A little peeve of mine… (=_=)

Anyone who claims they “Can’t” see mesh.  For example. (=_=)

I said it there and I’ll say it here… (=_=)

Prims are mesh.

Sculpties are laggy mesh.

Flexible prims are rigged mesh.

“Mesh” is the nickname for a different way of storing the information for what we’ve been seeing all along. Storage is server-side. (^_^)

When you say you “can’t” see mesh; I can only respond with, you don’t know what you’re talking about. (^_^)y

About Imnotgoing Sideways

I'm a Second Life avatar with my own cookie jar! (^_^)y
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10 Responses to A little peeve of mine… (=_=)

  1. CHEEZITS LIGHT says:

    A prim is not mesh in any form. Take a prim sphere, for example. Its a x,y,z point in the center and a radius. No vertexes at all. Easy to draw in OpenGL and easier to occlude the stuff behind, which is the hard part of 3D. Flex applies variable radii to the sphere, really, its just a trick. Not a mesh. Sculpts are a fixed size mesh, encoded in an image, with a perfect UV space. The image is the laggy part due to the crap image support and jpeg decoding. Mesh is not laggy to fetch, is hard to draw because of the variable surfaces, has a massive decode issue with UV, and occlusion is a real bitch. They still rez far faster than a sculpt, which shows you how bad textures are handled by the server and client. And there are more rendering passes when it is rigged so it can be deformed.

    And flex, mesh, prims, and sculpts are entirely client side. I have viewers that cannot see any of them.

    There are many people having problems seeing rigged mesh but can see unrigged. There are plenty of really bad openGl drivers out there and the viewers do a bad job if degrading.

    • Imnotgoing Sideways says:

      You’re falling very short of the facts. Here goes:

      The storage method of prims is simple X-Y-Z+size+rotation+pathcut++++ and so forth. But, that’s the storage method, not the rendering method. So, your sphere example hurts your argument. Run SL in Wireframe mode (Ctrl+Shift+R) to see what is really going on at render time. You’ll actually see the vertexes, as transmitted to OpenGL. (=_=)

      Also, spheres don’t flex. This statement alone is enough to kill any other point you’re trying to make. A sphere is one of the 4 radially extruded prims which don’t have flexible properties applicable to them. Only the Box, Prism, and Cylinder can flex because they’re the result of linear extrusion of the 2D shapes square, triangle, and circle. The linear extrusion allows for a simple rigging which is a straight path up the Z dimension of the shape with the most basic physical capabilities. It’s not a “trick” as you say. It’s a feature of OpenGL’s physics capabilities. (^_^)

      Sculpted prims UV is by far not “perfect” as the LOD defects show. It’s a square grid at LOD3, yes, but that in its own comes with a myriad of problems. OpenGL manages UV maps as a native operation; so prim, sculpt, and Mesh get all the same treatment. Given, to OpenGL, they’re all identical object assets. Which also means that the local occlusion library has the same challenge with all 3 forms. (^_^)

      There are many people who are having mesh problems, yes. But, they also had odd star distortions in the sky. They also had disappearing system skirts. They also had all-black baked skins. They also had the inability to run SL in the secondary of a dual monitor setup. Also distorted twist in flexi prims. Also “Ruthed” avatars. Also attachments stuck in their butts on teleport or simline crossing…. And I can go on. This is not a computer performance issue at all. It’s a conditional issue that’s no more or less related to all the other bugs in SL. (=_=)

      So “My computer can’t display mesh” is not something I’ll buy. “My computer has driver issues that I’m unable/unwilling to fix” is more like it. Invisible mesh is a problem you can solve on your existing hardware. To say anything else is ridiculous. (=_=)

      As a result, it is of my opinion that you don’t know what you’re talking about. (=_=)y

  2. CHEEZITS LIGHT says:

    None of this arguing about what is mesh is not related to to Cullys request to post in the market what is mesh and what is not. She cannot see it. I cannot see it on this Android. Lots of people cannot see mesh. There are plenty of machines that cannot run the any of the latest viewers under any conditions, including brand new Dells, due to bad drivers.

    I agree that drivers are the main issue – and even when there is one, people will not update or do not know how ( it is not easy to de-OEM a Dell) because of the fear the new viewer/driver will break their old frame rates. My son, who should know better, managed to brick a brand new laptop trying to get rid of the cheap low-power video card and run exclusively on the 3-D. We only got it back by plugging in an external monitor, as even the BIOS refused to work after that misstep.

    My spheres was not a good example, I was in a hurry and its hard to type on the Android ( and impossible to see mesh on it).

    Runitai Linden says “meshes are not prims” and “you cannot compare mesh to prims to sculpts”:

    http://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Prim-Equivalence-Explained/td-p/923303

    :-P

  3. CHEEZITS LIGHT says:

    Here is the definitive answer to what a prim is: from Avi Bar-Zeev, the guy that invented them. Its not a mesh, that’s for sure!

    http://www.realityprime.com/articles/how-sl-primitives-really-work#more-264

    • Imnotgoing Sideways says:

      You’re still responding with non-facts. I’ve read both of the topics you linked to already. The construction method of prims is still at the asset level and still has zero connection to the OpenGL function usage when it comes to rendering a prim on the screen. As well as “meshes are not prims” is, again, a storage asset statement taking more into account the server and physics loads necessary to render them. Talking points are fun, but in no way convey facts or contradict anything I’ve said. (=_=)

      Add, I have 4 Dell computers. Two towers, a laptop, and a ‘Duo’ tablet… Every single one of them run SL V3 just fine. As of yet, I’ve seen zero evidence of a native code failure. There is no ~reason~ for anyone to not see mesh. If there’s any excuse, it’s because they’ve screwed up their system in some way and probably face a myriad of other problems from bootup to shutdown. In addition, I’m yet to see a client which can deliver higher FPS than the current LL V3 release client. So “I have to use Emeraldphoenixfireballs to use SL” doesn’t fly with me either. (=_=)

      Hand me a computer which “Can’t” use V3 and I’ll show you how it does. (=_=)y

      • Lord Karas says:

        Immy…i might not be as smart as manny off you all but..all i can say is…that’s just another smartass trying to impress others with his BS(=_=) Get him Immy :) (^-^)y

      • Lord Karas says:

        For various reasons originating in pure mathematics, your graphics card is optimised to draw three-dimensional triangles — the biggest of these reasons would be that three points in 3D define a flat surface, meaning that wherever these three points are, a flat plane can be drawn that includes all three. All 3D objects on your screen are actually a mess… er, a mesh of those triangles. GPU performance is measured in triangles per second, among other things.

        Now, imagine a cube. How many triangles do you need to draw it? A cube has 6 faces, each of which is a square, and every square can be drawn using two triangles. So the answer would be 12, right? In a normal 3D engine, it would. A large wall covering half your screen is still only 2 triangles — in a 3D game. While the GPU still has the same amount of pixels to paint, it only has two triangles to paint, and only needs to know the coordinates of four individual points — vertices, to be precise — that tell it where to start and end.

        Now, rez a cube. Turn on wireframe rendering, which will let you actually see where all triangles are. And stare.

  4. CHEEZITS LIGHT says:

    Interesting – “[The only one that’s unique, in fact, is the sculpty-prim, which is basically a texture-lookup (height map) deformation on a sphere”, from http://www.realityprime.com/articles/volumes-of-reading

  5. CHEEZITS LIGHT says:

    Immy, you are just lucky. Google shows 266,000 hits for “Cannot run mesh viewer in second life”. Read the Jiras, they are full of people who crash with mesh viewers on all kinds of cards. Lots of old and new machine, simply cannot run SL out of the box, let alone run a newer mesh viewer.

    My GeForce 430 card won’t work in mesh. I had to roll back to year-old drivers to stop the crashes. Why? The latest drivers from Nvidia sometimes break things, as the viewer uses a mix of deprecated old OpenGL 2 and new OpenGL 3 commands with a compatibility layer and it’s not done very well in the latest drivers, so backing up a rev or two gets you out of compatibility mode and things work better for some drivers. No one wants to fix OpenGL any more, its a dead end for future development.

    My take on the triangles argument is still that mesh can in no way to be considered the same, or even similar to a prim. Prims are stored as a list of params on the server, but the viewer has to calculate each and every vertex. This is not so for mesh. The vertexes are already defined when they arrive at the viewer.

    SL starts with a list of prim parameters and sends them to LLVolume::LLVolume, draws them nGons with LLProfile::genNGon. nGons are just that, n-sided objects. i.e. a prim. Meshes are not nGons.

    There appears to be 6 faces on a cube, with 4 points on the vertexes. But that’s a human view. There are actually 4 X 6 = 24 vertexes in a prim cube, and the viewer prunes the extras. The end result in OpenGL is a 288 vertex shaped cube with 18 triangles per face.

    • Imnotgoing Sideways says:

      Google shows over 950,000,000 results for “Computer doesn’t work”. With that in mind, do any computers work at all? You make no point in using a Google search statistic. For the people who are having problems, I can’t help from here, because I’m yet to see a computer with my own eyes which won’t run the latest LL V3 without issue. (=_=)

      My Intel Mobile, Nvidia 8600GTX, GeForce 295, and GeForce 580 all run mesh clients just fine. Even with the latest drivers. Why? Because that’s what a non-broken machine does. So, if your computer fails to work due to OpenGL yet mine collection works fine under the same conditions, which computer is doing it right? (O.o)

      Your graphics card doesn’t care how a prim is stored, what an nGon is, or how an object is calculated from spherical offsets before rendering. Asset storage is not a task for viedo drivers. It’s not managing that part of the operation. All your GPU drivers do is get vertices, form triangles, apply surfaces with textures, and apply shaders and particles as defined.

      Have you even tried to view SL in wireframe yet?

      Have you ever pressed Ctrl+Shift+1 and checked out the KTris (Kilo-triangles) statistics?

      It’s fun to watch you try to save face over your lack of knowhow, but your every word falls flat. My opinion continues to stand that you don’t know what you’re talking about. (^_^)y

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