OK, I went ahead and got the new LL Viewer, 3.5.0. I won't bother to post a link, as most n00bs probably already have it, and many others have variations of V2, which is the Mesh one. Now before the content creators and their shills laugh and say they were right, I'll laugh right back in their faces and tell you that Phoenix 1185 is alive and well. I did not change over because I was finally forced to, in fact, quite the contrary. I tried it because of recent talk that it was supposedly close to what some call a 'third-party viewer,' whatever that means. I assumed that they meant it wasn't like their V2-based interfaces, which, to the newer members of Second Life, is the 'normal' viewer. Remember, when the awful V2 viewer was released, people were appalled, and LL fired the person responsible for creating it. Oddly though, instead of apologizing for the mistake and recalling V2, LL chose to trudge awkwardly and blindly ahead with it.
This release was met with mixed emotions; some people sheepishly accepted it, some chose to go with one of the so-called third-party viewers, and some clung to the normal (non-mesh) viewers. Subsequent updates implemented by Linden Labs rendered many of them unusable, most notably the popular Emerald viewer. This left those of us with the more independent minds in a quandary. Some made the switch to Mesh, despite a rather poor selection of available viewers. I am one of the hold-outs who ended up with Phoenix, and it's still my viewer of choice.
Shills and Control Freaks
The shills and control freaks will whine that I should have just gone to a Mesh viewer. Maybe I should have, but I still have my reasons why I didn't want to. I'm not like those people who just follow along quietly. I know what I like, and if I am going to change, it's going to have to be for a good reason. I could see no good reason.
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First of all, I did not want to learn how to use SL all over again. Everything in Viewer 2 is different, and reversed. It's change for the sake of change, making things all 'new' again for no good reason other than perhaps job justification. I suppose they do have to be able to justify their existence at LL, but at what cost? In this case, that person lost his job. That says a lot to support my opinion of this terrible interface.
Yes, I said 'interface.' It's not so much the Mesh-enabled viewer itself that was a bad thing. It's normal for something new to have bugs, especially when it is something built by Linden Labs. The big problem here was that the entire interface was changed from what we all knew as being something very intuitive to a clunky, awkward abomination that left the user searching for features that were either hidden, rearranged, or were no longer even there. Phoenix 1185, I believe, is the last of the old-style viewers, and I don't think it's even available for download any more.
Second, Mesh was still pretty new, and not without its faults (and it still isn't). Not being a sheepish follower, I refused to buy any Mesh products at all. Since I was still using the older viewer, I could see what Mesh
really looked like. I am the type of person who cares what they look like, and I certainly did not want to look like those Mesh people. The planes looked terrible, and the Mesh clothes and hair looked even worse. As long as I knew that people in SL still could see Mesh that way, there was NO WAY that I was going to end up looking like a blob.
It's 'BETTER'
Here is a little secret, perhaps I never told anyone before: I have installed and tried some of the Mesh viewers, and I have looked at and flown some of the Mesh aircraft. Shhhh... Traitor, you say? Hardly. I wanted to see for myself rather than just harbor opinions gathered from talking to others and from reading online reports. I never saw ANY report saying why Mesh is 'better,' and after looking at some of the Mesh items with the newer viewers, I was left wondering WHY Mesh is supposedly better. They fly exactly the same, although maybe laggier at crossings. The flight characteristics are still the same; they are no better than their prim and sculpted predecessors. The textures aren't any better either. The same person who drew them for the sculpts is drawing them for Mesh, and the line quality is the same. So, why is it BETTER?
I'll tell you why it's better. It's better for the builder. There is NO advantage for the buyer or for the user whatsoever. It's all about marketing. It's easy to upload a Mesh product and it's even easier to texture one. Anyone who is skilled with Photoshop, Paintshop Pro, or even Gimp can easily create wonderful new textures for Mesh. In fact, some are even charging people for that very service. It's so easy a caveman could do it.
I mentioned earlier that I had just installed 3.5.0. It's really not too bad, after a bit of tweaking. Feature-wise, it's pretty bland. After using Phoenix and Emerald for so long, it's hard to go back to something so basic, but it works. I must admit though, it's nice to not have to look at those Mesh boxes and blobs. NO, I am NOT going to start buying Mesh. I have already explained why I don't care for Mesh in an earlier post. Do I have to repeat myself? Maybe I will anyway, later. But regardless, that's not what I was getting at. I was discussing how easy texturing these things is now.
I was given a freebie Mesh helicopter. I never looked at it before, but since I had just set up the new viewer, I thought, "Why not?" I opened the box and rezzed the heli, and I must say, it looked really good. The proportions were right on, and there was a lot of detail (well, texture detail, anyway, but it looked good). It came with a set of perm textures, and when I had a look at them I realized that YES, it would be a simple matter to take these textures into Photoshop and alter them. I might even start a business doing this now. In fact, I had another idea.
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One thing I noticed in my initial tour using this new viewer is that there are all sorts of new and interesting items in SL now, and they are all Mesh. I never noticed before, because to me, they all looked like blobs and boxes. The one thing that really got to me though was this: People who previously had mediocre or NO building skills whatsoever are now cranking out perfectly-proportioned and textured models at an almost alarming rate, and these models show those same unskilled 'builders' as the Creators. Wow. Granted, some of them were already builders, so I can't take credit from them, but SOME of the names I have seen are among the most inept and unskilled builders I have seen, yet here are all these seemingly perfect builds. What is happening here, for those of you who are too naive to realize it, is that many of these so-called 'builders' are merely downloading their products from one of the many online 3D model warehouses such as Turbosquid and the rest. Yeah, NOW you know what I'm talking about. THAT is why there are so many new Mesh builders. They really didn't 'build' anything. But that's OK; the n00bs won't even know that in SL people actually used to really build things, and they did it right here, in-world, piece-by-piece.
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Mesh has taken the creativity out of building, but no one cares. Quality no longer matters. It's now just an illusion, and people are scrambling to cash in on it before it all comes crashing in on itself. Maybe I'll start doing that too. LMAO... This doesn't mean I'm going to start flying them though, I'll just download them and sell them, like everyone else. Sure, some of these Mesh objects look good with the right viewer, but I wouldn't want to be seen flying any of them. Not that there's anything WRONG with that...
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~Jamie~