I haven’t yet released much into the wild in terms of mesh and the reason for that is largely me being a fussy bugger. The trouble with mesh is also part of the beauty of mesh, you have extra control over mesh and this leads to me constantly deciding I can do this better and never actually finishing my build, ignoring the advice I was given years ago in Second Life that at some point you have to say to hell with it, that will do, or you’ll never finish your build.<\/p>\n
Years ago that was with relation to the dotted lines that appear on builds when you have certain settings, I would try and find ways to avoid it, someone then said to me that you just have to roll with it. I’m back there now with mesh, not with regards to dotted lines, but with worrying that I could be more efficient, that I can make the inside a lower LOD than the outside, as the inside doesn’t need to be seen from so far away, whether I should worry about inside faces in the roof space that probably won’t be used …. but what if someone wants to use it? Arghhhh!<\/p>\n
I can then build a very basic roof, with insides, all in a low land impact modular roof, but you can’t rez inside said roof, you can drag things inside and rez them that way but that means any scripted items that rez inventory won’t work. This constant second guessing of use cases becomes stifling in the creation process, but I realise it’s me whose stifling myself.<\/p>\n
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However I tear down my roof and decide to make an outer roof and inner roof, now I’m cooking on gas, I can have different LOD’s as they’re different objects, this also means they’re likely to have a higher land impact when combined, so now I’m trading one efficiency model, for another, which is more important, land impact or use of a space that probably won’t be used?<\/p>\n
Then there are physics issues, two mesh prims set to convex hull don’t play nicely, the physics calculations are out, this is a known issue, will anyone notice if they rez an item? Heck maybe I should set the physics shape to prim, which will increase the land impact score but make the build more user friendly, I mean it’s only going to add a few points to the prim score overall.<\/p>\n
Whilst I’m painfully pondering these issues, other people are releasing wonderful mesh builds, getting on with it and not finding themselves tied up in knots, but I’m concerned about not releasing a laggy build, I don’t want to contribute to a bad user experience, but wait a minute, all these other people are releasing builds, I’ve even purchased some and there’s no real big issue I’ve noticed, so I should just get on with it, but wait, if I I just tweak this then it might be better …. round and round and round she goes, where she stops, nobody knows.<\/p>\n
The thing is, the advice I was given years ago was the correct advice, publish and be damned, you’ll only really learn better techniques and what’s acceptable by publishing your content, but it gnaws at me and I can’t be alone with this … can I?<\/p>\n