Wish I Could Get a Better Pic of This SL Airship Made of Mesh

I finally had a chance to try out the mesh-enabled SL Viewer 3 last night, and immediately came across this lovingly detailed airship in the first mesh sandbox that came up in search. (Wish I knew who made it, but keep reading.) There's a satisfying solidity to these mesh objects, don't you think? While you often come across prim-based airships in SL about as impressive as this, you can usually see the seams, their cobbled-together feel.

Anyway, I tried to get a better screenshot of this airship, but then I turned my graphics settings up to maximum, and even though I have an Alienware laptop which can play graphics-intensive games like Deus Ex Human Revolution just fine, my viewer promptly froze, and refused to respond. So that's my mesh-filled Second Life so far, how's yours doing?

Comments

[Catten]

Am on an alienware laptop too and often freeze in viewer 2 with everything turned to high, I think it's a computer problem and not to do with mesh

[Seymore Steamweaver]

nice!

[Hamlet Au]

... and yet immediately after I froze in SL, I launched Deus Ex on high settings and it worked just great. I'm sorry, after so many years of shit like this, I'm just totally impatient with SL's viewer performance.

[Alicia Chenaux]

No. I've been using the viewer 3 beta and it's really stable for me, even running at Ultra graphics. I'm getting between 45-70 FPS depending on where I am at. But I'm on a desktop, not a laptop, so that probably makes a difference.

[Nyoko Salome]

:0 had to do a few manual cache/preference cleanups myself to stabilize the viewer updates... your mileage may vary...

[Ehrman Digfoot]

I just logged in and visited the same sandbox on Samurai Island Estates, with the same mesh object and I didn't experience any problems. Ultra settings 4x AA, 81fps w/o shadows, 36fps with shadows

[Arcadian Vanalten]

Y'know, SL's been a lot crashier for me lately. Kinda reminds me of the old days (back when we used to fret about concurrence, which one rarely hears about anymore).

It seems worse on V2 and Firestorm, although I've had some relief back on plain old Phoenix. Haven't tried V3 yet, but I suppose I should inflict that one on myself as well. The newer viewers are supposed to improve the experience, right? :P

[Hitomi Tiponi]

LL know that stability is flaky for some people and are planning to take steps to improve it. Unfortunately the integration of mesh broke a lot of things - but that is what happens when you don't have anyone in charge of QA (as has been the case for several months).

[CoyoteAngel Dimsum]

Mesh is just Crashy McCrashenstein for me, even on a high-end machine. :(

[Uccello]

Doing anything with inventory or the inventory pane is sluggish, but I can run my graphics maxxed out in a field full of laggy Meeroos with shadows on and still move about fine. v3 is better than v2 for me so far.

Apple iMac 27" 16GB RAM; ATI Radeon HD 4850 512 MB

[Seymore Steamweaver]

They should change SL over to the Source Engine. I know that's like saying the earth's population should up and move to Jupiter, but damn, those Valve games run like lightning on my iMac.

[Keenan Golding]

I seem to have had the opposite experience of everyone else here and quite a few of my friends in SL that I've been trying to help.

On brand new hardware (meaning a desktop machine with an Nvidia 570GTX and the latest drivers) all of the V2 viewers since 2.5x have been rock solid for me with a noticeable frame rate improvement. Ironically logging into Phoenix or any other old V1 viewer has been a painful exercise in nosediving performance and memory leaks, especially after teleporting around for a while.

It would appear that LL have decided to optimize for the latest hardware and let the fringe cases fall off the trailing edge. It's just unfortunate that the trailing edge in the case of V3 is circa-2009 hardware.

[Orca Flotta]

Hamlet wrote: "I have an Alienware laptop which can play graphics-intensive games"

So what? It's still a laptop. Even much cheaper desktops will give you a much better experience in SL.

SL is a killer application, eventhough the graphics are not as impressive as in most newer games and LL are really stupid when it comes to their server architecture. We all should keep that in mind and only use the bestest hardware we can afford. SL is not something to do quick-quick, checking in for a few minutes, leave a message and go. It takes time and effort to make it worthwile.

Trying to make SL a mobile app that can even be played from your iPad or clever cell phone or one of those unspeakable netbooks, using wifi instead of plugging into cable or ADSL is clearly the wrong way.

[Hamlet Au]

"Even much cheaper desktops will give you a much better experience in SL."

Yes, this is a fundamental, essential problem with Second Life now: It was architected to run on a computing platform that's now 4 generations out of date. Desktop sales have totally waned, laptop sales are declining, netbooks like my Alienware are not selling great either, as people move to the iPad, iPhone, Android and other tablet/mobile solutions for their computing needs.

[Eyeball Soup]

@Hamlet:
Excellent point. I'm assuming by "a computing platform that's now 4 generations out of date" you mean OpenGL 2.0/DirectX 8 level hardware.

I'd argue that the situation with PC hardware sales has more to do with nobody pushing the envelope hard enough to force people to upgrade. Handhelds and laptops with low-end graphics chips are "good enough" to let the average person get 2003-ish level 3d graphics which is fine if you're just going to play WoW.

Remember when Doom came out and suddenly everyone's PC was obsolete? Imagine if Doom was released today with hardware requirements that put it out of reach of all but 10% of the existing hardware base. Would there be thread after thread of people whining about having to upgrade their hardware or the fact it wouldn't run on their iPad?