Going Underground

I was reading a post from Hamlet Au over at New World notes regarding Mesh terrain, which you can read here. However what caught my attention most was a comment from Masami Kuramoto:

What mesh brings to the terraforming table is the option to use subtractive modeling. Think caves, tunnels, subway stations, underground cities. It’s all possible now.”

I’m not quite sure what Masami means, but the idea of sims being to have cave tunnels, subway stations and underground cities is something that could really add a new dynamic to Second Life. Think of exploring deep mines or dungeons. People have long wanted  to build underground in Second Life, the problem is, you can’t, you can’t build at a base level and then raise the terrain, that causes chaos, you get error messages or items returned to your lost and found.

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Blender To Drop Support For COLLADA? No Need To Panic

The Mesh Forum has a post from Masami Kuramoto pointing to a mailing list discussion, which suggests that Blender, the hugely popular open source 3D creation tool, may soon drop support for COLLADA in release builds, if you’re unsure what any of this means, COLLADA is the format that users export their creations to from within Blender to make it Second Life compatible in terms of Mesh. The opening to the discussion reads:

Hi,

As everybody noticed current collada importer/exporter is very buggy which seems to make this format almost useless in Blender. And what’s much worse — we don’t actually have developer who maintains this area.

We discussed this already with Campbell and found that OpenCollada itself isn’t actually maintaning — there are only few commits in several months. Ofcourse it doesn’t mean this library is useless and all bug from our tracker is related on that issues, but still.. Maybe the time have come to re-think this importer/exporter (investigate if it’s possible to fix issues in clear way, check if design is good enough — not sure, haven’t touched this code deep myself)?

Here’s our proposal: – Move all collada-related issues into it’s own tracker. Like it was done with BGE, it might help finding volunteer to fix them. Also, people will see that it’s not actually core stuff and that it’s community-supported. – Disable collada in release builds. It’s not useable and only seems to be making artists disappointed.

More optimistic targets would be find volunteer to pick up this stuff who will make it usable (maybe rewritting this stuff from scratch..)

— With best regards, Sergey Sharybin

This initially looks like a massive blow to Second Life’s Mesh implementation, but in reality it isn’t.

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1920’s Berlin Starts To Embrace Mesh

A few days ago I blogged about Mesh adoption and used 1920’s Berlin as an example of a sim that wasn’t currently allowing Mesh, the reasons for which had been detailed in a blog post, which can be read here. 1920’s Berlin sim owner and driving force Frau (Jo) Yardley has been stating that the stance was not an anti Mesh stance, but merely a no Mesh yet stance, Frau Yardley made this point in the original blog post and in comments, including in my original blog post.

However, now that we have hit the new year, 1920’s Berlin is moving towards mesh adoption, slowly but surely, as they enter 1929 in their story, a new blog post has appeared saying that Mesh is coming, which can be read here.  Two of the main reasons cited are that Mesh is already on the grid and that Mesh can save prims.

Frau Yardley writes: “To show you how Mesh will look in Berlin I have just placed our very first Mesh object in berlin. Go visit our old deaf Cordelia, behind Alexanderplatz Bahnhof. You know her old street organ that she has been playing for ages. I have put a Mesh version right next to it. Look at the quality and how many prims it uses, 18 vs 3! That should make clear why we really have to move on to Mesh!

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Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer Goes Alpha

First of all, Happy New Year to everyone.

The Mesh Clothing Parametric Deformer project has now reached an alpha release. At the end of yesterday’s MetaReality Podcast the news was broke that it would be released tomorrow .. which is today! Warning, the MetaReality podcast was live and the podcast posted is uncensored, I haven’t listend to it all yet so it may contain naughty words. A video has been released to show the code in action and to point out that it’s not finished:

This project is to make mesh clothing in Second Life more viable, the problem so far with Mesh clothing has been getting it to fit. This project goes some way to addressing that.

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Traffic Shaping Causing Mesh Woes?

MaxTut Wonder has created a rather interesting Jira:

Very slow rezzing for Mesh – highest lod does not rez at all – cause traffic shaping by internet provider

ISP Traffic Shaping can be a pain, I’ve experienced woes before when World of Warcraft traffic wasn’t being identified correctly. My ISP is supposed to give priority to games and live video streaming, but during the WoW woes, WoW traffic wasn’t getting a priority.

However with regards to Second Life, I’ve never noticed anything untoward that would make me think traffic shaping was an issue and as I’m on a better package these days, I wouldn’t expect it to be an issue but MaxTut Wonder is claiming there is an issue for him when it comes to Mesh items rezzing and he’s convinced it’s due to traffic shaping, as he states within the Jira comments.

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