Firestorm-Created Mesh Causing Display Problems in SL?

According to this fascinating conversation among the hardcore SLers of SL Universe, mesh items created through the third party Firestorm viewer can have serious display problems. (As depicted at left, from Aki Shichiroji.) Longtime SLer Adeon Writer says this is due to how Firestorm handles level of detail (or LOD) for mesh objects:

You may not be aware of this, but Firestorm changed the "Object Detail" slider away from default behavior. Putting the slider all the way up on official viewer results in a object detail value of "2", but on Firestorm, it's "4" (with many people even going into debug and making it even higher. The side effect is if you are a mesh creator, you will not realize how quickly your models fall to lower LODs. I see so much content that LODs so quickly with distance that it's unmistakable it must have been made on Firestorm viewer.

If Adeon's description is accurate (and I have no reason to doubt it), this is concerning, because Firestorm isn't just a random third party viewer -- it's the most popular Second Life viewer by usage, even over the official Linden Lab-created viewer. And so yet again, the open sourcing of Second Life's viewer (back in 2007) continues creating unintended negative consequences:

Not only are different users experiencing the world in significantly different ways, these changes seem to be affecting the content-creation system -- and therefore, the virtual economy.

Hat tip: Nalates, who has thoughts of his own on the topic.

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Comments

[Hanna]

Just use both viewers while importing in with the linden one-piece of cake.

[Cube Republic]

If content creators make their own LODs this shouldn't be an issue.

[Dude]

Cube, that doesn't really apply if your viewer renders the LoD a lot stronger than others.

[zz bottom]

That is the reason why i use a lod factor of 12. I can always see mesh no matter the lod factor it was build with.
And in LL viewer you can also set that by going to debug settings and change it (12 is the best when zooming in or out far way from the object and keep seeing it).
And please dont tell me otherwise, i have experienced with several diff builds for several diff builders and for those that say, over 4 it is useless i say, no it is not, over 12 it is.

[zz bottom]

And dont tell me that setting the lod factor by default to 1 (yes that is Ll official viewer lod factor) is helpful for any but Ll, cause it is almost impossible to build mesh at a low land cost impact using that.
So builders know, what sells more, a 500 la build or a 1 la one?
And they easy make sure any knows how to see it, by posting tips in how to acess and change debugt settings.

[leliel]

If any one ever wondered why SL has such horrendous rendering performance one only need to look at zz bottom's post and realize many "creators" in SL share that opinion.

SL: the land of user made problems.

[Cube Republic]

Dude, it does apply. If you make your own LODs, you will obviously know what the mesh will do at each switch. Trust me on this one, I've been making large landscaping items for ages now and through necessity have taught myself how to produce these meshes.

[zz bottom]

Leliel, if the land impact had no cost at all (Open sim anyone, where i can set a region to be 45000 land impact instead of 15000!) or was a lot higer, for sure all would use high res mesh builds and then ill wonder about performance.

[zz bottom]

And i can not be blamed for having a old hardware (almost 4 years now) but that i can improve to a point where i can be in sl at ultra settings all the times.

[zz bottom]

And if you want, then feel a petition to cap, server side, the lod to the default LL one.

[zz bottom]

fill, lol.

[zz bottom]

But the truth is, you can build with a lot less land impact if you set the lod to higer then LL default one, therefore being able to build more on a region and the cost is, just changing a debug setting.

[FlipperPA Peregrine]

Web Developers have been dealing with this problem for decades now: different browsers. While a lot of people remember the "screw Internet Explorer 6" mantra, it was worse even before then. At my first full time job in the late '90s, we were worried about getting things to look "ok" on IE3, Netscape 4, and AOL all at once (to say nothing of monitors and "web safe color choices"). Web Developers have been checking the "look" of how things are rendered on multiple browsers for decades now; the same will have to occur in the 3-D realm. Just wait until there are multiple rendering engines for whatever succeeds WebGL!

[Cube Republic]

ZZ that kind of negates the whole point of LOD. It's not there because 'OMG teh lindens are evil'. The reason we have LOD is so people are not rendering loads of triangles from often 100s of meters away. These triangles have to reside somewhere and be calculated and this is usually done by the GPU. Most people are not running GTX Titans, so there's only so much memory and resources available at any one time. LOD, proximity meshes, etc are pretty standard fair in video games as a way of reducing GPU load.
Making LOD meshes is not difficult, often it's just a case of collapsing loops. As long as you remember to keep the bounding box the same size in all the meshes, you shouldn't have a problem.