Hidden away on the Second Life Wiki are two very useful pages regarding optimisation, well they can be seen in that light anyway. One is regarding texture sizes and how much memory they consume. This is a useful guide but far from being the be all and end all, basically using 1024 x 1024 textures everywhere is silly, fortunately people generally use 512 x 512 but from the linked page we can see that a lot of them will eat resources too, which brings us to thinking about which textures we use and when we use them, do we really need 512 x 512? Well generally, it’s a yes but there are many times when 256 x 256 or even 128 x 128 would be fine.
The other page deals with pyhsics optimisation, this is a really handy page because it talks of using simple physics shapes to reduce load. The trick really is whether you can get away with only using a cube as your physics shape, say for example you build a nice fence with gaps all over the place and maybe it’s a bit weathered, could you just use a cube as the pyhsics shape? If you can, then the physics optimisation page is for you, if you can’t, then why can’t you?
I’ve said before that Linden Lab should be leading some sort of go green initiative to try and encourage people to build more efficiently, these pages are steps in the right direction, I swear I found a page the other day that mentioned both of these issues, anyway, we should be looking to build with other users in mind, which means using smaller textures where possible, reusing textures and examining our physics shapes.
I’ve spent a lot of time on the beta grid this week playing with Mesh, comparing physics scores and thinking long and hard about what I’m doing …. and then realising I’m getting nowhere! However I did notice that if I don’t select highest lod for all of my Mesh upload options, the land impact score an come down, here’s an example:
The above are three uploads of the same build but I selected different levels of details for each upload, the bottom one is the lowest but I found that lost shape too quickly, generally having high and medium set to the ame Lod as high works for me when it comes to buildings, they stay in view just fine.