I’ve mentioned the Good Building Practices section of the official Second Life Wiki before, I’ve also mentioned the extremely useful Texture Usage page in that section. The good building practices is an under promoted resource in my opinion, Linden Lab haven’t forgotten about it, I see that they have added a case study on how June Dion used normal and specular maps to add details to a Katana imported from Lightwave. However that’s not what I’m going to talk about today!

The Texture Usage page describes a situation many of us will recognise:

“We have all been there, teleporting to a new location, everything grey, the need to stand there for 10 minutes waiting for everything to load. Even then many textures still remain blurry. Some people give up and teleport away, some people leave to make coffee. Land owners can lose traffic over it. Store owners can lose customers over it. So optimizing your textures to ensure that they load quickly, without losing any of the visual impact, is important.”

The tip is to use as small a texture size as is reasonable, with advice to try and avoid using 1024 x 1024 textures if possible. Now some people will argue this point, because good usage of 1024 x 1024 textures can actually make an item efficient in terms of performance, however as a general rule, you should not use a 1024 x 1024 texture when a 256 x 256 will suffice, but it’s not a simple numbers game because the number of textures you use is also a factor.

I’ll do a small example, I created a prim and used a single 512 x 512 texture on it:

Now I’m going to click the more info link because that’s where I can find out some extra inforamtion about the display costs of my item:

Now this has a display cost of 404, but what happens if instead of using a single texture, I use three different textures on my prim? Well in this case I’ll use two 512 x 512 textures and one 64 x 64 texture.

Continue reading “The Partially Hidden Cost Of Display Costs”