I’m playing around on my site with Google Affiliates, so things may look a bit wonky, Second Life has an affiliate program, I’ve signed up to the Linkshare deal on another blog of mine, I didn’t realise they’d started a Google affiliate program until I saw a post from Inara Pey that mentioned it, you need to get approved all over again so I don’t know how that will work out. Inara’s post also pointed out a very useful community resources portal too, which has plenty of information for communities. Linden Lab are posting lots of information on the forum and Wiki, I just wish more of it was being promoted via the blog.
However the blog is being used and today it annouced the Mesh rollout. I’ve played with some very basic Mesh creations and it’s not easy to get into, but for the patient it will be worth the effort. Full perm mesh objects are appearing for those who don’t have the patience but even then, you’re going to need to get your head around UV Mapping if you want to get into textures, although items that can be textured will in some cases come with a UV Map for you to texture. There are limitations on who can upload Mesh, although this is where full perm Mesh creations will get into that market, which may raise a few questions but anyway.
If Mesh seems all a bit overwhelming, there is something far more simple to get your head around, big prims!
I’ve been playing with this already as I volunteered a Region to be put on the Mesh channel and that opened the door to big prims. The advantage of big prims is that it saves prims and for simple items like floors, really, get looking at what you can do here, even relatively small builds of 28 x 28 floor size can benefit here because now you can replace those nine prims that create the floor with one prim, of course then you’ll need to look at adjusting textures and positioning but prims are and always will be, an area where people can save space to use other items, this is why mega prims were created in the first place.
There are of course time constraints for all of us, so going around changing all your builds, especially if you’re a merchant, may not be appealing, but long term it’s the right thing to do because it provides customers with more space and if it’s your store, you can put out more items after you’ve saved those prims.
I don’t know how well these large prims will work when you start bending them a bit and shearing here and there, but for your basic floor and wall, they are going to be very handy. Video may have killed the radio star, but Mesh won’t kill the prim, even though it’s currently flavour of the month, the beauty of the prim remains that anyone in Second Life can create one just by using the build tools inworld and so much of the Second Life experience starts with the prim, it’s not going anywhere.
One of the interesting things that came out of the initial roll-out of mesh onto the Main grid, in terms of the Mesh/Volunteer Programme was the number of people over on the Main grid mesh sandbox who were building in prims & using the new max size.
I spent a fair amount of time there, not only watching mesh builds and talking to mesh creators, but – in all honesty – re-working my more prim-heavy builds (megas notwithstanding) to get them down to something more economical – and that meant shaving 125 prims off one build alone (including old megas where I’d cobbled, cut, sliced and tortured to get sizes approximating what I wanted.
So yes, the new prim limit is indeed most welcome – and with Durian Linden hinting very strongly that there will be a “directed experience” coming along specifically aimed at prims, we can be sure they’ll be a part of the landscape for long time to come.