So I was reading Nalates Urriah’s blog, which I do quite often, when I noticed a post about SL Best Practices. Then I met The Dwarfins and got sidetracked, but now I need to go back to blogging about more than Dwarfins … they’re so cool though and I should be getting a free camp fire today … where was I? Oh yes, Nalates alerting us to best practices.
This is a very good development, Nalates points out that there is a Good Building Practices page, edited by Jeremy Linden and it has some very handy and useful information. The page is aimed at moderate to advanced creators, sorry new builders, although new builders will find useful information in the knowledge base to get them started and may even benefit from reading the resources on this page anyway.
The page has links to articles on good building practices for Mesh, Sculpts, Textures, Scripts, Physics Optimisation and such like and is quite frankly the sort of page that should be around on the Wiki. I’m very enthused to see it being developed.
The thing is, people come to Second Life, get started and then either get a bit stuck or start getting carried away with things and build epic creations that aren’t efficient. This is part and parcel of the package of a user developed world and I wouldn’t want it any other way, but what I have long felt was lacking, was a page of tips on efficient building, now we’re seeing one come together. People are of course free to ignore these tips, some may even disagree with them, but it’s good to have a reference point.
A lot of the page does cover Mesh and Pathfinding, which are the new shiny toys, but don’t let that put you off looking at it, the page is a work in progress and you may even find you have some contributions on building efficiently that could be linked there.