How Mesh Devalued Prims in Second Life & Made It a "Consumer World"

Works by the artist known as AM Radio in Second Life's pre-mesh age

Philip Rosedale's open challenge to name another metaverse with dynamic, collaborative content creation evoked this response from reader Vivienne Schell:

I think that Second Life's initial success was tied to in-world, collaborative content creation offering in-world tools. Leaving the Prim (do it by yourself) path and quitting further development on that field caused much of the decline SL went through after Sculpties and later Mesh became predominant.

The virtual sandbox has turned into a consumer world mostly, where many people pay money to a few people for creating some kind of "multiple social frameworks", but much of the original thrill which keeps Minecraft big (and made SL big) is gone. As a result Second Life has turned into a self-centered universe, where the latest mesh head or the latest body or the latest whatever shiny has become the most important issue for a core of die-hard users. That may be enough for a certain amount of people to log in, but it isn't -- by far -- enough to attract a broader audience.

Which sad to say, seems sadly true. Echoing that thought on Twitter is this from Jeff Berg, once best known as AM Radio, Second Life's most famed artist:

All true, but I have never seen a content creation tool accessible to so many stripped away so quickly in favor of complex external tools. Second Life shot it’s own democratized native content creation tool while declaring no one else has done it. pic.twitter.com/9TY5huRwIO

— Jeffrey (@parametricshape) January 20, 2021

"I have never seen a content creation tool accessible to so many stripped away so quickly in favor of complex external tools. Second Life shot its own democratized native content creation tool while declaring no one else has done it." And yes, people can still create with prims in SL, but they soon fell out of favor: "The common devaluation 'But it’s prims' said it all the moment mesh arrived."

Seems to me that you can have a virtual world with mesh, or a virtual world with prims/voxels -- but not both in the same world. Now that Second Life has moved entirely to the cloud, I wonder how hard it would be to create a spin-off product that's effectively an entire sandbox, with no mesh allowed. Market it the right way to kids and creative adults (call it "Second Sandbox", let's say), I suspect we'd see much of the old magic return.

Comments

[Valentina Kendal]

I agree completely. I used to make things (jewelry) in world, standing there in a sandbox or my workshop, talking with other people, using the tools the Creators gave us. Now content creation occurs offline using other software and while we all look better, content creation is far less accessible, and that is sad. But for new users, they don't even know that. Even other in world residents have become an annoyance to the consumer minded: many people go through the world in Show Friends Only mode.

[Eeri Ethaniel]

Agreed. We were working on a major SL project, but when mesh because the standard, it made the project pretty much unfinishable. Especially since mesh wouldn't do some of the things that prims would; but no one wanted prim based builds.

[Summer Haas]

He's apparently never played Minecraft or any other voxel MMO.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

What I would give for a full implementation of CSG prims instead of the dumb "addition-only" approach we now have. carving holes in prims that are more unusual that the standard cylindrical/triangular/square holes, or making strange new shapes that are the intersection of two different prims.

We also lost the ability to define connections between specific prims in a linkset very early in the Second Life beta. bring that back - imagine actual working windchimes banging away in the breeze? or even easier definitions of rotations between joints in a prim-based sculpture.

There are a lot of possibilities in a prim-based approach - if only LL had continued banging down that door hard. Even if you needed a final publish to get it out into the world as a mesh everyone could see (booleans can get expensive very fast in realtime), perhaps you could have a mixed object format where the original prims are preserved, but the baked mesh resulting from all those operations is what makes it into the world.

such a shame. still, at least it's still open to being used for prototyping and roughing stuff out inworld, prims.

[Joey1058]

Jeff nailed this one. Mesh based worlds require a lot of time and forethought, and working outside in a creation program. This is IMVU in a nutshell as well. You go in and buy what you want if you can't run Blender. Your creations there are limited to what other people sell. This is what made Roblox so popular. Simple prim based creations. It took me till now to understand that!

[Tankgirl]

Nonsense. Yes, 3d mesh models are imported in. But the most important part, the building of environments is done together inworld in real time. You can build a sim together. Meshes are just different, more advanced building blocks. This is old people complaining everything used to be better before tv, or the internet.

[Adeon Writer]

It also made it not ugly as sin.

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

One of my favorite prim-only builds is an Elemental Air/Land/Sea vehicle - it uses the same prims for all three main forms, but changes prim parameters to form a boat, plane, blimp, hovercraft or car etc. you can't do that with sculpties or mesh. Granted it's very simple and minimalist, but it dates from an era where vehicles were rarely made of anything more than 31 prims due to physics and LI counting methods of the time. And it was free!

One of my favorite mainly-sculpty builds is a hairdo from Curio obscura that also serves as a cake delivery system, with swaps between sculptmaps and textures to change toppings and frostings. You can't do that as easily in mesh without some severely heavy polygonal overloads, and prims wouldn't be able to simulate some fruit shapes.

You can have a hybrid approach to using mesh, sculpties and prims. Each of those building blocks comes with its own strengths and weaknesses, so a wise builder would not immediately discount anything that isn't mesh but examine what they require of the build and choose accordingly.

Some of the strongest builds in SL are the ones where the creator has chosen to play up to the strengths of each kind of asset and not make mistakes like using one kind of asset to do a job that can be better done by another.

[Adeon Writer]

> you can't do that with sculpties or mesh

Only because Linden didn't let it. Models have been able to do that for a very, very long time in the rest of the 3D modeling world. Way better than prims could ever hope to do.

They're called Blendshapes / Shapekeys.

[seph]

Did the axe devalue the sharp stick? Are axes complex? Only very few Second Lifers believe that's a real debate, the rest of us wish we could catch up with the rest of the 3D creative industry and have chainsaws.

[Jeff (AM Radio)]

Echoing my reply on Facebook:
Ha, I kinda figured you might do this as I was writing that. 😂 I know about the in world meshing. The complex nurbs based modeling with considered texture optimization and baked effects will always be a step ahead. Minecraft proved high fidelity is commodified in a world that doesn’t need to push past 4K and the kids don’t care if their AAA game is from 2017 as long as the gameplay still rocks. Prims were somewhere between Minecraft and AAA. It worked, and then it didn’t. Am I saying it’s not worthwhile to create and be an artist, of course not, as per usual being an artist is not a lucrative lifestyle without a champion of the Likes of Bettina Tizzy et al. There’s more to
Being an artist than the media you’re using. As I said in the polygon article, “‘Avoid showcasing a particular technological capability,’ Berg says, ‘but instead, build experiences that remind us how human we are and have always been.’”

[Osiris Indigo]

They really need to add in a few tools now that the bandwidth constrains of 2003-2007 have been lifted and people have 100x the bandwidth they used to have. Those prim tools were CREATED for low bandwidth. Add to the tools and give us “Prims 2.0” and give us lathing, Booleans, real joins with optimization, chamfered and rounded corners, slice, etc. I see tools everyday that are built on javascript tools that give the user all of this and more. Just look at a simple tool like Tinkercad by Autodesk, designed to help kids build 3D objects for printing. It will do 10x the stuff that prims will do and it runs in a browser. Come on Linden Labs!

[Johnny]

Just like the demise of feudal Japan, as I noted 11 years ago:

https://secondlifeshrink.com/2009/12/16/virtual-bakumatsu/