When I was a lad I spent a lot of time on the Second Life Forums, not being productive. Now that I’m older, I spend a lot of time on blogs or other websites, such as dio, not being productive. However it has to be said that there are very productive sections on the Second Life Forums, your mileage will vary on what you consider productive, but the creation forum is a good place to discuss creation issues. There you can discuss your creation issues, ask questions, provide replies and discuss a lot of pros and cons of content creation. There are forums for fashion, Art, Music and Photography, animation, machinima, building and texturing, mesh and LSL Scripting. Therefore pretty much all the bases are covered and yet, there is a glaring missing link.
There are no stickies pointing people to the wonderful world of the Second Life Wiki. The Wiki has some superb resources, that’s where you’ll find the LSL Portal, which has so much information about scripting functionality, this should be being highlighted.
The Wiki will also take you to the excellent Creation Portal, where you’ll find information on all your old creation favourites. In many ways things are arse about face, people go to the main site for information, they go to the forums and ask questions. The only link to the Wiki from the main page appears to be the Second Life Developers section, but really, Linden Lab should be promoting their Wiki all over the forums.
I’ve talked about the good building practices section of the Wiki before, but it’s worth mentioning again because it’s such a good source of information. Within there you’ll find other really handy sections, such as the physics optimisation page regardinging Pathfinding, although the concepts explained there do not only apply to Pathfinding. The examples about using a simple physics shape regarding mesh instead of the complicated physics shape your mesh item may be, are well worth sharing because reducing physics, increases the overall performance for everyone and as that page exemplifies well, you don’t always need your physics shape to be the same shape as your Mesh object.
The Texture Usage page is another very handy section. The page is quite brief but explains that even transparent textures use texture memory, so why not use an 8 x 8 transparent texture? Why not use small textures for small details, people often use whatever texture they buy but on small surfaces it’s perfectly feasible to use smaller textures and not lose anything in terms of how it looks.
The linked Texture Sizes page is a real eye opener when it comes to how much graphics memory textures use. A few examples:
- 1024×1024 = 4 MB 32-bit, 3 MB 24-bit
- 512×512 = 1 MB 32-bit, 768 KB 24-bit
- 64×64 = 16 KB 32-bit, 12 KB 24-bit
- 32×32 = 4 KB 32-bit, 3 KB 24-bit
- 16×16 = 1 KB 32-bit, 768 Bytes 24-bit
- 8×8 = 256 Bytes 32-bit, 192 Bytes 24-bit
As you can, there’s a massive difference with using different texture sizes. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make beautiful creations, we don’t want Second Life to look a game that could be played on the ZX Spectrum, although I still maintain that a Manic Miner, Lords Of Midnight or Sabre Wulf sim would be awesome, but there are times when most of us will use a texture size that we really don’t need to.
I’m not saying The Wiki should replace the forums or anything like that because the forums are a great source of richness. However the Wiki really is under promoted and with such good resources, that’s a great shame. There are resources there that will aid new and old content creatiors, they give good advice on how content creators can help to improve the Second Life experience for their visitors and customers, let’s seem these resources getting the promotion they deserve.