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 Viewer Problems

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As much as I use different viewers, I miss lots of the problems. Lance Corrimal, the Dolphin Viewer person, pointed out some of the problems in SL Viewer 3.x. There are a couple of gotcha’s.

Speed

SL Viewer 3 and viewers based on version 3.x code are slow. I’ve been using the SL Development Viewer for so long I expect it to be slow. If you are just moving to a 3.x based viewer… well prepare yourself. It affects the SL Viewer and third party viewers based on version 3 code.

Outfit Problems

We usually see these problems manifesting as problems with alpha layers. If you are wearing multiple layers then an outfit replacement only replaces one layer. That results in layers left behind from the previous outfit.

A work around is to remove the current outfit then add the new outfit. This does leave you nude for a few seconds. So, you need a changing room… or not, if you are an exhibitionist.

Crashing

If you attempt to teleport more than one person at a time, you have likely run into this problem. Inviting more than one person to tp crashes the viewer.

#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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#SL Adult Content News Week 38

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The last couple of meetings in the Adult Content User Group have improved. The meetings are moving forward and usable information is being provided. There are several new things that are pretty interesting, especially to those with land in Zindra.

Hopefully by now you know Zindra is the name of the Adult Continent. There is also a region named Zindra.

Second Life
Second Life adult Content Destinations

RFP for Adult Content Gateway

I think it is pretty well established and agreed that people have trouble finding things in Second Life. This has been a particular problem in the Adult Content community. While one can use search and the Destination Guide, that still leaves the problem of people not Adult Verified.

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#SL Dolphin Viewer Release

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There is a new version of the Dolphin Viewer 3 out. It is version 3.0.5.20427. There are few fixes. One notable is the change to a separate cache. Most third party viewers (TPV) now use their own cache.

The RLV enable switch in preferences has been renamed.

Whispering is now mentioned in the chat Tool Tip…

The Linux builds have been fixed to work with older Linux versions.

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Second Life Server News Week 37

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Andrew Linden talked about caching in the 9/13 Simulator User Group. He has the job of writing code to track cache misses. I’ve never thought the viewer cache was doing much for me. I don’t see much difference in render speed for returning visits to places I’ve visited from places I’ve never been to.

The trick is figuring out which are planned or expected misses and which are cache failures. If you have been to a region you should have all the needed textures in your cache. Those textures should be found and avoid the need for a download. If the texture is in the cache and it downloads again, it can be considered a miss or failure.

Of course if you have never been to a region, one expects all the texture to have to download. So, misses are not a bad thing. The challenge is in knowing when the caching system is failing. It has broken in the past. So, the new code will be an alerting system.

The simulator has an Interest List. In the list are the things the viewer needs to render the scene for its avatar. As Andrew describes it; when an avatar arrives in a region things around them have specific positions, geometry, and textures needed to render them. The simulator figures out what objects are in the avatar’s view and assembles a list that it sends labeled with a version number. When things in the list change, a new list is sent with an updated version number.

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