#Second Life Server Update Week 38

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There was lots of interesting news at this week’s meeting. Check these things out.

Roll Outs

Surely by now you know the main grid gets new server software Tuesday morning. The Release Channels get new software on Wednesday. This week the main grid got the the Server-Maintenance update running on Blue Steel.

Data Collection

The Lab is doing lots of analysis of the regions to find bottlenecks and problems. This roll includes new data collection features. One of the more confusing and hard to find problems is labeled TimeWarp. The Lindens think they have found the problem, at least where the problem resides. The additional data collection will provide more information on many aspects of the Second Life servers and reveal more about the TimeWarp problem (more on that later).

Unexpected Prim Return

The addition of Land Impact costs has created some surprising situations where region prim limits are hit and prims get returned. Changes made by scripts can change object shape and trigger a Land Impact value and trigger returns.  A feature has been added to the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) to anticipate such changes and prevent them. I think the idea is to return an error message in the script error channel rather than allow the change and trigger returns. Nice idea.

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Phoenix with Mesh?

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Today I’m seeing Plurks and Tweets about the Phoenix Viewer getting mesh. Looking at the Phoenix Viewer site, I find they are adding mesh support to Phoenix. Interesting.

Henri Beauchamp, of Cool VL Viewer fame, has back ported the render engine from SL Viewer 3. He is allowing third party viewer developers to use his work. One of the Firestorm-Phoenix team made the conversion to Phoenix, Ansariel Hiller.

A new release of Phoenix is coming soon. You can read the details on the Phoenix blog (link above).

So, it seems series 1 viewers will be getting the ability to render the new free style models we call ‘mesh’.  Jessica explains this viewer version will probably be more crash prone. Also, that Phoenix is on its last legs. She makes a point that the ‘team’ did not make this addition. A couple of team members made it as a personal project. Now it is being added into the Phoenix Viewer project.

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#SL Cloth Simulation Clothes

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With the addition of mesh objects we have some nice possibilities for creating new things in Second Life. Ashasekayi made a great 6 part clothing/rigged mesh tutorial. Gaia also makes wonderful tutorials for working with sculpties, going from sculpties to mesh, and mesh. They have the basics pretty well covered. I want to get beyond the basics and find more Blender features. I have found several features that can help with modeling and in particular with making clothes. This article is about one of the Blender features.

Second Life Tutorial Example
Nice Clothes Example

Looking through loads of tutorials I’ve found some I think are pretty good examples of how to use the feature for making clothes look like they are made from real cloth. This is not a complete how to make a top. This is about a feature you can use in making a blouse.

Feature

Cloth Simulation – This is a feature in Blender that I have seldom seen discussed in Second Life circles. I wanted to explore what it can do and try it out. I used Blender 2.59.

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The Effects of Mesh

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Tateru Nino writes the Dwell On It blog, a favorite of mine because she does numbers. Today she has an article titled, The effects of the Mesh content-type on Second Life. The article is an accurate assessment of the current state of ‘mesh’ in Second Life. The comments show the user reaction to mesh and are interesting to read. I have a very different opinion than I see in the comments there.

It is All Mesh

Opinions

In psychology there are the concepts of transference and projection. If you have a new age belief system, you know those concepts as mirroring. The concepts are a mix of ideas that basically results in the idea that what we see in others is ourselves. So, if we see someone being dumb, we are probably seeing our own stupidity. If we are smart our first thought would be to ask of our self if we are being dumb and missing something. At the least it can save us considerable embarrassment.

So, with mirroring as the top cliché read through the comments on Tateru’s post.

Defining Mesh

I read lots of stuff. Somewhere in my reading I came across an idea Einstein expressed in a conversation about language. It contained the idea that people cannot communicate or understand each other if the language does not have words that precisely describe concepts. If we use ambiguous terms we will have ambiguous discussions. Ambiguity is a disaster in technical conversations and any conversation where one hopes to achieve some consensus of opinion.

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#Second Life Mesh Week 38

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A few interesting things came up in this week’s Mesh Import group meeting.

Land Impact

This mesh cost things is an ongoing problem in SL. People have yet to figure out Land Impact (LI), formerly Prim Equivalence (PE). They keep asking questions in the meeting that have answers in the SL Wiki. The forum is full of complaints that mesh costs too much. Well, it sure does if you do not understand the Land Impact equations in the Wiki.

Mesh Meeting 11-09-19

If one understands the explanations in the Wiki and Forum or the repeated explanations answering questions in the forum, mesh can be cheap It is tedious building efficient mesh, but it is easy to build efficient mesh that is cheaper than comparable prim builds for many things.

Understanding mesh cost also gives you an idea of what is a good candidate for prims, mesh or sculpty. Trying to build everything out of mesh or giving a mesh object a gilillion sharp edges are bad ideas.

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