As you may have heard, Second Life has taken polygon mesh modelling out of beta and spread it far and wide across the main production grid. Huzzah! We at TOC have been waiting for this for what feels like forever. So, I wanted to take a moment and keep you all up to date on what we're up to.

First and foremost, we have imminent mesh releases for not one, but two brand new products. Beta testing is starting on these, and if the debugging gods smile kindly upon us, the first should be released in a couple of weeks.

Second, I have been fielding some questions about updating the existing product line to mesh models. The answer to this is nuanced, so read it twice. For most models, converting to mesh provides no real benefit in aesthetics or functionality. However, I would like to go back and remodel those what I feel would benefit from the capabilities of mesh. Rebuilding these models in mesh is going to take a bit of work and time, and I'm allergic to doing work with no hope of ever being compensated for it. Current thinking is that for models that are simply updated to mesh (i.e. not re-scripted and basically rebuilt from scratch) is to provide them to existing owners on a "Pay what you like" basis, in the hope that this will satisfy both customers' perception of value, and my perception of compensation for effort.

And now the bad news. Sorry to all you older viewer users, but mesh requires a viewer that supports mesh, which at the time of this writing, means either the official Second Life viewer version 3.0 or the Firestorm viewer which has also added mesh support (though not upload) with its latest release. Currently, I'm using Firestorm because I'm stuck in my ways and like the additional features, familiar UI feel and mix of some of the better ideas from Viewer 3.