To some Penny Patton is like a broken record, calling for people to change their camera angles, change the way they use textures, change scale, change their perceptions. However Penny’s content creation tips for Second Life should be heeded, even if you don’t agree with all of them. Penny’s site has a lot of good information but the post I’m going to highlight today is : Building A Better Second Life.
Most of the tips Penny advises content creators to follow actually work to improve Second Life performance, for example:
Textures eat up bandwidth to download, processing power for the sim to retrieve them from the asset server and deliver them to your viewer, and then your videocard needs to store them in memory and render them. Too many large textures are one of the biggest reasons SL gets such poor framerates and why everything takes so long to rez.
This is undeniably true. Larger than needed textures hit performance, using too many textures will also hit performance too.
Penny doesn’t just provide tips and sit back and hope people notice, she allows people to call her bluff because examples of Penny’s work exist within Second Life and there are no two ways about this, performance is generally extremely good where Penny builds. Textures load fast, you can move around, you’re not sat there waiting for grey buildings to rez.
Penny gives plenty of examples of where people may make inefficient content within a Second Life, and other virtual world, context :
From another store I purchased a simple, one room house. Not counting the two windows and the single door, the house uses eighteen 1024×1024 textures. Realistically, this house could have been textured with no more than three 512×512 textures and looked more or less identical.
Now if you want to know why that’s not optimal design, you don’t just need to listen to Penny, you can check out the good building practices on the Second Life wiki, especially the part about texture usage and the linked page of texture sizes which lists how much memory textures can take up, here are a few examples for 32-bit textures:
- 1024 x 1024 – 4MB
- 512 x 512 – 1MB
- 256 x 256 – 192KB
- 128 x 128 – 64KB
As you can hopefully see, larger textures take up more memory and a lot of them are quickly going to start to tax an average graphics card.
Penny points out how textures can impact performance with another example, this time from changing the textures on her build herself, the results are quite staggering:
I have used a variety of tricks to remove over sixty 1024×1024’s worth of textures and saw my framerates jump from single digits to over 30fps in the worst areas. With shadows on. I’m seeing around 50-60fps in the best areas of the island, up from about 20 before I went gung-ho on texture use.
Now of course there is a balance here, smaller textures mean less detail. There’s also the issue of texture reuse being important. If you have a 1024 x 1024 texture that you use repeatedly, it may be better to stick with that size if you absolutely can’t get away with a smaller size because repeated use of the same sized texture can also provide a performance boost, as the Second Life wiki explains:
If you have one texture repeated many times around your parcel/region, it costs more resources to have that one texture broken down into various sizes for different sized surfaces. In this case it is better to just have one size of the texture throughout your land.
However the Second Life wiki does also caution against using 1024 x 1024 textures:
You should rarely ever use 1024 x 1024 sized textures. Try to avoid using this size as much as possible.
The reason for that has already been explained by Penny, larger textures use more memory.
Textures of course aren’t the only component that causes latency in Second Life, but they are a big one. Careful usage of scripts can also help with performance. Scripts compiled in Mono have a nifty feature called bytecode sharing, the advantage of that is explained by the Second Life Wiki:
Mono can do bytecode sharing. Thus multiple copies of scripts with the same asset id will only take up as much room as one instance. Imagine some script that you use a dozen times on your land. If each of the objects containing the script is separately compiled from text source, you will use up a dozen times the script’s size of memory. But if instead you simply drag a copy of the single, already compiled script into each of the dozen objects, then no matter how many copies exist they only take up the size of one script (plus data) in memory.
The really important point to note there is that the scripts must be the same asset ID, so compile once and then copy that compiled script into your other objects if you want to take advantage of this, don’t copy and paste the code into a new script.
However back to Penny, she doesn’t just talk the talk, she actually walks the walk. If you’re brave and can turn a blind eye to adult themes, you can see some of Penny’s work in the Skara Brae sim in Second Life:
SLURL To Skara Brae : http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Skara%20Brae/237/239/1341
There you should find options to teleport to a few destinations. Unfortunately this is an adult sim …. no really, I’m warning you, this is adult oriented in a way that some may not like. However if you go during a quiet period you should be fine, there are some really nice examples of efficient builds here and I’ve included some shots of the sim in the images for this post. However it is an adult rated sim advertising adult rated themes.
Between them, Penny and Linden Lab can point people in the right direction, although some people will have their own efficiency methods and some of those may well be different to LL’s or Penny’s. Optimising content for a shared creative space such as Second Life is something that should be encouraged more, Penny does a good job and Linden Lab have some good information but I do wish Linden Lab would shout about it more often, the resources are there but it would be useful if they were highlighted more often.
Penny’s articles are an eye-opener. The antediluvian default camera settings in SL lead to huge, unrealistic builds. Stairsteps 50-60cm high? WTF? As for her anti-lag advice, it works. And maybe the amateurs who pose as professionals in SL should finally listen to a real professional like Penny. But I forgot a very influential crowd… The fashionistas with their stupid insistence that everything be 1024×1024 because quality. Sod them, I say.
That’s a really big problem, some people are afraid that lower textures mean poor quality but done with care it doesn’t mean that and really, for everyone’s experience lower texture sizes should be positively encouraged,
I couldn’t agree more.
I’ve been using primscale since day one and it has made 1920s Berlin a much better sim.
I still have to do a lot of improving on the textures though, I just love the big textures too much.
Also don’t forget that alpha textures are more demanding than regular ones.
I’m cutting down on those now.
4mb for a 1024×1024 alpha texture or non alpha? Also, since you’r;e mentioning texture size, often times (in my case), a 1024×256 or 1024×128 texture looks better than a 1024×1024 texture.
4MB is an alpha texture, a 24 bit 1024 x 1024 comes in at 3MB.
1024 x 256 or 128 are smaller and of course all textures don’t need to be square, which is where sizes like 1024 x 256 come into play.
Alpha textures are a surprise, so are transparent ones, even the LL library texture uses more memory than people realise.
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