OK… it’s not their first announcement of mesh. But Thursday’s late afternoon post gives us more information about Linden Lab’s plans and timing.

What is Mesh?

I’ll say the majority of residents are asking, what is mesh? I’ve seen questions asking, how does mesh differ from sculpties? The Lindens have an answer in their announcement: Mesh Update: Part Deux.

It is All Mesh

If their definition-explanation works for you, great. It is definitely a non-techy answer. If you want to see MESH in Second Life, press Ctrl-Shift-R. It is a toggle, so press again to turn off Wireframe. If you are wondering how people figure out or remember all the keyboard shortcuts, see: All Second Life keyboard shortcut keys. Remember. There are different shortcuts in Third Party Viewers (TPV).

The wireframe view shows that all of Second Life is mesh. What this Mesh Roll Out is changing is how SL users can work with mesh in SL. Prior to now we have had to work with Primitives, prims, which are preset arrangements of the vertices that make up an object’s mesh. One arrangement of vertices makes a mesh cube that we call a prim cube. There are only so many ways we can alter the prim cube. With mesh we can do anything we want.

Sculpties are a half step between the restrictions imposed with primitives and the freedom of mesh. There was more designer freedom, but still plenty of restrictions.

Timing

Still as fuzzy as ever about an actual 100% roll out date, the Lindens are telling us they are picking up the pace. In the Beta Server meeting we found out there are about 1,300 regions with mesh enabled. Plus there are about a dozen mesh enabled sandboxes. You can find them in the world map by searching on ‘mesh’.

More and more it is looking like we may have a small to significant percentage of the roll out of mesh in time for the SLCC convention, August 9. See the convention schedule.

It certainly is looking like mesh will reach 100% roll out before or at least by the end of August.