How Offline Mesh Hurt Educational Projects in SL (Comment of the Week)

While many of us have talked about how the addition of offline mesh transformed Second Life into a consumer-focused world, educator Joe "Iggy" Essid offered this comment on how it hurt virtual world teaching projects like his:

I recall when Mesh arrived. Most of us in the .edu sector had already left, but I thought "there goes another magical SL experience": team-builds in-world. I think two students I knew could make things in Blender, and even then, it would be made outside SL and imported.

The magic of SL was always when folks interacted, in there. I didn't mind how much more realistic mesh avatars looked or how clunky the physics-engine proved; we were not building avatars or scripting HUDs, but we were making the spaces where avatars interact. I'm not a coder, so I imagine in-world building tools for mesh would be laggy and complex, but then building itself was complex already, the permissions system a mess, and the UI for SL clunky in the extreme.

Had in-world mesh tools existed, some of us in education would have soldiered on and given away Creative Commons content to colleagues, as a brave handful still do in OpenSim. Sure, we could keep using prims, but after a while, our builds would resemble the black-and-white people in Snowcrash's color Metaverse.

We dismantled our project, a virtual House of Usher peopled with actors, one of whom went on to win SF's Nebula Award. I also took down the version in OpenSim, after the host we had closed shop.

A former Linden told me "hey, buy some cool stuff from Turbosquid and import it to jazz up your build."

Sounded good until I priced it. Four items would blow the entire budget. We had already lost two hosts because of the .edu discount coming to an end. Game over.

Essid discusses his project to create a roleplay experience based on Poe's Fall of the House of Usher in this academic paper here and for HyperGrid Business here.

This is not to say all education projects are no longer viable in SL/OpenSim (more on that later this week), but Joe is probably right that any of them which relies on good graphics will hit on the added economic cost of high quality mesh. For them in might be worth considering a virtual world with much more pre-existing content and a far larger user base such as ROBLOX. Where, for instance, a historical roleplay city sponsored by a real life museum moved (and has since garnered over 20,000 visits).

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

When they added mesh they should have let you still build with prims.

It was a mistake to block anyone from ever using prims again. They should have retained that ability for the people who wanted to build that way and not forced everyone to use mesh.

Wait...

[Cathartes Aura]

I've always wondered just how much it would have cost LL to simply do for Mesh what was already done for Prims.

Simply reproduce what already existed for Prim Building - Premade Geometric Mesh Shapes, Deformers, Mesh Shape linking, and a Mesh Optimizer.

LL spent 10's? 100's of millions on stupidity... And nothing spent on implementing in-world Mesh Building Tools. Massive Fail...

I never understood the hard-core RESISTANCE to simply doing for Mesh what already existed for Prims. Unless... Some folks didn't like the fact that in-world tools means more people learn to build and create. Thousands of folks who never created/built anything learning to do it using in-world tools. Getting help from more experienced builders. Cooperative building in Sandboxes. Having a shizload of fun. Now...

Ken and Barbie Dress Up Land. Using what others build outside of SL. Boring...

More Builders/Creators equals less income, and LESS CONTROL for some folks. They'd rather be big fish in a small pond than little fish in a big pond. Selfish... Greedy. Destructive. And ultimately self-defeating.

SL mirrors RL. ;)

[Susan Wilson]

You know what would have been even worse for Educational Projects in SL? If there was no more SL. I truly believe that would have been the case had mesh not been incorporated. Mesh allowed more to be done with less prims and it allowed for a MUCH better looking virtual world and avatars. And speaking of prims - you can still do everything that you could do with prims before mesh.

[Adeon Writer]

@Cathartes I believe the reason is they don’t have anyone left who understands their prim code. It’s why after all this time they never added more prim types either.

[sirhc desantis]

@ ser Writer - omment of the year (to date)
Besides, 'educators' have been kvetching at SL (because 'won't someone think of the children? so give us special deal also inordinate amount of time etc') since I first logged on

[Iggy 1.0]

Tip of the top had to Mr. Au, as ever, for noting this.

@Adeon, point taken! Yep, we could have kept on primming along, but instead of improving things with the underlying code, so our clunky, prim-heavy builds could run faster, Linden Lab just moved on to pretty fashion and pretty builds. They had to make money; we didn't.

I can understand why they had to chase that money; they had people to pay and lights to keep lit.

We were more concerned with changing the world. We had more in common with the metaverse artists than we did with the Lab.

I've griped about this long enough. Now I can be sanguine (back then I used metaphors like "kicked in the teeth"). Heh. It was fun while it lasted.

In the end, Silicon Valley types and educators come from different planets, but for a few glorious years our spacecraft resided on the same asteroid. We almost made a crazy not-for-profit artistic utopia. It was worth it!