I say ‘incomplete.’ Even though the word implies that it falls short of an intended goal, I’ve no idea if the intended goal was to actually… well, mesh with Second Life as it is used. Second Life mesh clothing does not.
Couldbe Yue has a great consumer’s guide to mesh clothing – well worth your time, since there’s a whole bunch of caveats and gotchas.
For my money, chief among the issues is that the clothing can’t be made to fit the avatar. The avatar must be made to fit the clothing.
If you’ve got a female avatar in Second Life, or just one who wears good-looking shoes, the likelihood is that your avatar has ‘size 0’ feet – that is, that the foot-slider is set to zero, out of a possible 101 different settings. Due to the long-standing inability for a wearable to obtain any information about the avatar and limitations in the ability to adjust wearables, size-zero avatar feet were a mostly acceptable compromise – as long as it was just one body-part, though some wouldn’t tolerate even that.
Still and all, many wearables could be resized, or their positions adjusted to accommodate the unique features of an avatar. That is, we could fit wearables to our avatars, rather than having to fit our avatars to the wearables – except in the most extreme circumstances.
Mesh clothing, it appears, doesn’t allow any of that. As such, you’d think a parametric (or volumetric) deformer would be a given; a fundamental leg of the feature, allowing mesh to hang and cling to your avatar, well… not unlike the way clothes actually work. Without it… well, Blue Mars already learned the painful lessons of trying to deal with mesh clothing without this feature, and the results were terrible and frustrating. Once implemented, things turned right around.
A JIRA request for just such a parametric deformer has been considered by the Lab and marked ‘Someday / Maybe’. Now while that isn’t a ‘no’, exactly, it’s very close to one. Essentially it boils down to ‘maybe someday, but maybe never’.
Maybe Second Life rigged mesh clothing was never really intended to be more ‘complete’ than it is now. Either way, it gives the impression of a half-arsed job, with no sign of when the the other half of the arse might arrive.
@Ezra: Take a pill
as long as there is no working mesh viewer (the one LL provides is just crap, Firestorm is way better, but still doesnt work that well (lots of RAM memory using, laggy), Kirstens is discontinued.. (was very laggy too imo..) mesh never will become big.. Think today 90% of the people on SL are using a 1.x based viewer.. only the newbees use a official 3.x viewer, but when they found out they can use a 3rd party viewer they change to that..
Melvin
My issue with the whole Jira situation is the sadly typical Lab response to a well thought out, and thoughtfully commented fix request. Maxwell Graf spent his time and effort not only to create mesh objects for Second Life, but to offer feedback and a fix request.
Lots of thoughtful creators of content, including many folks with experience working with mesh, commented on the jira. It had many voters and watchers.
Changing it to someday/never without bothering to offer ANY explanation or acknowledgement was extremely disrespectful.
If there are technical, political, or financial reasons why this is not possible even an acknowledgement of the effort taken and perhaps even thanks for the interest and effort is appropriate here.
The creative and talented people who make content for Linden Lab’s virtual world are very good at coming up with creative workarounds for issues and limitations – but a history of having those same workarounds broken with no warning or explanation (much less apology) makes these same folks very skittish about investing time and effort to create a whole line of products that could be suddenly broken without warning.
Again, the corporate culture of disrespect for the people who create the content that makes Second Life a compelling and viable product has chilled a lot of excitement for mesh.
Sorry, fogwoman, i don´t see anything “creatiive” or “compelling” in high poly mesh full avatar objects supposed to be clothes lagging the place down while the same result can be achieved in a much more efficient and more compelling way with a simple graphic layer.
If you are so utterly disappointed, why don´t you invest where your mesh creation talents are wanted and you´ll be well respected, like IMVU, Frenzoo or Blue Mars?
@Fogwoman
Exactly. I find it especially telling that the issue is tagged “usability”, and that’s supposed to be Rod Humble’s prime focus alongside “service” as pointed out in most of the interviews he’s done this year where he’s proclaimed as much.
If its impossible for them implement the feature for lack of available resources or whatever the reason, they should at least say as much. To be silent and dismissive and just feel they owe zero response is just plain disrespectful.
I personally don’t think this issue is big for everyone present in Second Life now, but that’s because we’re used to dealing with fitting issues with alphas and shape tweaking. But, it adds one more first-hour issue to new users and I think we’re all tired of having to explain workarounds to friends we bring into Second Life everytime that we do. Ignoring that Jira creates one more, and one more reason most new users will quit rather than put up with it.
This is a prime example of there being a disconnect between what Rod says and how things actually get done. I see neither a focus on usability in sweeping this issue right underneath the feet of new users that dare buy a mesh outfit day one, or a focus on service in ignoring all of us that at least want an explanation as to why.
Beyond this issue, the attitude towards Lindens have been a bit of an issue on the Jira for awhile now. I know there’s only so many of them and only so much that they can do at one time, but there’s an obvious disconnect between what they feel like working on and what we the customers have deemed necessary in large numbers. The engineers there seem to be able to very casually say yes or no depending on how they rolled out of bed regardless of giant short and long term implications. Something is wrong with that. Where does the buck stop with an issue like this?
@Ezra: My understanding is that decisions of that nature are determined by managers nowadays, and that JIRA items are accepted or rejected by engineers looking at JIRA items based on how well-aligned they are with the management direction that has been set.
Short version: The person changing the status on the JIRA item is unlikely to be the person who made the decision as to what that status should be. AFAIK, it is being handled just as any other business might.
@Ezra: Rod´s agenda – as far as i understand it – is not to focus on the “different” user (the one who prefers the one click be happy mesh barbie doll costume) but to take care of the current user base, which -as you mentioned – did and does very well with mixing and matching – or even self creating – outfits of any kind of format and tweaking shapes for an individual stylish appearance. In so far the decision to drop further investments into something requested by a few 3D object importers for boosting their sales records isn´t really contradicting this agenda.
And btw, the “first user problem” is not really of relevance. Linden Lab added tons of pre-equipped avatars lately where clothes actually fit. Even the not so tight ones.
That seems to be a huge problem with Linden Lab. When we complain, we have no one in particular to complain to or about.
I’m not saying we should be offered a neck for lynching, but you know, to give an example, when the community took up arms against Google+, a large share of it was able to be directed at Brad Horowitz who took responsibility for the controversial decisions made and he responded.
I’m not sure the decision making at Linden Lab is handled like any other business. Google is MUCH larger and many of the businesses we interact with on a daily basis are much larger. Even so with those businesses we tend to know who’s shoving what in our direction or ignoring us.
With Linden Lab, we have a lot of helpful, great Lindens that handle the Jira items, host user group meetings, respond on the forums, participate on the mailing lists, the wiki discussions and even answer IMs directly. Then up top we have Rod, who like M and Philip before him tends to set vision rather than handle the nitty gritty. Then, we have this mythical middle tier, “managers”, where apparently all the cogs actually move and in scenarios like this there’s no one to attribute blame to on why this Jira will probably never be addressed, like many other popular ticket items in the past that’ve gone completely ignored.
So, we end up being told Linden Lab is all about usability and proper customer treatment now, but when that so glaringly falls on its face, it becomes one more case of the buck stopping no where, at least anywhere that we can visibly see. When that happens, and it happens often, at best we stop caring, and at worse it becomes one more reason Linden Lab gets blamed and loses trust as a whole because it was too much trouble for whoever that actually calls the shots to actually explain themselves.
It seems foundational to any business a customer has the right of “Can I talk to your manager”? Not so with Linden Lab. If we’re lucky, the CEO responds to a tweet, otherwise we’re screwed if its any kind of important.
As it turned out, Horowitz wasn’t part of the decision-making for the contentious Google Plus stuff himself. He was just the poor bugger who was tasked as the messenger.
Rule of thumb: Staff who communicate or interact with you (in any business or service) are almost never the ones who make the decisions. There are exceptions, but they’re very rare indeed.
I highly doubt in a company as big Google any decision is made by any one person, but they’re still able to produce someone to take responsibility for it.
My point was that Linden Lab, with a just a few hundred employees, can’t seem to field such important feedback in any way more personable and responsible than a Jira ticket likely to go no where. That’s a problem, and companies bigger and smaller do much better.
I would humbly suggest – not knowing any better – the reason for this mess is because the people who create these “tools”, “additions” and “improvements” don´t come inworld themselves to live with it.
Why don’t I get surprised, or even a little disappointed, at news like this anymore?
[...] this excellent blog post by Tateru Nino on why Linden Lab have failed to implement mesh clothing properly. Please vote for [...]
So, what’s left for mesh? The Number Formerly Known as Prim Equivalence is set high enough that land owners won’t want to use mesh for large objects (will they give more convoluted prims, e.g. tortured tori, a cost reflecting their actual rendering costs?); mesh clothing, thanks to not being able to adapt fully to avatar shape, is a Procrustean bed you can wear. I guess that leaves jewelry, perhaps hair, shoes that confine themselves to the size 0 feet we’ve almost all set our shapes to, and vehicles. (And a few other things, too; for example, Mikki Miles makes some amazing mesh musical instruments.) What a wasted opportunity. LL draws a bead on its foot yet again.
[...] discussed in many blog posts – on this blog, by Rowan Derryth; elsewhere, by Trinity Dejavu, Tateru Nino, Vaki Zenovka, and others. Many agree the current technology conflicts directly with one of the [...]
“For clothing designers, this will eliminate the need for rigged items, weight adjustment, alpha maps, and multiple sizes of mesh clothing items.
For anyone who wears mesh, this will mean mesh clothing items will adjust automatically to fit your size and shape…”
Sounds like a stiff leather jacket will then bend exactly as the soft silk shirt does – good bye creativity, welcome uniformity.