Weekend at Winx 2

 Bloom Peters: I created a special viewer for serious creators, its a custom Firestorm that allows you to upload insanity mesh haha

Thirza Ember: is there a link to it? or maybe there will be in the future?

Bloom Peters: not yet but i can show u the city, it demonstrates that.

"swishing tp sound... to a region called Whiterun"

Whiterun

Bloom Peters: We can and should have better limits in place. What your about to see was uploaded all in one go in less than 4 mins on my viewer - full textures. With the custom viewer you have no limits to what you can upload. Super super complex mesh, like this town, and it doesnt lag us. I believe Opensim should not have the same limits as Second Life.

Thirza Ember: I have almost 80 frame rate and the build rezzed in about 2 seconds - all of it. Admittedly, there are only the two of us here, but still...

Bloom Peters: yes and there is an insane amount of details, but it's all optimized. This comes from a video game called Skyrim.

It's a feature not a bug that Opensim has a lot of mesh uploaded by beginners and intermediate Blender users, and so optimized mesh is not the norm everywhere. Unnecessarily complex mesh, like super large textures where much smaller ones would do just as well, and scripted accessories that give the wearer a dozen different fashion choices and the rest of us a big headache are some of the biggest causes of inworld discomfort. But as people get better at making mesh, it's to be hoped that much of the unoptimized stuff will gradually disappear. Bloom sees other factors as vital to Opensim's future.

Bloom Peters: PBR will be a game changer for opensim. the music bar on Frutti is PBR.

Frutti Music Bar, seen with PBR Viewer

Frutti is the region described in this post, it's a recreation of the Frutti Music Bar from the Winx Club TV series.

Bloom Peters:  Opensim also needs a new viewer, a DirectX version

Thirza Ember: what is DirectX?

Bloom Peters: DirectX is a far superior render engine like those high end video games Call of Duty. The music bar does have PBR materials, but the materials have to be optimized  so it doesn't lag. People use 1024 texture maps for a cup. i use 24x24 pixels, so my entire bar is run by like 4 textures.

Thirza Ember: i noticed you did that on gardenia town.  i remember inspecting the textures, and finding you did something very clever with a single texture divided up into squares or bars of color, and then applied different bits of the same texture to the people and the buildings.

Bloom Peters: all the NPCs share 1 texture. This is what it looks like.

Thirza Ember: that makes for zero lag really, and on a build with a cartoon-style look, with blocks of color it works well, but what about a more photorealistic build like this?

Bloom Peters:  this build here has like... let me check...  4 textures and 1 plant texture. Super optimized

Thirza Ember: Looking closely I can see the repetitions, but the size and proportions of the various surfaces are so well done, it doesn't matter

We walked into the town, and saw a figure up ahead.

Bloom Peters:  That's Tatsuo my Skyrim girl ... she just a model haha

Thirza Ember: I'm imagining if this city was like a zombie hunt game,  it would be really cool to run about in here.

Bloom Peters:  haha, would work well... I actually do have a zombie shooting game but its basic

Bloom Peters:  so, on normal viewers, you be lucky to upload a tree without errors... you know those mesh convex block, missing LODs messages...

Thirza Ember: omg yes I do. It's maddening, because the mesh looks fine, then the Viewer spits it out and you can't see what in the world the problem is.

Bloom Peters:  all those fake errors

Thirza Ember: I thought it was because I am crap at Blender

Bloom Peters: no, not at all. The restrictions on the mesh is overkill. i got fed up with it, so hacked it

Thirza Ember:  so you have done an override on the mesh uploader?

Bloom Peters: yes, i removed and added open no limits... and the best part? You know how it takes so long to process and upload?

Thirza Ember:  no, how long?

Bloom Peters: this entire scene uploaded in 4 mins.

Thirza Ember:  Amazing.. but in the hands of others, maybe less adept at making mesh, won't that open the door to problems?

Bloom Peters: yes. It does expose Opensim to bad mesh.  But it's great for extreme builders.

Thirza Ember:  I have heard people talk about waiting for ages for highly intricate mesh to upload... and then it failing anyway. Very frustrating.

Bloom Peters: So, about that. I uncapped that as well. I eliminated the limits. It still checks for bad mesh, but most mesh isn't really bad. if viewer detects 1 bad piece,  it just skips it. So now i can upload a sim in 5 mins. hahaha... I uploaded a 10GB DAE in 5 mins, and it doesn't have issues,  its fine, no lag no crashes, but this town was 1.9GB. I had to modify firestorm and a custom opensim distro - it requires the opensim distro i have that, too.

Thirza Ember:  so do you think all the nit-picking slowness of the default mesh uploader, is that maybe because at the start, SL was afraid of getting a grid full of bad mesh by amateurs trying to sell stuff?

Bloom Peters:  yes it is but mostly for SL it's a question of storage space. The mass cost of second life is simply storing the mesh and its contents or any asset

And from thinking about storage, we got to talking about Servers.

Bloom Peters:  I need to do some kind of fundraiser for Winx in a decent kind of way. My goal is to raise like... 600? To replace the old server, it's 13 years old now !

That means, pretty soon you'll be reading about a fundraiser to help Bloom to continue her cutting edge original work in Opensim. Investing in Bloom's various .oars and kits (you may have obtained some in the past, under Bloom's old name, Cuteulala Artist) is an investment in the entire platform, because it will make it possible for things like her musical region, Crescent Melody, with its unique sounds and fabulous instruments, to be honed and improved.   

Bloom Peters: and you know I love crescent melody i can't wait to start the second one, I made the program for it already. It would be nice to get it up to a modern machine. The speed increase would be amazing haha!
HG Addresses: 
Whiterun fast mesh upload demo    hop://bloompeters.ddns.net:11052/Whiterun/229/248/43
Crescent Melody      hop://bloompeters.ddns.net:11052/Crescent%20Melody/150/128/21

(Visit any time, leave an IM to Bloom Peters if you would like a demonstration of the music machine on Crescent Melody)