A thread over at SL Universe, which you can read here, points out that Mesh support looks like it is coming to the extremely popular Phoenix Viewer. This is in many ways a surprise move as most people seemed to be under the impression that the Phoenix viewer was largely at the end of its development and that they were concentrating most of their energies on Firestorm, which already has Mesh support in their beta version. I’d post a link to the Firestorm blog post but there doesn’t seem to be a way of doing that! Weird blogging software they’re using there.
The summary of the changes to Phoenix can be read here apparently a lot of the code to bring Mesh to older style viewers has been carried out by Henri Beauchamp, who releases the Cool VL Viewer, which has a version that unsurprisingly, supports Mesh.
TPV’s generally aren’t my thing, Inara Pey is a good source of information for third party viewers. I’ve only ever really used Boy Lane’s cool viewer to any great extent. I used to love that, I’ve used Firestorm a little bit and quite liked it but generally I play it safe and use the official Linden Lab viewers. However I am a fan of TPV’s with regard to them adding nice features that users like and they are at times better performance wise, I can remember switching one Saturday afternoon from the official client to a TPV because I couldn’t move and everything was magically better for some bizarre reason.
However with Mesh support extending to even older TPV’s it is a sign that demand for Mesh is definitely around inworld, people are obviously asking about it or else it wouldn’t be being implemented, how successfully it is being implemented is a different matter, as I said, I don’t use TPV’s often and the Firestorm team reluctantly released a beta version with Mesh support … due to demand.
The Dolphin Viewer 3 and Kirsten’s Viewer also have Mesh support, unfortunately real life priorities mean Kirsten’s viewer is no longer being developed.
This all means that with Mesh, resistance is futile, which means I need to get back to Blender and try and figure out how the bloody hell you do a UV Map for stairs .. stairs are my greatest achievement so far … hey I’m new at this!
“Weird blogging software they’re using there.”
It’s Google’s blogger silly. Just click the title of the article 😛
http://phoenixviewer.blogspot.com/2011/09/firestorm-mesh-beta-optional-update.html
That wasn’t working earlier, I swear! That’s what I tried to do and the hand icon didn’t come up when I moused over it, it’s working now though! I rest my case!