Yesterday Linden Lab announced that the materials project viewer is now available. This is something that will add some oomph to textures in Second Life and has the added advantage of meaning that people can do things with textures that they may otherwise be tempted to do with Mesh.
Now this is the sort of thing that you need to see for yourself to understand why it adds oomph. There’s a healthy discussion over at SLUniverse where a post from Imnotgoing Sideways gives an idea of what can be achieved with this viewer. Another post from Laverne Unit has a YouTube video comparing two chairs, one with the new materials system applied and the other without, you may need to watch the video at a higher resolution to see the benefits of the new system, but they are there in that video.
There’s also a post from Seven Paragorn demonstrating toadstools, with and without materials applied. In another post Orc posts an animated gif of a Damien Fate dress which exemplifies the system in action too.
The project viewer is available for download and you can get it from here. There are also release notes, which you can read here. The release notes are well worth reading because this is a project viewer, it has bugs, it’s an alpha release and you should most definitely not play around with anything you value whilst playing about with materials. I recommend you only play around with new items you don’t mind losing. The release notes also point you to the material data page, which is also important to understand.
I will emphasise again, do not try this with anything you value, indeed after reading Qie Niangao’s post about the possibility of increasing Land Impact costs, it’s probably best to play with this in a sandbox. Indeed Qie’s post raises a very interesting issue.
Qie posted Jira Matbug-13 which reports an issue whereby switching to Alpha masking raised land impact from 1 to 43. Two things to note here, one is that the Jira is viewable, hurrah, the second thing to note is the reply from Brooke:
“Falcon, can you please take a look at this and determine if this is expected behavior due to the use of new accounting when Materials are applied? (We will also document that on our wiki.)”
Textures have never, as far as I’m aware, had a land impact cost before. People in the past have argued that they should have a cost and it’s hard to argue with the concept of textures having a land impact cost because the larger a texture, the more video memory it uses, which impacts upon the end user experience, on top of that, the number of different textures used is also an important consideration. Now introducing land impact costs for old textures would cause mayhem, the same as when Mesh was introduced and we had a new accounting system, Sculpts and legacy prims got a pass because they are already in existence.
However it would appear material textures may be part of a new accounting system, if done sensibly it will have merits, however a leap from a land impact score of 1 to 43 seems excessive!
If you do get time and know what you’re doing, this is something worth looking at. Do bear in mind that you need to have the right sort of graphics card to take advantage of the new system, this could lead to trouble ahead, although if merchants make their items with care and attention, it should just mean that people with older hardware just miss out on the full awesome experience, we already have that situation now with advanced graphics features anyway.
MATBUG JIRAS, as with CHUI, are publicly-viewable, as LL are agains seeking constructive feedback on materials as they were with CHUI.
Maestro has responded to Qie’s JIRA stating the LI issues is expected behaviour, and is based on the physics cost of an item. However, it’s interesting to note that a sphere as used in Qie’s MATBUG example actually has a physics cost of 43.5 regardless of the Alpha Mode setting – yet setting the Mode to Alpha Blending (equivalent of what we have in non-materials viewers) leaves the LI at 1.
Alpha Blending also has a higher display cost than Alpha Masking (984 as against 534, server and download costs constant for both), so the 43 LI in the case of the latter can’t simply be down to some archane calcuation based on the physics and display costs…
More concise explanation from the Lab on LI and LI calcs would appear to be required.
I think it’s long overdue that there’s a big discussion on LI, textures can cause chaos for the shared experience, especially when large textures are being used when small ones would suffice but there’s more to it than that, sometimes larger is better in terms of efficiency.
The introduction of materials is the ideal time to talk efficiency in texture usage.