tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1050813142440628460.post565368598059857273..comments2024-03-21T19:58:45.639-04:00Comments on Second Life Newser: Opinion: A Look at What Went Wrong With MeshBixyl Shuftanhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15409792769906782556noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1050813142440628460.post-58017542175818448162011-12-21T04:46:14.425-05:002011-12-21T04:46:14.425-05:00Mesh is an interesting creature that I believe was...Mesh is an interesting creature that I believe was implemented poorly in the confines of SecondLife. While in most existing game engines, one would think that a Mesh object would count as a single object in the scene, with complexity of the object being calculated as impact (after all, we don't want 1 million polygon models on a sim) we instead see this legacy limitation as applied to calculating the land impact via the existing prim limits.<br /><br />When we take many prims and consolidate them into a single merged model in a 3D program, the program isn't counting the prims it used to make that model any longer, and thus the model becomes optimized for the scene (within reason). When models are further optimized as low-polygon real time models for usage in game environments or virtual worlds, it becomes very odd to see a prim equivalent attached to that single model even though it constitutes one 3D object in the scene.<br /><br />A good example is in ActiveWorlds where one 3D object (which is mesh in .x,.rwx or .cob) counts as a single object in the world and the cell limit is calculated based on the script and land impact. Each Cell in the grid in-world has a maximum memory impact for items and commands. <br /><br />In this manner, a single Mesh 3D object imported in the the virtual world does not suddenly count as multiple objects which becomes a voodoo science at best in calculation, but instead has a solid and definitive impact on the cell limit as defined by memory allocation.<br /><br />Unfortunately, because the SecondLife business model heavily relies on the Prim equivalent across the board - from how much land costs, to how much you can put on that land, and even to computational lag for both server and client, introducing Mesh in SecondLife meant that in order to preserve the legacy model of economy and existing methodologies, those Mesh objects had to be arbitrarily restricted and tied to the legacy methodologies for calculation.<br /><br />If the issue was a concern about complexity and stress on the servers and clients in rendering them, then the answer would have been to address this problem via an LOD rendering system which can adjust the tessellation fidelity in real time, keeping the complexity at a par.<br /><br />Instead, the underlying failures of mesh stem from existing technology "lock-in", as Jaron Lanier would put it. Whereby existing business models or technologies artificially restrict the innovation of new paradigms where a much better innovation would have come to pass had that pre-existing system not been a defining factor as a basis for limitation.<br /><br />As for why there seems that many more people are using the older viewers versus the newer ones, I may be able to shed light on that...<br /><br />For me, the difference between a non-mesh viewer (like Firestorm 2.5.2 beta) and a Mesh enabled viewer (3.x +) is that of 26FPS with basic shaders and atmospheric shaders enabled, yet on a Mesh enabled Viewer, the same graphics settings give me 8FPS at best.<br /><br />The OpenGL implementation was borked in the transition, and it seems that any specific workarounds that solved the problems prior and stabilized the experience were lost. So for myself, it boils down to whether or not mesh is worth the trade off to 8FPS (or 20FPS if I disable all shaders). To me, it's not a worthwhile tradeoff when I know that Mesh alone does not warrant that drastic crippling of the experience in any other case.Will Burnshttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14369186130470176679noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1050813142440628460.post-34610012626289808442011-12-20T09:56:07.901-05:002011-12-20T09:56:07.901-05:00The inclusion of Mesh brings SL on par with other ...The inclusion of Mesh brings SL on par with other video game systems, ALL of which are totally based on Mesh. Build on the Quake engine? You'll be making Meshes. Build for Unreal? Guess what you are going to be making? And guess how many tools are out there for making meshes, free and commercial? <br /><br />Mesh incorporation will be slow because a) the professional mesh makers are not in SL yet because until now, no mesh has been here. So it will be a little time before they hear about SL having mesh and wander in. b) way too many viewers don't support mesh, and those content creators who run such who can make meshes aren't eager to dump their favorite viewers just to use Mesh. <br /><br />This is quite different from how sculpts and voice were rolled out. The new viewer came out and if you didn't have a viewer capable of using them, you didn't log onto SL. Something similar needs done this time too. Put out the code for mesh to all the TPV folks and say that in 3 months, everything has to be a mesh-capable viewer to be able to get into SL. That's plenty of time for folks to add it to their code. Anything else will simply create a world where two people running two different viewers will see two different things, which doesn't just break SL, but shatters it.Shockwavenoreply@blogger.com