Chic at Ebbe's Place

New buildings at MOSP - LEA7

It is my rez day as this posts. I am --- have to look that up -- seven.

Or am I?

I just turned one in Inworldz, I am a few months old in Canada and all sorts of ages hither and yon where I have plunked down roots if only for a short while.

When I started this Ebbe blog (for those of you not in the know, Chic at Phil's Place is nearing 4000 posts), it was about chronicling the beginnings of what is now called The Next Generation of Second Life.

It became more than that as, wide-eyed innocence in hand, I ventured back into OpenSim.

We are all connected -- corporeal or virtual. What impacts one, impacts the others. Even though many folks ventured away from SL in fits of rage, traveling to new worlds in hopes of "true freedom", they owe much of their virtual lives to the platform that birthed us all. They don't need to return; the genealogy is evident -- invisible bindings that stretch but never quite break.

As we move into 2015 and edge closer to the alpha unveiling of the new "revolutionary" platform, I have been pondering what I hope the new world will bring. And in some ways, the answer points to OpenSim. 

I suspect that if I took a poll of Second Life residents, up toward the top of their lists of "must haves" would be a better mesh avatar. Those are available in Second Life now as add-on purchases and I give many kudos to the intrepid designers who have done wonders with the mesh bodies. Still, they are a hack -- fitting over framework more than a decade old.

So, yes, I too would like joints that don't break with real life movements and poses; ones where Photoshop isn't needed to fix the photographic flaws.

But ego aside, my TOP request for SL 2.0 would be a fix of mesh physics.

(login.greatcanadiangrid.ca:8002:Parkville)

I am a multi-platform builder these days. Things made in OpenSim make their way to Second Life and sometimes the return path is traveled also.  Recently I wanted some filler buildings for my Parkville, OpenSim city. In SL I was once again short of prims on LEA7; some streamlining was called for.

The same building could be used in both places, no?

Well, yes and no.

Here's the story and for you non-mesh builder folks I will  keep it simple.

In Opensim each object be it a simple cube or those complex trees you see in the photo register as ONE land impact. I can't tell you how my mouth dropped open when I realized that. Inworldz by the way has its own accounting method for land impact.

But even more stress reducing for the mesh creator is that physics is not an issue. Most (or at least the grids I have been on) do the physics for you, don't take that factor into the upload cost and (except in the case of Avination) WORK!!!!!  

Making a doorway that you can walk through in Second Life isn't hard, but it is boring and tedious and the folks uploading in SL for the first time get very confused. You need a separate physics model (the basic shape of your build), you need to choose factors in the upload tab and then turn the mesh once rezzed in world to "prim" from "convex hull". And if all works as it should, you can THEN walk through your doorway or to the back wall of your room.


My building in Canada, with some spectacularly detailed iron barred windows weighs in at eleven (eight for the windows) with very good long distance viewing and reasonable physics. I am standing on the landing; no pose ball.

The same building  in Second Life without barred windows is 15 with a shorter viewing distance and I had to use many tricks to get it that low. To make the "same" building (still with iffy physics in SL) the cost would have been at least 48. I am not saying It couldn't be done, just that "I" could do no better.

There are in theory reasons for the land impact costs.  Stress on the server, etc. etc. I hear that quite often. But in my mind it is still about that land to "stuff" ratio model. With the advent of mesh and smart building we can have many more details on our lots or sims in SL. While an overabundance of mesh might slow the servers some, I haven't seen much evidence of that at LEA7. In OpenSim this is also true, just that with sometimes more than three times the number of prims available, it isn't so important.

What I DO see is that WEARABLE mesh in a crowded venue can bring even hefty computers to a crawl. So along with making mesh physics more automatic and  easier for the designers, I would hope that the new avatars can both look good and be gentler on our hardware.

I do have a wish list for OpenSim too.

I hope that some of the more creative thinkers begin to edge outside the box. I see the SL commercial model redone again and again in that "if we make it -- they will come" mode. Too many places to rent (some amazingly more expensive than Second Life), not enough community and often not enough tech support.

The next big thing is out there. It may be SL 2.0; it may come from a forward thinking OS entrepreneur. Whatever it might be, I'm looking forward to being there as it unfolds.