Snoots Dwagon wrote: ↑Sat Oct 28, 2023 10:17 pm
So I'm not "against mesh" specifically. Mesh is awesome. I think what I dislike is the idea of having to create an original mesh item off-world. If we could create mesh shapes and texture them in-world... hubba hubba.
One partial solution is to build a collection of ready made useful optimized meshes. I have a lot of that for sale on the SL Marketplace but never uploaded many of them to Kitely since they don't really sell very well. I'll fix that though, keep an eye on the Merchants section of this forum for new listings!
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I wasn't going to post again in this thread but since I do, I might as well annoy a few people with a long rant.
The suitability of mesh on opensim depends a lot on how well it's optimized. Well optimized mesh won't perform much worse than prims and will easily outperform the same shape as sculpts. Too much poorly optimized mesh will cause serious lag issues of all kinds.
Optimization is not only about simplification btw, it's about getting as much visual quality as possible out of as few triangles, vertices and pixels as possible. Take a look at this tree for example:
- 55 tri Birch.jpg (146.08 KiB) Viewed 19198 times
It's made from only 55 triangles, 108 vertices and three 512x512 textures. The LOD doesn't break down no matter what distance you view it from and it has proper physics, you can walk underneath the branches but not through the trunk. Yet I dare say it looks just as good as trees that causes three to four times or more as much load on server and viewer and still are likely to break down when viewed at a distance and have lots of physics issues.
This is what optimization is all about.
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I don't know of anybody who has taken mesh optimization as far as I have but that's ok; I'm overdoing it and I know I am.
More problematic though, if I was asked to list ten SL and opesim content creators with both the technical and artistic skills to make top notch high performance mesh, I would struggle. I think I could do it but I'd have to think hard. (I'm not going to name any here because this post is likely to be read by a few people who believe they would belong on the list but don't.)
I could probably come up with more than a hundred names of mesh makers who do an ok mesh optimization job - about the same level good quality sculpts give or take a little bit. That's still a minority of the mesh makers in SL and opensim though and very, very few of the big sellers would be among them.
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The worst meshes on opensim (and to some degree SL) though, are the ones that were made for different environments. I once read a post by a professional game developer who compared porting assets from one game to another to trying to fit truck parts to a racing car. He was talking about games made on the same platform (Unity), adapting content from one platform to another is much harder. Adapting content that wasn't made for real time rendering in the first place, is much, much, much, MUCH harder.
Most of the mesh I've seen on opensim are such ports. I'm ignoring the legal aspect of it here; some of the items are genuine open source, some are copybots. It doesn't matter in this context: from a technical point of view it's all garbage. At least everything I've seen is, even the objects uploaded by the two people who actually do a pretty decent job with their own meshes.
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Before I get too many hate replies, I'm not telling anybody what to do with their sims. I'm just pointing out the inevitable consequences of poorly optimized mesh. What you decide to do about it, is none of my business. I'm also trying to establish some perspective on the mesh vs sculpts issue which is the main topic of this thread. My answer is that really well optimized mesh performs significantly better than sculpts, reasonably well optimized mesh is usually about the same as sculpts while poorly optimized/un-optimzed mesh is worse.
We also have to keep in mind that a few heavy meshes isn't going to do much harm. As you've probably already figured out, I'm obsessed with optimization. But back when I had land in SL, I still managed to find room for a few Apple Fall items and that's about as poorly optimized as mesh can possibly be. It was perfectly fine because I only had a few such items - and they were all indoors so they were only visible in a confined space with very few other assets.
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We should also be careful not to blame the content creators for content that isn't as good as it shuold be.
Hobbyists for this for fun and they're generally doing their best. In my experience most of them are actually very keen on improving their skills but it's their choice; we have no right to demand anything from them.
Commercial content creators have to keep in mind that time is money. Every hour you spend improving your general skills or tweaking your build for better performance, is an hour you spend not marketing your products and marketing is what matters if you want to make a little bit of money from your meshes. I once confronted a well known SL builder for his poor LOD models. His reply was "people in SL buy it anyway" and I don't actually have a response to that; he was absolutely right.
There's also the question how to improve. Me, I've spent tens of thousands of hours studying, learning, experimenting and just building. No sane person would do that. (I also have the advantage that I have both a little bit of tech and artistic RL background. You really need both and that's something very few have.)
Even if somebody wants to improve their mesh optimization skills, it's hard to find the relevant information. Linden Lab would of course be the most obvious source but they don't have any skilled mesh makers themselves. The pathetic meshes the Moles produce are hardly examples to follow and the official documentation they've produced is all tech with little or no practical relevance. There's a lot of information about mesh making out on the wide, wide web but most of it is created by people who aren't really that skilled themselves and very little is specifically for SL/OS. The "fitting truck parts to a racing car" metaphor is just as relevant for information and tutorials as it is for actual meshes.
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