Another Fine Mesh They’re Getting Us Into

I’m afraid I’m going to have to depart from the general love in on the mesh upload requirements, as revealed here by Tateru Nino. I’m not a fan of how this is being presented, nor am I a fan of the implications of it. The proposed requirements are listed on the official Second Life Wiki, under Mesh Upload Enablement.

This isn’t all bad, there will be a tutorial for starters which is long overdue. However the PIOF requirement I’m not fan of because we still have this absurd situation in Second Life where I can’t just have one account and multiple alts. This is an absurd requirement to receive a flag, my NPIOF alts can go to adult land because I submitted a support ticket, I didn’t have to get them PIOF status and I didn’t have to get them age verified. This whole individual account business is a nonsense.

Beyond that, there are people who can’t, for whatever reason, buy Linden dollars from Linden Lab, they use third party exchanges such as Virwox. The folk who buy from third party exchanges do put money into Second Life and do contribute to the overall economy, why should they be discriminated against?

Another issue of course is that it goes against the ethos of user creation to limit it in a fashion such as this, although it should be noted that at one time Second Life required people provide credit card details to engage, this was also a time when there were a lot less users.

Socially, mesh is going to be disruptive, in terms of the viewer it’s going to be the cause of some frustrations as older viewers won’t render mesh properly. These upload requirements are just adding to the disruption of mesh, already people are calling for all uploads to be limited in this manner, as in the past people have called for NPIOF avatars to not be allowed to transfer items, which of course would have hit the education sector for a start, people really need to be careful what they wish for.

There have long been people who feel that content creation should only be the domain of the skilled, I’ve seen folk complaining of ugly builds and how it makes Second Life unappealing, but the ability to turn your hand at creating is one of Second Life’s greatest appeals and in order for people to get better, they need to be able to start somewhere, it used to start with a prim. If we start to take away people’s ability to create then we’re going to start to take away people, user generated content is a massively appealing factor for Second Life.

However I don’t mind professi0nal creators turning their hand here, I’ve mused before that Turobsquid and Renderosity should be advertising to Second Life users, however at that time some people mentioned to me that they didn’t think this would be a good idea because it would undermine the work of Second Life content creators. There is something in this in so much as Second Life content creators are largely in Second Life, not on the outside looking in.

There is also going to be a snobbish factor arriving with mesh, with people arguing about quality and the impact within Second Life and calling for certain creators to be banned from uploading mesh because it doesn’t meet their standards.

I’m all for better IP protection in Second Life, but there are processes that Linden Lab should be engaging with to make it easier for people to register their identity with Linden Lab and making it easier for people to link their alts to a known identity. Linden Lab should want to know the identities of the people using their platform, they should be making it easier for people to share those details.

We have to be careful where we’re heading with this because if you take away people’s ability to even get started with creation, then we take away one of Second Life’s greatest selling points and then those who are now embracing this brave new world, will be complaining that not enough people are coming to see it.

Eye candy alone will not make Second Life a better place.