Took a peek at the SL forums this morning and spotted a confuzzled dood who’s trying to figure out what kind of bug PE has… (^_^)
Well*sigh* Hi, i found a not so nice bug within the equivalence calculation… i’ve created a meshwindow with the equivalence of 1 prim, now for my house i need a second and so i rezzed another one… but here comes the bug, when i link the windows the properties show me 2 prim equal to 1 prim and the object even took only 1 prim on the land.. shall not bother me… but when i link the windows with my house(made of 28 prims) the properties and even the land info are showing me that the house is equal to 295 prims and they are taken on the land. Ok easy and fastest solution to not link the windows.
Maybe someone could explain that so i can understand this, pls
That’s perfectly normal. Not a bug. (^_^)
What you have is what I’ll call “Fractional PE” objects. I’ve been experimenting with them since the open beta. Basically, a properly optimized simple mesh with simple physics will have a PE of less than 1. (^_^)
But, the build dialogue treats the PE as an integer. So, from having a PE from 0.01 to 1.00, the display PE will be 1. =^-^=
Get two mesh objects with a PE of 0.50 and link them together, the resulting PE will remain 1 after summing and rounding the linkset. (^_^)
I checked with Charlar and he stated that this value will always be rounded in order to avoid confusing people. So, at this point, it’ll be up to the uploader to indicate the fractional value of the PE, if it’s important. (^_^)
You’ll find it while uploading. When you get your upload quote, look at the far lower left of the upload dialogue, you’ll see PE displayed in a 0.00 format. This gives you an opportunity to record the resulting fractional value in addition to simply cancelling the upload to pop back in to your mesh app and cleaning some details up in order to reduce the number. (^_^)
Less is more! =^-^=
Here’s the fun part. As long as we continue to have this fractional PE, it’ll be a boon for mesh building materials. Sort of like, reinventing prims. There’s no super good reason to make an entire house out of a single mesh. Right now, we have Box, Prism, Cylinder, Sphere… as prims. Well, imagine building a house with Wall-2windows, Wall-1door, WindowFrame, DoorFanWindow “prims”… Nearly all having fractional prim values. =^-^=
Prefab makers, the old texture stores, and inworld builders with no mesh experience will still have great tools to work with, if not better. (^_^)
Now… To address your GAIN in PE. I’m assuming the rest of the house is made of regular prims. Be it hollow boxes and various other things to be as prim-efficient as possible. Well, here’s the fatal flaw. Prims are the most inefficient building materials on the grid. Really, they’re lag nightmares by default. How else can we explain why games with apparently 10x the detail can get 100FPS on computers which can only get 10FPS in SL? (>_<)
So, when building with mesh, while exersizing efficiency and reducing the overall prim count… When linked to a regular prim build or adding scripts, the lag is taken into account and the overall score is changed. (^_^)
My mindset is; while building in prims, the prim count is an old an innacurate measuring method of resource usage. Mesh and PE is more along the lines of “LAG POINTS”… A far more reasonable score for the effect each linkset has on the server, network, and client. Reduce ~that~ number by making more efficient prim-replacing mesh components, and watch lag fade away. =^-^=
