Another interesting coment came up from Inara Pey’s blog post (see previous post for link as I don’t want to spam pingbacks). Adomaw Lupindo raises a really interesting point about tier and scale:

Do you think that LL’s Mesh discounting was an indirect way to offer tier reductions without changing their product pricing scheme by passing on the work to the content creators? I’ve asked the opinion of an estate manager and what that might mean and it was pointed out that even though people could in theory cut their prim needs by a max of half—it doesn’t give them more or the same amount of landmass to play with that on.

Linden Lab have, over the last year or so given us opportunity to reduce our land impact (prim count in old money) numbers. We can now create 64 x 64 metre prims natively in the client, whereas the old maximum was 10 x 10, unless you were using workarounds, such as megaprims, which as far as I’m aware were never officially supported. We can use tricks and techniques using the convex hull shape to reduce the land impact score and we can buy or upload Mesh. This means that your 117 land impact allowance on a 512m parcel goes a lot further, so can everyone tier down? I mean tier is the bugbear (and is too damn high). The answer of course, is no, not everyone, not even the majority I’d guess and that’s an issue of scale.

Penny Patton has been banging on about the issue of scale since The Pope was an altar boy. In many ways the changes to enable us to need fewer prims is arse about face, Second Life started from a different starting gate and we are where we are.

However Penny raises many interesting points in her blog post, a matter of scale, which is from 2011:

SL content creators can craft a richer, larger and more detailed world in Second Life, simply by building smaller — but Linden Lab has to help them by encouraging most avatars to shrink down to a much more realistic size.

Penny’s post is aimed at being informative, rather than critical of the sizes of builds and avatars and should be read with that in mind, it really should be read. Penny’s post isn’t pie in the sky, although for it to work for Second Life would require a hell of a lot of collabartion. Penny points out that 1920’s Berlin and The Doomed Ship have built with scale in mind.

Those Ad widgets need fixing, the large version isn’t rendering images for me. Anyway, I’m not sure if scaling down saves Frau Yardley any money in tier, but it does give Frau Yardley more options. Jo may have needed more sims for her project if she built to a larger scale, for example.

The thing is, tier is such an oppressive barrier to creativity in Second Life, that something needs to be done, the problem is identifying exactly what. However scaling down can help some, it most certainly won’t help all but I do feel it’s interesting food for thought.

Tweet