Second Life’s Mesh Mess

Kat Feldragonne is a mesh fan. But recently had a problem with mesh render time at an event. It apparently was frustrating enough Kat wrote about the experience: Mesh Mess – A Lesson in Frustration. If you read it, I suspect you will know exactly what Kat is writing about. I’ve experienced the problem. I suspect most of us have.

Slow Render Problems

Slow Render Problems

There are places and times when it seems to take forever for things to render. Avatars are missing parts or clothes are gray and stuck on sideways or at some odd direction. Nude avatars render in all their glory and only later do the clothes render. Of course the nude person has no idea their clothes have yet to render for those around them. The clothes always render quickly for the one wearing them.

From the last TPD’s user meeting (See:Second Life Inventory Changes) we know the Lab is working on inventory and viewer communications to improve performance. But, it will be weeks before those fixes make it to the grid.

Kat seems to have little understanding of why mesh will render sometimes and not other times. She writes as if all mesh is the same. It isn’t. While there are many that know a great deal about the tech side of the render process, there are so many possibilities that can cause slow render I am sure no one can say for sure why Kat was having problems.

I think much of the problem is with poorly designed mesh items. There are well designed and poorly designed items. Hopefully the Quick Graphics viewer now at Release Candidate status with the Render Complexity information will move people toward building better mesh items and buying better made items. We may see it make it to the grid in October.

2 thoughts on “Second Life’s Mesh Mess

  1. As you stated, I don’t have a clear understanding of why some mesh things rez and some don’t. And it doesn’t make any logical sense to me that when 8 people are wearing the same outfit, I only see it on 6 of them.
    I understand that mesh is very technical, and that polygons and vertices and how the mesh is created differ widely from creator to creator. But how to tell the ‘good’ mesh from the ‘bad’? I do pay attention to RW for my own purchases (after the fact, as that’s all I can do), but I don’t have any control over what others wear, obviously.
    I think part of my frustration was that since I upgraded my graphics card, I’ve had little to no issues with rezzing problems in SL. So to suddenly have nothing but issues was disconcerting, to say the least.

    • There is so much going on with the viewer and servers it is hard for the Lindens to pin down what is going wrong in any one case. One of the things they are working on is the communication channels between the viewer and server. If bits of information don’t make it through, you could see one avatar render and another with a very similar outfit not render. But, it could be a significant number of other things. Is that avatar wearing earrings with a massive collection of large textures… Is the unrendered avatar using a weak connection to SL and the server timed out waiting to be told what they are wearing so it can tell you? Its hard to know.

      When something goes wrong, I tend to give it 2 or more days to self correct. If I trace it to the viewer, I wait for the next version or look through the JIRA to see what problems people are complaining about. I used to get excited and try to fix my computer. No longer. It seldom is my computer. But, from time a video driver update will cause me problems.

      I suppose I’m jaded enough in my 8th year little is surprising or disconcerting.

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