In the Eyes of the Meshless, Hamlet Au 3.0 is a Horror

So I finally had a chance to log into Second Life from China to fully enjoy the new version of my avatar that Iris so helpfully and brilliantly made, and I came into the world like this, howling "My god woman what have you done to me?"

Though I kind of think the green pole like protrusion emanating from my waist will be a big hit with the ladies. (You're welcome.)

And then I calmed down and realized I was logging in with an old Imprudence pre-mesh viewer, which cannot render mesh, and makes it look like what you see above. As it happens, Imprudence is still the most stable viewer on my AlienWare. But now I must commit myself to a mesh-enabled viewer, lest I keep looking like a knobby and twisted mutation. So the cost of looking beautiful as Iris intended is a resource-taxing upgrade. But to all those who still use a pre-mesh Second Life viewer (and it's still a significant userbase, I believe), I need to remember as I talk to them that they are talking to a 3D cubist painting seemingly impaled by a striped jade dildo.

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Comments

[Pussycat Catnap]

I suspect its actually a very small user base. Features of the v1 viewers are gradually getting broken. Many if not all of those updating to address this have also included mesh support.

The V3's all have mesh support - and recent changes have given them big boosts to stability and performance (possibly even to mid-age systems).

The current V3 beta is supposedly a big performance booster - but seemed about the same on my iMac.

Mesh is started to pop up everywhere in SL. Its as common as sculpties now - so if a large number of people couldn't see it we'd be hearing about it. Instead I see maybe one or two people on the official forums making a note about not seeing it, and that's about it.

Like the "adult" industry pushes technology forward, the fashionistas in SL have called it for mesh; making it ubiquitous.

[Strawberry Singh]

That looks painful.

[Harper Ganesvoort]

ROFLMAO!

[ZZ Bottom]

Singularity or Sl cool viewer will prove a good choice if you wish to see mesh and still use a V1 style viewer!
I do regret that imprudence can't see mesh, as is by far the best v1 viewer, not only for Sl but mostly to open sims and is the best in graphics terms, of the viewers that don't use the new rendering methods avaiable!
Now if you wish to see yourself in the best way, just make sure you read Niran Nv blog and make a upgrade to your hardware to be able yo use her viewer (at least windows 7 64b, quad core cpu, minimum 6 giga ram and a Nvidia 460gtx or higer!

[Iggy]

Cubism rocks. Dare to be square, Hamlet.

Or--the price of SL's ever escalated requirements--buy a new computer. Mesh is working fine on my three-year-old Macbook Pro.

[singularityfanguy]

Remember when mesh was coming? Oh that will never be available in a v1 style viewer, they said. Not possible, they moaned. Eh. Anything is possible. :P

Get Singularity. It's a solid viewer and it runs very well from bottom end to top end. Mesh/multiple layers and alphas, oh and it's solid! Did I mention solid? lol

[Katharine Berry]

But to all those who still use a pre-mesh Second Life viewer (and it's still a significant userbase, I believe)

3.12%, to be precise (the majority of whom use LL's 1.23.5). That's not really all that significant.

[Adeon Writer]

Yeah, logging in on a +2 year old viewer will do that.

Thankfully, I can't remember the last time I ran into a meshless viewer user.

[elizabeth (16)]

lol jejejejeje (:

[Brookston Holiday]

I know from other posts that your readers have already explained about having to update your video card's drivers. Have you done that yet? It seems disingenuous to continue to blame mesh if you haven't done the basic troubleshooting steps.

[Kenshin]

Looks like an avatar belonging to a troll haha. There are still some people who is using the older viewers due to the inability to afford newer machines so to them we'll be odd looking or totally naked!

[Sandy Sandalwood]

I see all the mesh lovers have turned out here to support their current favorite fetish. Most people who see mesh gaps in others' avatars just keep their mouths shut out of politeness and not wanting to receive flames from mesh lovers.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

I've been resistant to mesh for a number of reasons, chiefly to maintain the backwards compatibility of my avatar (because apparently nobody at LL has heard the term 'graceful degradation') and out of pique that they steadfastly refuse to even consider an integrated toolset for creating and modifying meshes.

But unless I'm testing, I use the V3 browser and don't trouble other people with my personal reasons for avoiding mesh (unless they ask). There are much more worthy topics to squabble over.

[Arabella Jones]

The Big Shiny of the last eighteen months or so has messed up a lot of stuff. Mesh wasn't so bad, just stuff looking weird if you didn't have a mesh-capable viewer, but the hassles for rigged mesh, and the associated mesh deformer project, have not been encouraging. It's not fun for the creators, I think.

And then came Pathfinding, which along the way broke a lot of vehicles (which were using an unsupported feature that affected bounding boxes and physics), and which has been messing up vehicle use while, for all I can see, nobody is using it.

Oh, and there are those fancy features that were tested in Linden Realms, which briefly went live on the rest of the Grid until the Lindens noticed they were breaking security.

I have sometimes wondered if the people running the show know anything about how the customers use SL.

[Pussycat Catnap]

Sandy: You're sounding like one of those people who decry's the "Windlight" or "Sculpty" fetish...

OLD NEWS.

Grid done up and gone moved on.

Progress.

It happens.

/drives off in model-T Ford.

[ZZ Bottom]

To be honest, there are some amazing mesh builds already avaiable, but one could live without mesh or at least use the mesh as open sims has it (For God's sake, not even that LL did it good).
And there is mesh and mesh, i have some amazing mesh that rezzes always and faster then any prim equivalent and is lower impact and i have some that most times not even rezz properly!
Now the fact is that, old hardware is not to be used anymore in Sl, but can still be used in Open sims, lol!

[HALEY Salomon]

I do regret that imprudence can't see mesh, as is by far the best FPS viewer, on my puter .But do I really need to see mesh I think not , I can still see your handsom face without it

[Tracy Redangel]

You should give some of the newer viewers a try. There have been some pretty significant performance gains since mesh first came out (at least in my own experience). I'm running SL on a 2009 iMac so obviously my machine can only handle so much. I always try to get as much as I can out of a viewer. The V3 HTTP viewer (still in beta I think?) is pretty fast http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Alternate_Viewers.
Exodus (http://www.exodusviewer.com/) has always performed great on my machine. The latest update to Firestorm (4.3.1.31155) is a LOT faster on my machine. I get about 25-30 fps several meters in the air on my platform, about 15fps on the ground in a crowded sim. Textures load faster for me now, and I get much less lag.
I think you're lucky, because at least you CAN upgrade your video card and add an additional power source. I'd have to get a whole new computer, as iMacs are meant to be taken out of the box and plugged in so you can pretty much only upgrade the RAM.

[Kenshin]

An i5 processor with a decent 3D card is enough to run mesh compatible SL viewer although I do admit having mesh on my older PC causes a serious frame-rate issue. Is mesh necessary for SL? More and more items will be made from mesh in the future including avatar body parts so the answer is a definite yes. Stop living in the past and get yourself a better PC if you can afford it.

@ HALEY Salomon
If one day Hamlet decided to use a mesh head, you wont be able to see his "handsome" face anymore.

[paul]

Another vote for Singularity from a fellow Alienware user who still boots up Imprudence once in a while.

[Archangel Mortenwold]

Singularity and Cool VL Viewer are both mesh-capable and have many features held by the default Linden Lab viewer.

Phoenix is good for building and scripting, and is mesh-capable having lifted the code from Henri Beauchamp, but it's no longer being updated and errors are creeping in as LL's altered code causes communications bugs. The Firestorm programmers are stupid for not offering further updates because the frame rate on Firestorm is much lower and it's buggy and uses more computer resources. I'll probably end up using Singularity full time, though not necessarily for building since its menu is less precise than on Phoenix.