Mesh – Page 54 – Nalates’ Things & Stuff

Designing Cheap SL Mesh

2011/05/22 by Nalates Urriah

A recent post on the SL Forum went into the details of creating cheap mesh, cheap as in low upload cost and tier. The actual costs remain in a state of change. There are still some obvious problems with the current implementation of the mesh uploader in respect to cost. But, the basic ideas of controlling mesh cost are becoming apparent.

What Affects Mesh Cost?

Performance is important to Linden Lab. Your render performance in the viewer and the load on the server are both of concern to the Lab. In the viewer it is all about appearance, how the mesh looks in your viewer. That aspect is all about Level of Detail (LoD) and total polygons.

On the server side it is all about physics calculations, which means the complexity of the shape for collision calculations.

Mesh and OpenSim

2011/05/14 by Nalates Urriah

The Lindens have reasons to change how mesh is handled in Second Life. The changes are format changes to the mesh data set. The reason given is performance and compatibility issues with the existing SL software.

For those of us that are not up on C# or C++ and object oriented data that doesn’t tell us much. Suffice to say mesh is sort of changing from a round peg to a square peg. That means all the holes for mesh have to change too. The place in the asset database where mesh information is stored must change. How the physics engine deals with mesh has to change. The inventory handlers, the build/edit dialog, render pipeline, and other parts of the viewer handling mesh must change.

This week the movers and shakers in OpenSim have been looking at how this change will affect OpenSim. Justincc has a post up on what is known now. His post is probably the most authoritative words on the subject for OpenSim. See: Warning: Don’t rely on meshes uploaded to OpenSim (just yet)

SL Mesh Status Week 19

2016/02/102011/05/10 by Nalates Urriah

Movement on the mesh project appears slow right now. The effort is going toward combining the mesh code and regular simulator and viewer code and the effort to get it all to compile using VS2010. So, we aren’t seeing many new bug fixes or features. Still the project is moving forward.

Set Backs

Regression testing over the last week revealed some complex problems the team worked to get corrected, apparently taking more effort than anyone expected. While it adds nothing new it is progress.

SL Mesh Status Week 18

2011/05/02 by Nalates Urriah

The latest news on the mesh front…

The Linden’s are telling us the mesh data format is going to change. This means the meshes uploaded to this point will no longer work. Mesh objects will have to be uploaded again. While this is a pain for many the change is made to get more stable mesh objects.

The changes have to do with renaming fields in the mesh data and removing some fields that are not going to be used. Additionally some meta-data is being added to allow mesh to rez faster. The document outlining Linden Lab’s mesh data format is started, per Runitai Linden.

These changes will roll out this week in ADITI. The changes will also necessitate a viewer change. So, you will need to get a new Mesh Project Viewer.

Second Life Mesh Status Week 17

2016/02/102011/04/27 by Nalates Urriah

There is currently a shift in mesh development. To understand the shift you need to understand how viewer versions are made. You probably know programmers write a program that becomes the viewer. The nuance in that process is the language programmers write in is not the language computers speak. So, at some point a translation has to happen. That ‘translation’ is called a compile. The compiler tool being targeted for use is Microsoft’s Visual Studio 2010. Much of the last week’s work and probably this week’s and next week’s will be toward getting the new mesh-viewer code compiling using VS2010.

What you may not realize is why the change to VS2010 is important for the Mesh Project. The main SL Viewer has been worked over to get it to compile in VS2010. See: Second Life 2.6.3-225584 VS2010 Review This moves the code and the viewer abilities to a new level of optimization for newer computer hardware. If you follow KirstenLee’s viewer development, you know it too has moved to VS2010. So, most viewers on the SL grid are going to be optimized to a 2010 era, at least for those on Windows systems.

Second Life Mesh Status Week 16

2011/04/18 by Nalates Urriah

Work continues on the development of mesh for Second Life. This week a couple of interesting bits of information came up in the Mesh Group.

Second Life Mesh

Bones… people want to stretch and shrink your bones… It’s not all that ghoulish. When making various avatars it is going to be necessary to create different skeletons. The Lab is not ready for that. They are still getting the skeleton we have to work right with mesh. Adding a couple more arms or legs could be fun but it is technically complicated and way down the road.