[sldev] SL 2.0?

[Lawson English]

Melinda Green wrote:
> Meshes will give an amazing improvement to the flexibility of building 
> but they will not be a replacement for most current uses of sculpties. 
> Sure, some cases where people have managed to painfully create polygonal 
> forms will be more efficiently remodeled using meshes, but all of the 
> lovely organically shaped models that have been modeled using sculpties 
> will be best left just as they are.
>
> This is not a boon for the user resource haves versus have-nots, or if 
> it is, it's the other way around from what you describe in that it will 
> be a boon for people with low-end systems who will be able to experience 
> the same levels of realism they currently enjoy but with faster frame 
> rates that will be possible when inefficient built prim and sculpty 
> content is replaced with more efficient mesh versions.
>
> I don't think that it will be even possible for open-source developers 
> to bring mesh modeling into SL. Aside from overall transforms and 
> textures, I doubt that it will be possible to edit the topology of 
> existing meshes any more than it is possible to edit existing textures. 
> I therefore agree with you that it makes the most sense to do all mesh 
> editing using external tools. What you lose in the community experience 
> of collaborative building that Lawson mentions, you gain in the ability 
> to make really efficient models and to easily make portable back-ups of 
> your work. The back-up feature is the one that has long kept me from 
> investing much effort into content generation but now it gets a lot more 
> attractive to me and probably to professional 3D modelers as well.
>
>
>   
We already have the basics of texture editing inworld in the form of 
html on a prim, and Aimee's VNC plugin.

Expecting the SL sever to track every vertex-change might not be 
practical, but a collaborative P2P connection between 2 or more clients 
ala croquet with the finish product updated to the sim server for 
everyone else to see, wouldn't be that difficult to work up. And, if 
someone cares to publish a specific dedicated server for mesh 
collaboration updates, the avatars of a sim and child-sims could still 
watch the mesh  update in realtime, simply by bypassing Linden's sim servers