rounds WRT to the uploader is more about misunderstanding what people are saying rather than actual bugs.
There were issues with the initial uploader – a lot of people found it overly confusing in terms of the calculations required to optimise a mesh object for the various LOD options; this lead to others translating the issues as being “bugs” with the uploader. The new uploader makes things somewhat more straightforward, but still not ideal.
Also, the uploader is pretty much restricted to either LL’s code, or a single third-party uploader (currently in Firestorm). Some TPV devs have commented that the third-party code isn’t to their personal coding standards, which seems to have been taken by others to mean the uploader is “buggy” (which is not actually what the devs are saying).
This has certainly been my experience. When I mentioned I’d uploaded a mesh object using the Firestorm uploader to a friend, they replied, “Oh, I heard XXX wasn’t adopting it because it’s so buggy.”
So, the talk of “bugginess” you’ve heard could simply be down to misinterpretations of things people have heard from others.
Its a foolish decision to try and hold this one back.
If your current settings are slow with it, change them. Update / revert drivers, turn off anti-alias, file JIRAs.
Mesh is here, and its not going back into the nether. There is already quite a -lot- of Mesh content out there. Even some building designers have figured out how to use it to hit a sweet spot between the resource cost of prims and that of sculpties.
Adapt or become obsolete.
I don’t know about being obsolete, the prim will live on but I agree with your general gist, Mesh is here and it won’t go away, nor should it, I’m a big fan of Mesh.
Ps: bought a mesh building yesterday. Not from LAQ, but another provider. I might still go back and get the LAQ cottage, which is 100% mesh. I toured inside of it yesterday and it was almost what I wanted – but I got picky, and then what I ended up buying was in a completely different style…
Tour the cottage to see a 100% mesh building. At 95 prims it sounds high, but at its detail level its only what I would call “slightly high”.
What I did buy was from “©Inside- Buildings” and called ‘Dawn’ – and is “mostly Mesh”. You’ll se the 356 prims and think its insane, until you see how detailed it is, and that most of that is furniture included with the build. The building comes to 177 for a 2048m lot. I tell people 30-40 prims for a 512 in your building. So that would be 120-160 for a 2048 (but in reality, less, since excess is often just longer walls).
– These two examples show that mesh buildings are possible. Current choices are slightly primmy, but there’s a lot of discussion right now on how to build more efficiently. Sooner or later somebody will come along and crop off 10-30% of that primmage up there, and hit the sweet spot that kills prim buildings.
When that happens, the anti-mesh folks will be stuck hiding, as they won’t even be able to navigate the world, let alone the people on mesh clothes: which despite the lack of Qarl’s coming fix, are still taking off pretty well.
Go to ‘Bare Rose’ to see how the ‘Walmart of SL fashion’ is now embracing mesh outfits. When newbies can get smartly designed full mesh outfits, in multiple colors in the pack, often partly moddable, for under 180L each… prim clothes are doomed.
– You can’t do a swirly flaring dress, but you can do nearly everything else (and a mix of mesh and prims might give you back the swish and sway).
I agree with you again, primmy buildings will go away once people get their heads around mesh, they will become lower impact but the prim won’t go, if people adapt Mesh in the form of convex hull! Convex Hull is basically mesh anyway, so for that alone people should be embracing Mesh.
I love Bare Rose, haven’t been there for a while but if June is embracing mesh that’s superb, as for swirly dresses, before it closes in a couple of days pop along to Pixeldolls, Neph has made some lovely Mesh dresses.
Here I go again with a pps…
Testing in my new mesh home last night, in V3 I get 20-38 fps running around in there and jumping on all the prefab furniture, clicking buttons, and trying to script-lag myself.
BUT if I switch to beta-V3, I get 3-5 fps… doing the same thing, and up to 6-7 if I stand very still…
I guess the larger lesson there is that V3 is making leaps and bounds with each patch, betas are likely to have some strange debugging code… and TPVs may be hit or miss depending on where they forked their most recent mesh code.
Because FUI is new, and was a surprise to TPVs, some of them have not yet been able to incorporate the latest and greatest versions of the official code… This should resolve itself “soon.” Until it does, people with problems in Mesh should try multiple TPVs and the official and see which works best – and if it is NOT official, file a JIRA telling LLs that they broke something… 🙂
Here’s the mesh house and a screenshot of performance
For a start, well done for demonstrating how useful the snapshot to new profile feature is! I meant to mention the new snapshot tools at some point.
Yes there are reports of folk using different viewers or versions of the viewer getting very different results. I’m not sure why that may be the case. I am very much liking v3, except for some of the crashing issues but that has always happened.
Mesh? Can’t see it. Give it a year pr two for them to fix the hard crash to desktop when I touch it. The 2 viewers I’ve tried run at 2-3 fps in lowest settings on a very high-end laptop with the latest drivers, while Phoenix renders 40+ fps in high mode.
Maybe someday…
See my pps right above you, where I note finding very different results in FPS with different viewers. Settings like anti-alias are also likely to play a big role.
Don’t budget a year to wait, budget weeks. Mesh is spreading FAST in adopted content, so people unable to see it have a matter of weeks to get their setups sorted out or JIRAs filed (with as much detail as humanly possible) for the lindens to fix… Weeks until large parts of SL become messy floating spheres.
I don’t think the hard crash to desktop is because of Mesh, although it may be a mesh viewer issue, happened to me twice yesterday and I wasn’t anywhere near Mesh, but was on a Mesh capable viewer.
“Older viewers” predominantly do support mesh rendering.
With the arrival of mesh rendering in Phoenix (which, based on *LL’s* figures, and not wild speculation, accounts for some 40% of the total user base) arrived in December, leacing only the legacy 1.23.5 (still in use, apparently! ), unmodified Snowglobe Viewers and Rainbow (I think) without mesh rendering. Cool VL, Singularity, Astra, all have mesh. All V3-based TPVs are capable of rendering mesh. There have been some issues with the Phoenix release, but a hotfix should have resolved these. Again, I found during testing that I could achieve pretty much the same frame-rates with the “mesh” 1600 release as the non-mesh 1185.
The latest V3.2 releases also offer significantly faster FPS rates, and some offer blisteringly-fast rendering. I’m currently running Milkshake, which on my Q6600 quad-core with a 1Gb Ge9800GT (hardly cutting-edge) pumps through an average of 40fps on popular sims and hits 60fps when I’m home alone. Niran’s Viewer is lower on overall fps rates, but the load/rendering speed is phenonmenal: even sculpties rezz “whole” rather than “popping out” from spheres / disks.
As Pussycat suggests, people should give various Viewers a whirl and see how they get on. I’m still finding all “official” V3.2 release very much slower fps-wise compared to the likes of Milkshake, Niran’s, Exodus and even (dare I say it) Firestorm.
Housing-wise, Novocaine Islay is developing mesh houses of VERY low Land Impact – the lowest being just 27 for the house (house structure and pool), or 91 fully furnished.
Well done to Pussycat for pointing out that many clothing creators supply alphas along with their mesh clothing – it’s not always ideal, and not as elegant as the parametric deformer will hopefully be (especially if it is developed to its fullest potential over time!), but they do mitigate a lot of problems. I took the plung with a creation from Salid Swell, which is a multi-form dress (can be worn short or long, with or without a blouse top, with or without sleeves, with a full bodice-style top or with a bikini-style top – and includes a range of alphas that conform beautifully to the various options.
I’m seeing a lot of positive feedback about Niran’s viewer, I may be tempted to take a look at it.
I’m hearing on Phoenix that a lot of people are giving the Mesh version a wide berth.
“The latest V3.2 releases also offer significantly faster FPS rates, and some offer blisteringly-fast rendering.”
Yes, I was topping 50 fps this morning on V3.2 in my mesh home.
I can’t even get that in an MMO like WoW with all my graphics turned down.
And I’m running SL on high. This is backwards… but its happening.
Granted those were spikes, but I saw a few of them, and my norm is topping the 20s and 30s – but the caveat is that this is at home, on a mainland sim which is largely residential. My neighbor happens to be a giant free-sex club full of avatars, but 1000-feet away from my build and on the adjacent sim. I’ll have to go up and rez my mesh stuff next door to them and see what happens…
Somebody at LLs is doing something right, and people should give the new release viewers a look.
Some people seem to think that we don’t like mesh in 1920s Berlin and don’t want it.
Please note the “not YET” part of our blog.
We love mesh and can’t wait to get it going.
But just not yet as in our experience most of the people visiting and living in our sim don’t use mesh viewers.
We are starting a campaign to get everyone in Berlin to a new mesh enabled viewer in the new year and once we’re sure most of them are ready, the sign will go and we will start bringing mesh to Berlin.