Deformer

Good meeting on mesh problems this week and the state of SL Viewers. For 3 or 4 months we have been having problems with the SL Viewers. Runitai Linden is working with many of the viewer’s OpenGL issues affecting us. These problems extend into third party viewers using the V3 render pipeline from the Lab. So, what can we expect?

Viewer Fixes Lagging Behind

Those of us that use project viewers and the development viewer know that many of the problems in the main SL Viewer and SL Beta Viewer have been solved. But, those fixes from the project and dev viewers are slow reaching the main viewer. Plus these viewers have had problems most residents would not want to put up with.

There are, what I consider, two primary hold ups delaying fixes moving to the main viewer. First is the chaos of rapid development. Multiple teams are tackling various aspects of the viewer. That makes for quicker fixes, but adds the problem of integrating and testing the fixes. More people and teams mean more work is done but communication problems increase. This means we see fixes in project viewers that take time to reach the development viewer which precedes the SL Beta Viewer which precedes the main viewer.

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Monday was a busy day. Lots of mesh related things going on. The Content Creation/Mesh Import User Group is where most of the news breaks. This week we were supposed to find out where the Lab was in their research for how to handle mesh clothes and body shape issues. There is lots of information on the subject.

New Tree

Charlar Linden has changed from his deciduous look to an evergreen look, which is probably seasonal thing for well dressed trees…

Unconnected Vertices

An unconnected vertex is a vertex without an edge connection to any other polygons. They are somewhat like crumbs. They usually serve no purpose as there is no way to render them. So, the question was asked what the SL Collada Uploader does with them.

Prep Linden says they are not rendered. If one has unconnected vertices the uploader should alert the user to the problem. In general you don’t want extra vertices driving up your Land Impact costs. Prep asked we file a JIRA feature request. I am not sure who is filing it.

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Deformer Project

The big topic in mesh is the Deformers issue… an obvious spinoff from the Transformers movies… not. Maxwell Graf is leading an effort to get mesh deformers for SL clothes. As you probably know mesh clothes will not fit to our avatar shape, which is overly simplified but conveys the idea. Deformers will make the clothes fit our shapes.

The Lindens were caught by surprise in this issue. The entire mesh project was geared toward using mesh for things other than clothes. During the closed beta period those helping were apparently oriented toward building mesh things, not clothes. So, clothes were a secondary concern for Lindens. In hindsight a good case can be made for seeing clothes as a secondary priority being a blunder. But, that is in hindsight and we know how that works, unfairly.

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Because of the large interest in JIRA SH-2374 (Rigged Mesh Deformer) I expected an interesting meeting and it was. We did learn that the Lindens are still working on how to handle the problem. The relegation to ‘Someday/Maybe’ status still upsets some. The lack of explanation upsets even more people. But, at last we got some explanation.

Charlar Linden said he would be adding more notes to the JIRA item. On the 4^th Charlar added this comment to the JIRA.

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