Second Life Mesh: Dead on Arrival…?
There’s another problem with meshes for content creators: Oskar Linden announced at yesterday’s mesh office hour that no third-party viewer would be permitted to use LL’s mesh upload code in their viewer. It seems that the upload code uses part of the Havok physics library that LL licenses from Intel.[…]
This means that a content creator will have to exit his viewer of choice (almost none of them are using Viewer 2, because they can’t afford to take the weeks needed to become proficient in the UI), start up Viewer 2, upload the mesh, then sign out and back in with his regular viewer. To a big content creator, time is money. If using a mesh takes up that much time and effort, they just won’t bother.
Meshes are also considerably less useful than they might appear to be to clothing designers, because they cannot be made flexible. A piece of rigid clothing isn’t very comfortable or realistic.
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As I said above, Linden Lab has a chicken-and-egg problem with mesh. The rest of the problems with it pretty much guarantee that people aren’t going to make the leaps needed to exploit them. Despite LL’s best hopes for meshes pushing people to Viewer 2, it just ain’t gonna work that way. Mesh is dead on arrival.
— Tonya Souther, The Tigress’s Second Den: Mesh: Dead on Arrival
1 year ago