In the wake of the arrival of mesh, and in the hope of alleviating confusion / making things a little more understandable, there are changes coming down the road for Viewer 3. Some of these will undoubtedly make their way into TPVs as well, so here’s a quick overview.

The changes described below can be seen in the latest Mesh Development Viewer from Linden Lab (3.0.5 (240741)+), which can be obtained from the alternate viewer wiki download page. note that as this is a development Viewer, some elements may change in relation to descriptions provided here.

Prim Equivalence and Land Impact

For a general user perspective, this is probably going to be the most obvious change.

Prim Equivalence, or PE has been an issue on many levels, not the least of which, for consumers, is that it tends to be bracketed with a prim count value – and is frequently greater than the associated prim count (although there are items where the reverse is true). People therefore get confused as to which is the key value: prim count (which everyone is familiar with) or PE.

In order to try to solve these issues, the terms “Prim Equivalence” and “prim count” are set to be replaced by a single value: “Land Impact”. How this will work takes a little explaining on two fronts, as it relates to a couple of changes within the Viewer and how we need to view things. So bear with me while I attempt to explain.

The first of these changes is that land will no longer be referred to in terms of prim counts and usage, but rather in terms of its “capacity”. Essentially, this means that:

• Full sims have a “capacity” of 15,000
• Homestead sims have a “capacity” of 3,750
• OpenSpace sims have  a “capacity” of 1,875.

Land parcels will also be referred to in terms of their “capacity”:

This might all sound like unnecessary semantics – but it does have a point in that it allows everything to be thought of equally, regardless of its origin – as we’ll see below.

Note as well, that nothing is physically being “lost” from your land. A 4096 sq m parcel that had a prim count of 937 prims before the arrival of the new Viewer will simply have a “capacity” of 937 after the new Viewer has entered general use, as shown by the figures highlighted in green in the above images.

To align with this, objects need no longer be through of in terms of their prim count or their PE – but simply in terms of their Land Impact – that is, how much of the available “capacity” on a sim / parcel they take up. This is reflected in changes being made to the Build menu floater:

As can be seen, the prim count / PE values are being replaced with two simple figures:

• The impact the rezzed object has on the land
• The remaining capacity that is available for rezzing further objects.

So if an object has a Land Impact of 15, it will reduce the land capacity by 15; if it has an impact of 150, it will reduce the land capacity by 150, regardless as to whether the object itself is made of prims or is a mesh object.

For people who want more detail on individual objects, the new Build menu also includes a MORE INFO link. This opens an additional floater which provides:

• Information on the object itself (including the prim count for those missing it!)
• If the object is a mesh creation, the “weights” applied to it in terms of the bandwidth required to download it, the server resources it uses, its physics weight, etc.
• The overall land impact: impact of the object itself, impact of all objects rezzed, remaining free capacity and total capacity for the land itself.

There will also be a WHAT IS ALL THIS? link which will open a Help page that explains the various figures.

Replacing both prim count and PE with a single, easily understood value (Land Impact) makes sense, and at a stroke makes the impact of rezzing any object in-world easy to understand, removing any confusion between prim count and PE.

Of course, there are going to be voices that proclaim the change is about further “hiding” the “real” cost of mesh objects from the user, with the underlying implication that the users are somehow being hoodwinked by Linden Lab. But, c’est la vie. People are wont to make waves come what may.

It will be interesting to see how merchants react to the change – given that all vendors, etc., refer to prim counts right now, and getting wording changed to “Land Impact” (or simply dropping the word “prim” from displays)  is a nontrivial issue for many. Some may even opt to retain the use of “prim count” in their vendors for this reason.

And when considering merchants – one hopes that Linden Lab will actually remember to update the Marketplace so that listings also reflect the use of “Land Impact” (i.e rename Prim Count!).

Avatar Rendering Cost and Avatar Draw Weight

Alongside the changes around PE and Land Impact, the Viewer will also be losing another measure that has always caused controversy and angst: Avatar Rendering Cost, or ARC.

Always intended to be an indicative figure for the amount of potential Viewer-side lag avatars create, ARC quickly became viewed by some as the figure for determining whether or not an avatar was “creating lag”, which in turn lead to a lot of drama in some quarters – up to and including people being banned from venues / sims on the basis of their ARC count.

From 3.0.5, things will be totally revamped. ARC as a term is vanishing from the Viewer to be replaced by Draw Weight for Avatars (DWA). Furthermore, how DWA is calculated is radically different to how ARC has been calculated, as Nyx Linden explains.

DWA should be far more accurate  than the old ARC system; and therein, one cannot help but feel, lies the rub.

If the figure is indeed more accurate, it is likely to be pounced upon within even greater zeal by those already obsessed with ARC. As such, I can’t help but hope this is one value that Linden Lab don’t make a song-and-dance about when these changes to the Viewer are formally released for general use.

Mesh Uploader

Another source of irritation for content creators has been the mesh upload floater. At SLCC 2011, Charlar Linden himself admitted the current floater is isn’t overly user-friendly. As such, it is also being overhauled, as can again be seen in the current Mesh Development Viewer.

The current upload floater presents a basic set of modifiers that can be applied to a mesh object prior to uploading in order to optimise it. These tend to encourage a lot of trial and error / guesswork on the part of the creator in order to arrive at a desired result.

The new upload floater offers a greater range of modifiers and the ability to better define the model itself in terms of what it represents (avatar shape, avatar attachment, moving vehicle, etc – see the drop down in the image below), which presumably apply suitable algorithms that help optimise the object and calculate its overall weight.

I understand that several of the changes in the new upload floater are as a result of consultations with / requests from mesh content creators, so hopefully they will go some way to easing the process of importing objects into Second Life.

More to Come

These are by no means the only changes coming to Second Life and the Viewer as a result of the arrival of mesh object support. For one thing, more needs to be done in the area of mesh clothing in order to make it easier to adjust clothing to fit the avatar, rather than the other way around as is currently largely the case. Therefore we can expect to see further changes in relation to this in the future (indeed, those interested in the issue should check Maxwell Graf’s JIRA relating to a parametric deformer).

In the meantime, the above should hopefully give insight into what is waiting just around the corner.