Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Project Interesting isn't the only news out of the lab this week. If you were wondering what was happening with Qarl's crowdfunded mesh deformer, or if it would ever be implemented in Second Life, you may not be surprised to hear that the deformer is dead in the water. The twist, however, is that Linden Lab already has an alternative, and it's available for testing today.
In the project's introductory blog post, they explain that resident-made solutions (both Qarl's mesh deformer and "Liquid Mesh"/RedPoly Mesh) are innovative stopgap solutions, but neither worked consistently enough for official adoption. Their solution is to expand on the RedPoly method by adding several new collision bones to Second Life's default avatar, so that items can be rigged to them and scaled to fit more reliably than they can at present.
This solution won't make your old mesh items magically fit, but it doesn't sound like it will break everything you own, either. As long as the current bones all stay where they are (and it sounds like they will), all other rigged mesh items should be unaffected by the addition of those new collision bones to the skeleton. Of course it's hard to say how long it will take before Fitted Mesh is integrated into the main viewer, and there's a chance that everything will go wrong and it never will. With any luck this project will follow the seemingly smooth trajectory that the Materials project had earlier this year.
You can try the experimental viewer out for yourself, but unless you're a mesh designer it may not be of much interest yet. LL is discouraging designers from selling items rigged to the current test skeleton as it's still subject to change as development proceeds, and that change would almost inevitably break items rigged to older test skeletons.Read all the details for yourself here.
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TweetIris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Timesand has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan andwith pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.
Said my piece here:
http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Breaking-News-Fitted-Mesh-Project-Viewer/m-p/2337723/highlight/false#M24534
As to why a version of liquid mesh over the deformer... here's what I'd said:
*****
Choice of technology to prevent incompatabilities.
They're choosing what is the superior choice.
I've worked with deformer technology before in Poser - its a nasty piece of work designed to overcome flaws when an item fails to follow the 'morphing options' of the underlying mesh. It tends to fail at complex points - resulting in triangles poking out. And it never deforms perfectly.
You fall back to deformers when the better choices fail.
They are adding in the better choice: new bones for a mesh to follow. IF mesh model makers follow the new bones - a deformer will be much less needed.
But to get people on board with following them, they need to stabalize. Meaning this:
"At this time, the new skeleton should be considered provisional and subject to change; we do not yet recommend selling or buying garments rigged to it."
Has got to change.
Which will likely occur once it goes out of testing.
At this stage, they probably want leadin model makers to start uploading test objects and telling them the results.
Lest you think that's a waste of time for those model makers - the ones who leadin will be most likely to have product ready when the thing is finished, and be early to dominate in the coming 'meshtopia'. :smileytongue:
- Just consider how major a brand 'coldlogic' is, from being the first big coop team to push the standard sizes and have a good sized inventory of products out long before any competition did. They have yet to lose dominance in mesh fashion.
If somebody beats them to having this stuff ready though, that someone will own SL fashion for the next year or two.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at 11:38 AM
It's already on the alternate viewer page along with the "Interesting" (which I suspect will be Main viewer VERY shortly)
I'm glad something is going on....they also started putting more info back in the changelogs.
Posted by: CronoCloud Creeggan | Wednesday, November 20, 2013 at 03:51 PM
Now lets see is how much time will take for Tpv's to implement these changes, some are real fast in doing so, but the dominants (yet) are way behind!
And as on materials and Alm use, we all know by now, if Firestorm or singularity dont add them, 99 pct of users will not see them!
Luckily is seems the change needed on the code is a real small one, so there will be no more lame excuses to why not adapt LL code!
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 02:42 AM
@zz: it is ridicolous to pretend 99% of the users would use firestorm or singularity.
Posted by: Kramp | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 04:03 AM
No single browser, including the official one, is dominant enough in the marketplace that you can afford to neglect any of them.
Posted by: Arcadia Codesmith | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 06:23 AM
True Arcadia, no viewer can be dismissed and on this subject it seems the changes are easy enough to all to adapt!
But (and i dont use them!) hardcore users (the oens that are in world for more then 1 hour) tend to stay with their user of choice and we can't deny the majority has opted by Firestorm as that 1!
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 06:44 AM
@Kramp: it is ridiculous to pretend 99% of the users would use firestorm or singularity.
*****
True. It's more like 98.5%. Or seems that way at times. Probably closer to between 40 and 60%. But they rant more than everyone else - because they blame all their own problems with old computers, wrong settings, or too slowly updated viewers on LLs instead...
And Firestorm is usually about 27 years behind the current code (or maybe just a few months). Singularity though - much as I absolutely DESPISE the v1 UI, usually catches up in a matter of days.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 10:04 AM
Oh and Firestorm this week has FINALLY started blocking old copies of itself.
I'm not sure how they do this, because I thought LLs owned the servers and not Firestorm... so I have no idea how a TPV developer has the ability to block logins from an already downloaded viewer...
But they're doing it.
So while Firestorm is very slow to update - at least people won't be connecting with very old vastly out of date copies anymore - and gumming up the works with complaints based on already fixed issues as they currently so often do...
So once Firestorm DOES finally get around to adding this, about 9 months later their users will all have it (they seem to put out a version every 3 to 4 months, and they're blocking anything older than 3 versions... and their users tend to be the most resistant to fixing their own issues; ie: slowest to update... so we can reasonably presume about 95% of them will always be 9 months behind the rest of us).
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 10:12 AM
The easiest way for LL to remedy this is to allow just their own viewer,as unpopular an idea as that is. It is the only way.
I believe that when one decides to use a Third Party Viewer, they deserve no support from anyone, and thusly,should be on their own with technical issues, paying customer or not.
Having a bunch of differently produced viewers is part of the issues many users have in my opinion.
Posted by: unpopularbutthetruth | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 01:14 PM
@anonymously afraid to reveal their SL name above me:
I agree. But here we are.
I think they should have used a system to allow expansion of the viewer within a contained frame instead of multiple viewers. Something like the 'addon system' of some MMOs. Not quite 'wearing HUDs' because it would rest outside the world - but not independent applications like the TPV system. More like an external version of LSL - that had the ability to move buttons, change graphics, gather up data and alter its presentation, change menus, change keybinds, and such.
That's the "safer" middle ground - and it allows the core developer to ensure everyone is always running compatible applications.
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 01:52 PM
And you managed a post anyway, without knowing my SL name. Well done.
LL has access to the same code that makes TPV's popular, find out what people really like about it, fold the code in, maybe HIRE some of people who make it-yes pay them actual, you know, money to make their product better and block TPVs. I say this not as someone who is anti-TPV, because I use one, but this would fully allow LL to have a handle on these issues and those similar.
Posted by: unpopularbutthetruth | Thursday, November 21, 2013 at 03:44 PM
As someone that never , note, never at any time, allowed and installed a official Liden Lab viewer!
LL relies on Tpv's to figure, fix and improve much of its code!
I just don't think LL viewers have enough quality to deserve to be installed in my computers!
And imagine ALL using V2 viewers?
Tpv's are a needed nuisance for Ll and they know that, the day they stop that collaboration is the day that Sl will end!
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Friday, November 22, 2013 at 01:58 AM
But as someone asked on another blog, can any answer this!
This new viewer can deal and still use old mesh, or if adopted, any old mesh will be useless?
And if so, will creators replace all their mesh products by new, adapted ones?
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Friday, November 22, 2013 at 02:00 AM
quoting:
This solution won't make your old mesh items magically fit, but it doesn't sound like it will break everything you own, either. As long as the current bones all stay where they are (and it sounds like they will), all other rigged mesh items should be unaffected by the addition of those new collision bones to the skeleton
Unquote!
So obvious one does not need to fear to loose all their mesh items that are pre viewer!
Posted by: zzpearlbottom | Friday, November 22, 2013 at 02:07 AM
"LL relies on Tpv's to figure, fix and improve much of its code!"
That hasn't been true since about 2010. It was true for only about the first half-year of Emerald's popularity...
Ever since then the TPVs have lagged notably behind the official viewer, or was with Emerald and why it lost that position: went off the deep-end of crazy with a core dev possessed of criminal mental issues.
Even before LLs required TPVs to not break the shared experience, they were lagging behind. The requirement was actually an attempt to force them to stay closer to current... but was done poorly and made it seem like they were being held back. But they were being held back in the kind of way that you would be holding back horse and buggy users by requiring them to use cars on freeways. Sure they made an advancement in a new axle for a wagon's wheels... but those are still horse-pulled wagons...
Posted by: Pussycat Catnap | Friday, November 22, 2013 at 09:24 AM
Until the LL viewer adopts some of FS's goodies I won't be using it. The quick preferences button alone is worth anything else the LL viewer has. That and the rest of the features contained in Preferences. I just simply can not use LL's for those reasons.
Posted by: scumshine | Sunday, November 24, 2013 at 06:26 AM