Mesh development continues moving forward in Second Life. The rumor that Mesh release is planned for the end of May continues too, in spite of the rumor having been traced to a Linden running a contest for building a mesh avatar that ends then. There are some new developments.
SL Mesh Upload Costs
Mesh Cost – Equivalency
The current Mesh Project Viewer is reporting high prim costs for mesh uploads. Those numbers are buggy. An 800 triangle mesh is not going to cost 3 to 6 prims. That is an anomaly from the viewer and the server being out of sync. There is code in the viewer that bases its calculations on information calculated and sent by the server. If the two sets of equations are not working together one gets bogus information, which is the case right now. So, don’t have a heart attack if you upload a small mesh and it looks like it will cost a fortune.
Nyx Linden has created a new tool that allows one to examine render complexity. When the tool is activated it colors objects in the area Blue, Green, or Red for low, moderate, and high complexity. The lower the complexity the faster things render.
New Render Complexity Tool
This tool is based on the newest render complexity algorithm. According to Nyx the algorithm is not yet built into the Mesh Project Viewer. So, we may see differences in the values given in the mesh upload dialog and the Render Complexity Tool.
This is Week 11, but the information is from Week 10… I’m lagging a bit.
Runitai Linden had this t say about mesh cost:
Upload costs aren’t finalized yet — you can be pretty sure costs are going to go up in general, the hold up right now is a reworking of the sim rez pipeline that will make the costs the simulator reports more reliable. Once the reports are reliable, we can get accurate measurements on whole scene polycount vs whole scene prim cost and tune accordingly. As it is, we’re more or less tuning blind, and the client doesn’t have enough information on its own to determine the cost of the whole scene without a major reworking of the mesh streaming pipeline (the client only downloads the parts of the mesh it needs, but the whole mesh asset is needed to determine streaming cost).
…upload fees are a completely different issue…
This gets confusing. The L$ upload cost has not been decided. The prim-equivalency is not even set. Runitai is talking about prim-equivalency. The values one sees for upload cost and prim equivalence in the Mesh Viewer are there for debugging and testing. The actual cost and equivalency have not been decided.
Daniel Voyager reports a bit of a mesh update tidbit from an interview with Linden Lab CEO Rod Humble. While we still have no ETA for the mesh roll out, they expect to have a timeline for the roll out this month.
[youtube d0eZ5_5Tb1M 450]
Development work on mesh is proceeding. I haven’t written much about it lately because most of the information is rather geeky… boring. I don’t really care about the details of the equation used to calculate upload cost of mesh nor all the changes made to the equation to make it equitable. I do care about what will make them cheap to upload. Whether I write about it or not there is lots going on in the Mesh Development Project. There is also LOTS of interest in SL Mesh. The Mesh Office Hours meetings are held at the corner of the region because the region is filling up. That allows people to flow into 4 regions for the meeting.
Second Life Mesh in February 2011
First of all, Charlar Linden tells us that some of the mesh objects imported with older versions of the mesh viewer will become invalid. These are typically mesh objects that have a box outline around them in the physics shape display. Use Develop->Render Metadata->Physics Shapes to see the shape.
Not much excitement in this area lately. Development is proceeding. The Lindens are not saying when they will arrive on the grid and more and more people are whining about that. The Lindens are not going to say ‘when’ until they have all the complex problems solved. I’m not expecting to see them hit the release channels for 2 or 3 months and I think that is optimistic. 🙁
Nyx Linden said in the last office hours meeting for mesh that they are looking at how to roll out mesh. Discussion is about a staged release. No real decisions so what is actually going to happen is up in the air.
