I’ve mentioned before that I’m a fan of Linden Lab’s wiki page of Good Building Practices. However now I think it’s time to turn this up a notch with Linden Lab actively promoting said resource and part of the reason for this is my own stumblings with Mesh. The thing is, these tips are good for all of our Second Life experiences.
The thing with Mesh is that you can reduce the number of faces on a cube and still display all you need to, you can also reduce the number of textures that need to be loaded, which in turn reduces the amount of work our video cards need to do, which improves the Second Life experience as a whole.
The other thing with Mesh is encouraging people to build more efficiently full stop. User generated content is an important factor in Second Life, it’s what makes the world vibrant but it also has the potential to cause problems, often unintentionally because people don’t have the resources available to encourage them to build more efficiently. This leads to people feeling that all Mesh is bad for Second Life, it’s not, but the lack of promotion of available material can leave people with a bad impression.
There are good and bad practices with Mesh, high poly models are not ideal for Second Life, they may look beautiful in a static environment but in the more dynamic environment of Second Life they can be problematic to say the least.
Land Impact/Prim cost is a factor people look for when considering purchasing a building, but there are other costs that aren’t talked about. Display costs and physics costs being two important areas of consideration, but they are hardly ever mentioned.
One way of reducing physics costs is to set parts of a building to physics shape none, this removes those parts from the calculations. This is a consideration that’s easier to carry out when you’re building for yourself really. For example I may decide that my roof doesn’t need to have physics costs, because hey, it’s my roof and I know it’s phantom. I am not intending to use that space so I don’t really care that I won’t be able to sit on my roof, but a consumer may want a roof that can be sat upon.
Now by removing parts of my build from the physics calculation, I can reduce the prim count/land impact score, but the point I’m trying to make is that the land impact/prim count score does not tell the whole story of how the item will impact upon performance, it tells part of the story, but far from all of it.
The Wiki does have a Physics Optimization page, and there you will see some good examples of why you don’t always need a complicated physics shape, using simple shapes as your root prim and setting the rest of your object to physics shape none can achieve everything you need to achieve in the right circumstances.
Then we come to textures, which I’ve discussed before. There’s a good page on Texture Usage, which explains why bigger textures take up more resources and why you’ll often find a smaller texture can achieve the results you want.
It’s not Linden Lab’s job to teach people how to build, however it is in their interest to encourage efficient building and arm consumers with information that will help them make purchases with efficiency in mind. The Good Building Practices page should be stickied in the content creation forums. Merchants should be encouraged to display the physics and display costs of their builds and Linden Lab should blog about the advantages of following efficient building practices, to try and nip bad practices in the bud.
Ultimately we all want a smoother running Second Life, there are things we can do to help ourselves and there are things Linden Lab can do to encourage people to be efficient.
when are you going to help ME learn huh?
I’ll teach you some mesh when you download Blender :p
Well… the building practices page is open for SL residents to edit and add to. So, the community can pitch in and help, as many have.
There are already a number of people making tutorials and helping new builders and creative types.
Unfortunately most of this information goes unnoticed by the majority of SL users. It is so bad I created a Word document with standard answers for use in the Answers section of the SL Forum. Most of the people that type in a question don’t even bother to look at the answers that come up as suggestions. They wait hours or days for someone to answer their question… if it is me I am pasting in an answer I’ve pasted in in dozens of times. I’ve checked to see if my, or a similar, answer comes up for their question, it does. But, for whatever reason, they didn’t bother to look at it.
There does not seem to be much the Lab, or anyone, can do to fight ignorance and the lack of will to find an answer.
That said, I would not ask the Lab to spend much time working to educate builders and creative types. The forum and wiki are just not productive enough for the effort put in.
Also, the basic idea that a problem is to be solved by someone else seems to be part of growing entitlement mentality. I don’t see where it is making the world a better place. If one wants a problem solved, they need to take steps to solve it. As Darien Caldwell did with the JIRA.
I agree and disagree, you can certainly end up in the situation whereby you can bring a horse to water, but can’t make it drink, but I think some stickies in the building, mesh and scripting forums pointing people to the wiki would be helpful.
Then there’s also a case for posting when new tools are available, the server team do a good job of keeping people updated on new releases. I noticed that you yourself highlighted some new scripting functions on your blog but there has been nothing from LL on their blog and only the server guys have mentioned it in the forum. Innula Zenovka posted the information to the scripting forum.
The thing is that encouraging people to build more efficiently helps everyone. Obviously one of the risks in a user created world is that people may build inefficient content, but trying to encourage people to grasp some of these concepts, and texture usage is a big one, does have potential.
However I agree that LL have better things to spend their time on, which is why I’d rather see gentle encouragement rather than overly active involvement.