News about the Mesh Deformer

Whirly Fizzle Posted a new and important comment to STORM-1716. Qarl Fizz has a new version posted at his web site.

• the team over at inworldz recently asked if i could help them integrate the clothing deformer into their new mesh viewer. which is nice, i think, because people really want to fit their clothing. and so far they can’t.but the inworldz guys took it a step further – they asked if there was anything i could do to improve the code. and i said yes, it could be made faster. and they put-up a bit of money to make it happen.

  Attached is a patch to the deformer code which (by my quick estimates) makes the deformation process 21 times faster. many thanks to David and McCabe for making this possible.

This is, at least potentially, very good news since one of the complaints about the deformer is that it is slow.

Lately I have been trying out mesh clothing on an unaltered LL starter shape. The results have been disappointing (with a few exceptions). A working deformer might well move things along. Of course there are other problems, the learning curve for mesh clothing makers is steep and torturous. There is a tendency to overuse the alpha layers resulting in see through areas of your avatar, especially around the edges and where clothing hangs loosely open.

We have waited quite a while for the Lab to incorporate a working deformer. Hopefully this will enable them to work on it right after Project Sunshine is complete.

May you live in interesting times.

This is really important! Once this is implemented mesh clothing should “just fit” if it is made to the proper av. No more changing you body to fit your clothes or alpha underwear!

Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld

Update: Sometimes working on multiple posts to your blog isn’t a good idea. Between drafting and pushing this one, Qarl updated his code, as Cinders points out. Sorry Qarl! Correct link is here. 

Slightly later than he’d hoped, but keeping to his promise, Qarl has released version 0.3 of the Mesh deformer, stating:

Quick announcement – I’m releasing version 0.3 of the deformer code. Primary changes: 1) should now apply cleanly to recent linden viewer code, 2) deformation tables are computed in the background on another thread, so no frame stalls.

There appear to be a couple of elements missing from the patch – as spotted by Henri Beauchamp in a comment following Qarl’s post, so developers may want to hold-off grabbing the code for a bit.

I’ll be watching the various Viewer blogs for updates to see when the patch is incorporated. It’s likely to…

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The Corporate Community

Linden Lab is a corporation; a private corporation with investors backing it. We must always remember that. Their first priority is, and must always be, giving the investors a return on their money. Of course in order to do that they must, to borrow a phrase from Simon & Garfunkel “keep the customer satisfied”. Note I said satisfied, not happy, just satisfied enough so we stay around and spend our money.

There have been some interesting twists in the customer/resident – corporate dynamic since I first came to Second Life. In January of 2007 the viewer went open source and development began on Third Party viewers. This development changed the dynamic because the new viewers were more responsive to resident wants and needs. They were not at all beholden to the investors. When this worked well the feedback between Linden Lab and the Third Party Viewer developers gave us innovations LL had never even thought of (think body physics) or had not thought important enough to invest development time into (double-click teleport). When it went badly — well, Emerald was an embarrassment to both LL and the third party community.

The latest evolution of the resident relationship with Linden Lab is crowd sourcing of projects. The one-man-developed Kirsten’s Viewer is in the process of funding it’s developer in the face of a RL economic situation that would halt his work without it. The residents have also reached their US$5400 goal (in under 3 weeks) to hire Karl Stiefvater (who used to be Quarl Linden) to code a mesh deformer so mesh clothing fits properly (any additional funding will be used to improve the project beyond a single layer). If these initiatives are well accepted by Linden Lab and by the Third Party Developers a whole new avenue for resident involvement will be open. Even if you can not code beyond “Hello Avatar” you can vote with your wallet to develop the features you consider valuable.

All of that said I reiterate my initial thought: Nothing will be adopted that impedes the investor’s return on the money they have put into Linden Labs.