New Region Setting To Allow Or Disable Mesh Creation

Happy days are here again, Aston Villa are top of the league for at least few more hours until the Sunday games are over, order is restored with the greatest team the world has ever seen at the top of English football, as they should be! I enjoyed my afternoon at Villa Park today and shall shortly be off to watch match of the day to relive it. However this has nothing to do with Second Life, Mesh however does have something to do with Second Life so let’s talk about that and the new region setting to allow Mesh on your sim or not.

If you are using a Mesh enabled viewer, such as Second Life beta 3.01, and if you’re on a sim that is on a channel that supports Mesh, and if you’re an estate owner (a lot of ands there) then you can get to a screen like this:

The only problem is, it doesn’t work!

As it doesn’t work, your intrepid hero created a Jira entry, vwr-26727. The problem is that if you untick the box, and click apply, the setting gets ticked again automatically. Now I know some of you may be wondering why I’d want to untick the setting, well for a start I wanted to see what message you got when you tried to create Mesh on a sim that didn’t allow Mesh. Using the Jira is like eating Cabbage, I know it’s good for me but it doesn’t taste very nice, however it has to be done in the interests of good health.

Then there’s the issue that my team and I on one of my sims are discussing, how do we avoid people having a bad experience when they aren’t on a viewer that supports Mesh, Mesh creations won’t rez properly on non Mesh enabled viewers, things will look blobby so it’s an important consideration. Long term this won’t be a problem I’m sure, but at this early stage of Mesh it might be, of course we can’t stand still forever and ignore features that improve the Second Life experience and I do believe Mesh will improve the experience over time. Many TPV’s support Mesh and they will sort themselves out, but let’s not forget that Mesh is live on parts of the grid now, people can upload and rez Mesh objects, even I’ve done this, so I know you can for sure.

I like the idea of Mesh, I think it will bring some great creations to Second Life, but it won’t be loved by everyone and this setting is useful to give estate oners the choice of giving the best option for their tenants, let’s remember that not all estates have the same rules and regulations, so I like this choice.