{"id":3734,"date":"2014-03-03T20:26:07","date_gmt":"2014-03-03T20:26:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3734"},"modified":"2014-03-03T20:26:07","modified_gmt":"2014-03-03T20:26:07","slug":"second-life-content-creators-should-pay-attention-to-penny-patton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sl.governormarley.com\/?p=3734","title":{"rendered":"Second Life Content Creators Should Pay Attention To Penny Patton"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Skara<\/a><\/p>\n

To some Penny Patton<\/a> 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 : <\/span>Building A Better Second Life<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Skara<\/a><\/p>\n

Most of the tips Penny advises content creators to follow actually work to improve Second Life performance, for example:<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is undeniably true. Larger than needed textures hit performance, using too many textures will also hit performance too.<\/p>\n

\"Skara<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"Skara<\/a><\/p>\n

Penny gives plenty of examples of where people may make inefficient content within a Second Life, and other virtual world, context :<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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<\/a> on the Second Life wiki, especially the part about texture usage<\/a>\u00a0and the linked page of texture sizes<\/a> which lists how much memory textures can take up, here are a few examples for 32-bit textures:<\/p>\n