New World Notes

SL Customers Can & Should Convince Merchants to Optimize Their Mesh Content! (Comment of the Week)

If it's true that some SL merchants create poorly optimized mesh items to satisfy customer demand for "more detail", reader Chic Aeon makes the point that the opposite is also true -- that customers can make their preference for better optimized content known to to merchants:

There ARE designers who make outstanding items that are STILL triangle friendly and look just as good as the heavy mesh items.

From what I have seen the problem is twofold, and hence I don't disagree with the idea is sometimes choices made are just about sales. For SOME anyway.

For others? They really don't know or understand and there may be some "lazy" folks along the way because it does take more work to get "the look" and also the low triangle count.

For an instance -- with no names used -- last year on the main furniture posting spot on the SL forums, many of us were complaining about the OH SO HIGH triangle count of some creators -- one very popular creator in particular. I LOVED the items but the vertices numbers were heart stopping.

Chic and others started explaining on the SL Forum why excessive vertices were causing them a coronary:

Second Life Creators Sell Poorly-Optimized Mesh to Satisfy Customer Demand (Comment of the Week)

Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.)

Reader "Seph" makes the interesting argument that creators are creating triangle-heavy products to please consumers:

Customers buy products that look great, regardless of what it does to their performance. If they preferred performance, I guarantee creators would be selling performance.

Linden Lab rolling out PBR and some better lighting features will help creators rely on more modern material maps and rendering instead of mesh density. More modernizing of Second Life's graphics engine and content creation pipeline will help more.

In the meantime, no creator is doing this to sell less but make performance floater watchers happy. Penny can keep calling them ignorant and lazy, but making customers happy is anything but.

I don't think Penny said either of those things, but I can see how customers might demand massive amounts of triangles, even though it actually does nothing for graphics quality -- similar to how in the US, there's a market for huge SUVs with impressive grilles, even though they actually do nothing for driving quality. (And in both cases, they harm the environment for the respective world they're in.)

Seph's expanded comments help explain why mesh creators are making the equivalent of  Cadillac Escalades for Second Life's fashion crowd:

Second Life Still Struggling With a Crisis of Poorly-Optimized User-Made Mesh Items -- But a Pro Game Artist Has Some Solutions

Above: A single Second Life fashion item with nearly 50,000 triangles (Courtesy Penny Patton)

Longtime SLer and professional game artist Penny Patton recently bought a Second Life shirt and then saw something that shocked her. That one mesh item (see above) had nearly 50,000 triangles.

As a point of comparison, characters in AAA console games with high end graphics rarely have this many triangle. The ultrarealistic lead character in God of War, for instance, has on the PlayStation 4 version only has 32,000 total triangles. For the entire character and their clothing items, while looking even more detailed than that one Second Life shirt. (Click Kratos at right to see.) 

But when Penny contacted the creator of this shirt in Second Life, she got an interesting response: 

"They informed me that they could not reduce this because it results in a 'decrease in quality'.

"The [shirt has] 11 faces. Each face has three maps. Diffuse, Specular, and Normal. It's even worse because the specular actually only uses one map, a black 1024x1024 texture that was uploaded 11 times instead of reusing the one.

"It's absurd. It's also, sadly, common in SL these days.

"This is why SL needs hard caps on avatar resource use."

It's not only common, it's an ongoing problem, and hasn't really been sufficiently addressed. As a former Linden Lab staffer told me about poorly optimized mesh, "These items are effectively DDOS attacks on everyone around them." 

Five years ago, we pointed out that most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are poorly optimized, and have even more triangles -- 200,000 or more. (Penny has also been writing about the issue on her own blog for years,)

Fortunately there are ways Linden Lab can address the issue head-on. 

"I really want to stress there is not one thing Linden Lab should do to fix a problem like this," Penny tells me. "There's no 'silver bullet' solution that will fix the problem and make everyone happy."

That said, here's the solutions she recommends:

Siddean Speaks: Slink Creator on Closing Her Beloved, Highly Optimized Mesh Body Store -- And the Market's Uncertain Future

The Second Life fashion community was hit by some shocking new year's news, when Slink creator Siddean Munroe announced she was closing down her line of high quality avatar mesh enhancements for painful real life reasons:

Following two stressful years of pandemic which I am sure we have all been affected by in one way or the other, I suddenly lost my mother in September of 2021, my grandmother in January of 2022 and my cat Cleo in June. I have been unwell and enduring a lot of chronic pain. I have to be very honest, my spark has dimmed a little and I no longer have the energy to pour into this business like I once did.

I’ve done a lot of soul searching over the last 18 months and have come to the very difficult decision that for my own physical and mental wellbeing, I need to move on from Second Life. I am starting something new, and can only hope it will be half as much fun and as fulfilling as my time in Second Life has been.

This is also a blow to the technical performance of the Second Life community: Slink was one of the few leading mesh body brands that are well-optimized. When I last checked, many of the market leaders, by contrast, are grotesquely lag-inducing.

In any case, a mutual friend helped me reach out to Siddean, because I was curious about her future. She sent along these answers:

Philip Rosedale's New Vision for Next Gen Metaverse Content Creation Includes Live, In-World, Multi-User Collaboration -- But Can We Bring It Back?

Philip Rosedale has a pretty fascinating new Medium post based on a presentation he recently made at an unnamed Metaverse work group, laying out a vision for value creation in next gen platforms, primarily based on what worked well (more or less) in Second Life -- Clear Property Rights, Collective Ownership and Participation, a Stable Currency Price, and so on. It includes a call for a feature that was clearly unique and great about 3D content creation in Second Life -- but I'm not entirely sure is feasible, beyond SL and Minecraft:

Support Live Collaboration rather than Offline Editing

Having someone stop by and compliment your work-in-progress is a powerful amplifier for participation, as is the ability to recruit passersby to help with a project. Reducing the time delay between content creation and publishing is effective in both virtual worlds and programming languages (compiled versus interpreted). A great temptation in virtual worlds is to take advantage of powerful offline editors (Unity, Blender, etc) and standardized file formats by creating an edit/publish sequence. Roblox, VRChat, and Sansar are examples of worlds taking this approach. But the problem is both that the creator cannot enjoy social interaction while working, and also that multiple creators cannot then work together on one place or project.

Something magical was surely lost when our focus moved away from live, immersive social creation, and we seemed to resign ourselves to offline editing as the inevitable default.

But is it really possible to build an in-world collaborative creation system, where the content is also mesh and optimized?

Philip believes so, when I ask him, pointing to Sony Dreams as an example:

Watch the Latest Feature for SL Roleplay: Dueling Pistols That Can Spin!

Lads and ladies, we're here with our first roleplay revolvers: The Duelist's Pride! Designed to be used idly, in roleplay, and wearing for fashion.

DETAILS HERE: https://t.co/svfWmKUsiI

Now available in BASSETT TOWN - https://t.co/oVEdA24qBR pic.twitter.com/g2fPNyCYzL

— Walton Wainwright (@SLContraption) April 29, 2022

Just in time for the Fantasy Faire and the steampunk-themed SL19B anniversary, Walton Wainwright's dueling pistols come with a seriously cool feature I haven't seen in Second Life up until now: Revolvers that can spin in-game:

If you're wearing the gun as an accessory, we've included multiple gun spinning options, a stylish toss, occasional reloads and other idles that play randomly, which can also be toggled off in our menu if you're looking to not twirl your gun or reload all the time.

Watch the trailer above for the supremely cool effect. This is made possible, Mr. Wainwright explains, by SL's recent avatar skeleton upgrade: 

Can Second Life Compete With Modern Metaverse Platforms? Top SL Content Creator Brilliantly Explains Just the Avatar Challenges Ahead

Now that Philip Rosedale's back advising Linden Lab, challenging modern metaverse platforms like Meta's Horizon, can he help fix Second Life's complex avatar system? I asked that question last week and a pretty amazing reader conservation ensued -- culminating in this excellent rant by the excellently named content creator Allegory Malaprop, of the style brand Schadenfreude:

I desperately desperately desperately want Linden Lab to come out with a new avatar to put an end to the avatar wars. I might actually make clothing again if I wasn't reminded every time I do that it is the most horrible tedious thing on earth to try to re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and re-fit and re-rig and I'm just going to cry now and never do this again.

With Meta and the hype, now is the time. Now is past the time to be able to scream to the hills "Hey you get no feet and you can't actually get anywhere near people there [in Meta's Horizon], come here look at this!!! Also we have cookies/amusement parks/dance clubs/cheese caves*/sex dungeons/probably anything else you could want already built and ready for you to check out."

Now is the time to be easy to sign up for SL [and] ...to have an avatar that just works. AND works without the whole very super obvious us vs. them you're totally a n00b (or backwards mainlander with your 2005 blinging shoes and of course people are going to divide into their tribes and their snobbish preferences but let's not make it THAT easy, ok?) divide.

Even getting SLers "up to date" is a massive headache that takes literal days if they haven't been following along the whole time. (I've helped walk a few [of my store] returnees through it lately, it's awful, and that's WITH people holding their hands AND having an idea of how a lot of it works). And even if they have, once the new thing comes out, and how many times have you personally had to explain BoM to someone again?

It's too much of a pain in the ass to think anyone who is coming in from zero, who is not already invested, is going to put up with any of this.

Except...how are they going to fix it?

Ms. Malaprop proceeds to dive deep into the SL weeds on the problems facing Philip. Buckle up:

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.

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:

Watch & Share: How to Optimize Mesh Content Through Retopology

Here's a handy tutorial for Blender users who want to optimize their mesh content via retopology, i.e. remaking an existing mesh surface with more optimized geometry. Even if you're not a Blender user, it's definitely something you might want to share with your favorite mesh content creators who likely might (actually almost certainly) need some tutorial resources on making their mesh less lag-inducing.

This video via Black Dragon creator Niran, whose latest update to his SL viewer has a new feature for checking how well-optimized or not a mesh avatar accessory is: