Why aren't there 1 million people in SL?

The idea is that you'd have your hair made from one mesh instead of 255 prims.

Actually, it's the other way around.

Prims have lots of hidden invsible faces that get rendered even through they dont appear. Meshes by constrast can be optimised a hell of a lot more -- so you can get a lot more detail, with a lot less vertices. Meshes would likely improve framerate, not lower it.

Yeah, and how would physics work with that?

Correct me if I am wrong. For a mesh you need the three coordinates for each vertex and values for the faces. For each prim, you need the three coordinates for its center, the three values for its size, the three values for its rotation, its cut, it shear, its adv cut, dimple, etc. Where prims win out in theory is that an object that consists of 20 prims might take several hundred to a few thousand polys to create. (However, I see no reason why good builders wouldn't optimize their builds to reduce poly count. Note emplasis.)

However, it shouldn't be that bad. We would make the limit based on polys versus based on prims. I would think that "hoochie" hair is a problem of the current system. I can have the same number or box or twisted torus prims attached to my AV. I wonder which impact performance more?

Doesn't a 100 twisted tori sticking out of somebodies scalp take up evil amount of polygons?

My concern over imported meshes is that people will be taking meshes that they never made themselves and uploading them into SL, then selling the mesh as their own. People do this now with sounds and texures. But this isn't so bad for a brick texture or a gunshot sound. Sounds and textures don't take a several days for the original creator to make, meshes do.

SL would have to set meshes to phantom. But if somebody wanted to make a tree from a mesh and have it still have a physical/solid presence in the game world. Then they could place a transparent prim over it. I think if I was to make a sculpture out of prims and the same sculpture out of a mesh. the mesh version would contain 60 percent less polygons. Although the mesh version would contain 8x the amount of data to describe it. Which would of course take longer to stream to the client.

Now if we had nurbs!!!

* dreams *

The male:female ratio in SL would jump to 1:9 pretty quick I expect. *remembering a certain model from Neverwinter Nights*

from what server on NWN? I haven't met anyone in SL who used to play NWN except me.

In answer to the original question: because noone really knows what to do when they get here. In theory we are progressing to that level, but it would be nice if we would see some long term coherent games. Chinatown might have been something special, but typically bedazzled gets board and pulls the pulg and goes on to thier next project.

This sort of resume building is fine, but what really neeeds to happen is for someone to come along and make a china town type game, and the ride it out. there are a lot of elements eveolved in SL that could foster this sort of thing such as families and groups. someone could do some sort of horse race or chariot race and have everyone be part of some faction: like red, green, yellow, and blue.

I know that SL is a platform, but its the content that will make is grow.

No idea. I haven't played it in over a year.

/waves

Now you have

Calling Second Life a Swiss army chainsaw seems rather misleading to me. Swiss army knives are extremely useful, Second Life is not useful for much at all except perhaps for making money out of it if you are one a small percentage of users. Second Life might be fun, it might be a nice way to pass the time, but there's not much in the line of performing mundane tasks that it can do at all, and to the degree that it can do them it does a pretty bad job of it.

Second Life is more like trying to build things with Legos while wearing mittens.
Now that's good Zen!

I, not to mention everybody in the "RL Work in SL" group, would beg to differ.

Good to come back to this thread when we hit 1,000,000.

How so?