[sldev] SL 2.0?

[Melinda Green]

Lawson English wrote:
> 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.

That's not texture editing, that's dynamic texturing. Cool but not the 
same. My point is that uploaded meshes will likely be as immutable as 
uploaded textures.

> 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

Sounds difficult to me, but go for it if you think that the benefits 
outweigh the costs.
-Melinda