Wagner James Au / New World Notes

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Second Life Co-Founder Cory Ondrejka: Adding Mesh to SL Without In-World Editing Tools Was a Mistake

Fortnite creative Second Life AM Radio chairs

Update, February 4:  In follow-up message, Cory told me: "I didn’t say meshes were a mistake — I said the lack of in-world editing and behavior tools [of and for mesh] is the mistake". With apologies, I've corrected the title to better clarify this.

Last week's post on how bringing offline mesh to Second Life was a mistake inspired this comment from Cory Ondrejka, a Second Life co-founder and first CTO for the company:

"Yup. Even among founders this wasn’t always clearly understood. Universal tools, available within the experience, differentiated SL from most everything before or since. Including later stage SL, Sansar, etc. Construction tools are insufficient, by the way, you need interaction and behavior, too."

Cory, by the way, was the one who gave an early demo of Second Life when it was still prim-based to Epic Games and well you know the rest of the story from Fortnite. Jeff "AM Radio" Berg, an undisputed master of prim-based creation, also expanded on his thoughts there from the original post, and dismissed current in-world mesh tools as an equivalent alternative:

Fortnite creative Second Life AM Radio train

"I know about the in world meshing. The complex nurbs-based modeling with considered texture optimization and baked effects will always be a step ahead. Minecraft proved high fidelity is commodified in a world that doesn’t need to push past 4K and the kids don’t care if their AAA game is from 2017 as long as the gameplay still rocks. Prims were somewhere between Minecraft and AAA. It worked, and then it didn’t. Am I saying it’s not worthwhile to create and be an artist, of course not, as per usual being an artist is not a lucrative lifestyle without a champion of the likes of Bettina Tizzy et al.

"There’s more to being an artist than the media you’re using. As I said in the Polygon article, ‘Avoid showcasing a particular technological capability,’ Berg says, ‘but instead, build experiences that remind us how human we are and have always been.’”

As for the images in this post, while they look AM Radio's Second Life creations, they were actually recreated in Fortnite by his son — using Fortnite's universal building tools, available within the Fortnite experience.

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12 responses to “Second Life Co-Founder Cory Ondrejka: Adding Mesh to SL Without In-World Editing Tools Was a Mistake”

  1. maxwell graf Avatar
    maxwell graf

    We should preface this by saying that mesh was an attempt to fix the even more significant mistake that was SCULPTED PRIMS, which should never have been introduced as a quasi-mesh alternative.
    Sculpted prims killed prim builds.
    Then mesh killed sculpted prims.
    Then mesh destroyed performance and your available resources (that mesh tree with 100 polys is 90 prims worth of land impact, but those nano earrings with 200K polygons? Wear em if you got em!)
    It is a mistake on top of a mistake. Sortof how mesh clothing that fits was handled.

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  2. maxwell graf Avatar
    maxwell graf

    Really, when you consider how many times problems were responded to with the grace and dexterity of a monkey f**king a football over the years, especially in contrast to just about any other form of virtual or online entertainment during the same period, it is really quite amazing that SL not only survived but thrived at certain points. One might even consider that the community pushed through despite how it has been handled and is the real key to its’ success.

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  3. Alex Avatar
    Alex

    Don’t sugar coat it. Tell us how you really feel. lol

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  4. maxwell graf Avatar
    maxwell graf

    Alex: I love it enough that I still have my full region since 2008, how bout you? Are my points not valid? Granted, I’m bitter and jaded after all these years but I’m still there because there is nothing that does what it does and no other community that would still be fighting for it in spite of how hard it has been over the years. I cheer them just as loudly when they do things right, or even when they do the wrong things for the right reasons, like Sansar.

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  5. Adeon Writer Avatar
    Adeon Writer

    I would like to see some nice regions and avatars made with no mesh.
    Because all of the ones I see look absolutely awful.

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  6. Adeon Writer Avatar
    Adeon Writer

    Wait! No! Redo. This is my actual response: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhckuhUxcgA

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  7. Diploma IT Avatar
    Diploma IT

    If it wasn’t for mesh second life would have failed like sanar did, since the day of the first sim in around 2002-2003, if you didn’t improve it, it would just fail like any game the doesn’t update, like Microsoft in a tin shed to what it is today e.g, like linden labs, grew through the years till now, more improvements could of happening sooner, like going to the cloud, think the CEO should pull his head out of his – – -,not listen to people like Cory.

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  8. Dargo Avatar
    Dargo

    What we need is an in-world mesh editor period

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  9. Iggy 1.0 Avatar
    Iggy 1.0

    I recall when Mesh arrived. Most of us in the .edu sector had already left, but I thought “there goes another magical SL experience”: team-builds in-world. I think two students I knew could make things in Blender, and even then, it would be made outside SL and imported.
    The magic of SL was always when folks interacted, in there. I didn’t mind how much more realistic mesh avatars looked or how clunky the physics-engine proved; we were not building avatars or scripting HUDs, but we were making the spaces where avatars interact.
    I’m not a coder, so I imagine in-world building tools for mesh would be laggy and complex, but then building itself was complex already, the permissions system a mess, and the UI for SL clunky in the extreme. Had in-world mesh tools existed, some of us in education would have soldiered on and given away CC content to colleagues, as a brave handful still do in OpenSim.
    Sure, we could keep using prims, but after a while, our builds would resemble the black-and-white people in Snowcrash’s color Metaverse. We dismantled our project, a virtual House of Usher peopled with actors, one of whom went on to win SF’s Nebula Award. I also took down the version in OpenSim, after the host we had closed shop.
    A former Linden told me “hey, buy some cool stuff from Turbosquid and import it to jazz up your build.”
    Sounded good until I priced it. Four items would blow the entire budget. We had already lost two hosts because of hte .edu discount coming to an end.
    Game over.

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  10. DoomRater Avatar
    DoomRater

    An editor does two important things: it keeps immersion in the Second Life world, and it informs the user that this content is flexible and powerful. Now, there are people who build in mesh in Blender and those who buy it. And all of my attempts to play up Blender, while slow, take me out of the SL environment. Why is it I can accomplish, with mods, everything that I want to do in Minecraft, from within Minecraft? Including customizing my character outfits. There’s at least two mods for that. Yes I’m stuck with a two year old version of Minecraft to run them, but who cares when I can look exactly how I want?

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  11. Valentina Kendal Avatar
    Valentina Kendal

    I can’t edit my mesh house. I love it, it’s gorgeous, but I can’t mess with it the way I used to mess with my older prim and sculpted prim houses. As I said last time, 99% of us are just pretty consumers now. The current users in SL are pretty happy with that, and it’s probably true that something imperfect that that kept SL going is better than stasis that let it die. But gather round kids, and we will tell you a tale of the days of yore…

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  12. PIXELS Avatar
    PIXELS

    Apparently Cory has been out of SL for so long he doesn’t know about the inworld prims to mesh conversion tools. You build with the viewer prim tool set. Drop a script in the object – single prim or linked – press a button on the mesh generator, you get a web link to a page with a dae download file, import the downloaded dae into SL and voila! Mesh object. You can texture up to 8 faces on your original prim object and the generated & imported mesh will retain all the texture parameters/values so you just have to lay the textures onto their respective faces. While I use Blender for creating more organic stuff, I fall back on the Mesh Gen for simple builds that primarily use cubes though all prim shapes work with the exception of some cut prim limitations.

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