Can I check the file size of an uploaded texture?

[Nutria2016]

Somewhat unrelated, but most of the performance issues could be solved by letting people have the option to only render objects within the single parcel they're in. Just a suggestion for any devs that may be watching this thread.

[Penny Patton]

You know, I went to a Linden office hour today just to push that exact same idea. They told me it was a good idea, that they had it filed away for future use, but that they had no plans for it at this time. So it might happen someday.

Here's the Jira I made requesting this feature in 2014:

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/BUG-5671

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

Somewhat unrelated, but most of the performance issues could be solved by letting people have the option to only render objects within the single parcel they're in. Just a suggestion for any devs that may be watching this thread.

Oh, you can easily lag yourself down with only the content inside a small 512. It's quite common even.

Besides, derendering the surroundings can expose quite a lot of system ground and that is actually one of the big lag factors. Well optimized landscaping items will actually reduce the render load considerably by covering system ground. (Here's a tip btw: if your land happens to be absolutely flat, rez a prim - or find a megaprim, with the right size to voer the whole place. If it's a big parcel with lots of exposed ground, you can gaina significant fps boost that way. It's not that easy with uneven terrain of course. At least not yet - I'm working on a series of low lag mesh landscape parts that might help, not sure when they'll be ready but watch my Garden and Landscaping store )

There's one thing that puzzles me here though. The look you end up with if you derender everything outside your own parcel. Is that really what people want?

If so, there are several ways to achieve the effect you suggest already. You can get yourself a mainland parcel completely surrounded by abandoned land. If you can afford it, you can rent your own homestead sim in the middle of nowhere. One solution I've seen on other grids but not in SL, is a sim split into four with each quarter screened by moutains or hils. You can live in a skybox or on a sky platform out of sight from everybody and everything else of course. 11 stacked full sim sky platforms placed 350 m apart, the lowest 750 m up and maybe with "living areas" placed above separate parcels would give each inhabitant a nice home out of sight of everybody else and a big surround landscape they could control and even use. (Yes, I'm working on that project too, there are still so many things that need to be built in SL!)

[Penny Patton]

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Oh, you can easily lag yourself down with only the content inside a small 512. It's quite common even.

 This is very true. The thing to remember about getting better performance out of SL is that there is no one, single, silver bullet answer to solve the problem. Encouraging optimized content, reducing the amount of content your computer is forced to render at once, and bringing down the memory use and render impact of avatars will all put serious dents in the issue, so every method of improving performance in SL should be encouraged.

11 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Oh, you can easily lag yourself down with only the content inside a small 512. It's quite common even.

Besides, derendering the surroundings can expose quite a lot of system ground and that is actually one of the big lag factors. 

...

There's one thing that puzzles me here though. The look you end up with if you derender everything outside your own parcel. Is that really what people want?

If so, there are several ways to achieve the effect you suggest already. You can get yourself a mainland parcel completely surrounded by abandoned land. If you can afford it, you can rent your own homestead sim in the middle of nowhere. One solution I've seen on other grids but not in SL, is a sim split into four with each quarter screened by moutains or hils. You can live in a skybox or on a sky platform out of sight from everybody and everything else of course. 11 stacked full sim sky platforms placed 350 m apart, the lowest 750 m up and maybe with "living areas" placed above separate parcels would give each inhabitant a nice home out of sight of everybody else and a big surround landscape they could control and even use. (Yes, I'm working on that project too, there are still so many things that need to be built in SL!)

Let me offer my own situation as an example. I have a 4096sq.m. (that's 1/16th of a sim). This costs me far less than a homestead and doesn't impose the homestead 20 avatar limit on me. I have the building know-how and experience to fit more content on this tiny parcel than most people seem to manage with their homesteads, it is the perfect size parcel for me in terms of cost and what I can do with it. 

I knew from the beginning I was going to exclusively work with skyboxes. The sim was mostly empty when  purchased the parcel. I tried to get a parcel surrounded with abandoned land but despite all of the abandoned land out there it is not that easy to get a piece of land like that simply due to how LL handled abandoned land (it goes up for auction, not direct sale, you can file a support ticket to try and get a specific parcel size directly but there is no guarantee).

When I built my skyboxes, I did so at a height where none of my neighbors had skyboxes. I did this to keep my sky clear, and so if any of my builds spilled out onto neighboring parcels, those neighbors would not be affected by it. However, that was years ago, now the sim is full. As a landowner, you have no control whatsoever over who moves in next door, and since it costs money to pick up a new parcel (and you cannot always dump your current parcel in a timely fashion) being constantly on the move as sims fill up is not even remotely feasible.

One of my neighbors, about a year ago, decided to build a giant wall, at the border of our two parcels and right at the edge of my main outdoor skybox. They did not actually build a skybox at that height for themselves. It seems the purpose of the wall was simply to troll me. Maybe they hoped I'd move and they could snatch up my land. Another neighbor of mine would constantly return objects of mine they believed were too close to the parcel boundary. This tool is meant to stop encroachment but here it was used for no other purpose than trolling. They even told me as much, saying they did it because the tools let them and no other reason. I had to rebuild my entire parcel so they could not continue to do this.

I've had other neighbors come and go. I've had neighbors move in, then contact me complaining that my skyboxes were ruining their view of the sky. I've had others move in and filly up my sky. I reduce my draw distance as much as I can but that only goes so far and if I want to do any major building I need to crank up my draw distance, forcing me to download and render literally Gigabytes worth of data I don't want or need.

I have worked on several role-playing sims, from Nexus Prime to Doomed Ship to Minotaur Empire. In each case I had a full sim to work with but I still wanted to make good use of skyboxes to reduce the rendering load on visitors, so everyone can enjoy high framerates. Being able to set aside parcels at the edges of the sim where I could place building interior skyboxes that would never be rendered unless you're in those parcels would have been a godsend.

 Sure, it's not a tool everyone would use, but that's true of every tool and feature in SL. Many people would find the ability to derender neighboring parcels, as well as the ability to have their own parcel contents derendered, invaluable and use it to great effect.

Edited November 18, 2017 by Penny Patton

[ChinRey]

4 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

Sure, it's not a tool everyone would use, but that's true of every tool and feature in SL. Many people would find the ability to derender neighboring parcels, as well as the ability to have their own parcel contents derendered, invaluable and use it to great effect.

Well, since you mention skyboxes, yes I can see how it can be very useful there. If it could be restircted to only work above a certain height, I'd be very happy to have it myself actually. As for the ground, well, most of mainland does really fit @Klytyna's "madland" description. Those parts are very unpleasant places by any standard and if you're stuck in such a dump, you have to make the most of the situation. There may well be cases where derendering everything is less bad than hiding behind ugly privacy screens.

But even so...

Klytyna once mentioned how Linden Lab at one time had recommended people to move to skyboxes to reduce the lag. I don't know if that's a true story (paging her to see if she can confirm) but it wouldn't surprise me at all if it is and if so, it was also an admittance of total defeat. Not only does it mean they did sloppy groundwork (both literally and figuratively), it also means that all the talk of building a vitual world, an online social platform and a shared experience was nothing more than a pipedream. All that would be left, was a cheap but overpriced version of the Sims wrapped up in glossy paper. I would hate it if that's really the case and I do hope and believe that Second Life can have more depth and meaning than that.

But I digress. Sorry. I need a platform or such to take me back to the original sidetrack about lag. I suppose any sky platform will do. Last time I counted I had 14 of them at Conistion, each of them spanning the entire sim. I needed them to be able to put all those prims to good use and even though not all of those platforms are filled up, it does illustrate one of the key problems and reasons for lag in SL: there are just too many prims to the sim!

I know, I know, I know! But I think I can prove it.

Greater Coniston is not only filled up with my own builds, I've also had the privilege to be allowed to resurrect a few forgotten gems by other creators. One of them is high in the air above Buttermere. It's a quarter sim skybox. Inside it is a Dickensian christmas town - an absolutely stunning piece of prims-and-sculpt work by Cuge Lacnala. It was originally built to use the spare prims on a tropical beach themed (of all things) homestead sim.

Think about that for a moment. A homestead with only a quarter of the prim quota of a full sim. No mesh. No playing around with weights to reduce the land impact. No single object bigger than 10 m unless you're lucky enough to find a megaprim that fits. None of the other modern prim saving techniques. And even then, after you've built everything you need on the ground, you still have enough prims to spare to build a whole little town! Any good content creator can do that. A mediocre one can't. Of course, a tropical beach doesn't require too much content to look good but it's still a feat far beyond what most SL builders seem to be able to.

All those wasted polys and vertices (and texture pixels although LL never seemed to have bothered about those) come at a cost. It costs in very Real Life money of course because you need a full sim for something that could easily have done on a homestead. It comes at a huge cost in performance because any client computer, no matter how strong it is, has to spend time shifting through all the rubbish to locate the bits it actually needs to draw the picture on the screen. It also comes at a cost in attitude. Resource management doesn't matter because there seems to be so much of everything. Unfortunately it only seems to.

On a sidenote. I'm still not willing to write off Sansar completely but yes, there is less hope every day and there are still no noticeable indications that it will ever take off. I'm absolutely convinced that one of the reason is that Linden Lab brought that attitude of wastefulness with them over there. I haven't seen many experiences but most of the ones I have seen have seen, have been filled up with content just as poorly optimized as we see in Second Life. I have the impression LL thinks they have this magic bullet called Umbra that will kill all performance problems once and for all. Umbra is actually good, really good, and yet another reason why so many modern computer games can outperform ol' SL. But in the end, every computer program has to obey the laws of the Great God GIGO.

Edited November 19, 2017 by ChinRey
Typos

[Penny Patton]

4 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Well, since you mention skyboxes, yes I can see how it can be very useful there. If it could be restircted to only work above a certain height, I'd be very happy to have it myself actually.

I should note that my idea for the feature would be optional, just like the ability to not rez avatars outside your parcel. Something every individual landowner could decide for themselves. It would also be two checkboxes. One would make it so for anyone within your parcel boarders, objects outside your parcel would not be rezzed.  The other would toggle whether or not objects on your parcel would be rezzed for anyone outside your parcel boundaries. 

 Between those two options landowners would have a lot of control for both privacy and performance. That latter option would also make it easy to use phantom landscapes that extend beyond your parcel border. You'd be able to enjoy the illusion of a larger world outside your land, and your neighbors would never even know of the innocent encroachment.

 There's really no downside here. Everyone wins.

11 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

Not only does it mean they did sloppy groundwork (both literally and figuratively), it also means that all the talk of building a vitual world, an online social platform and a shared experience was nothing more than a pipedream.

The key point here is that not everyone wants the same type of virtual space.

Some wish to be a part of a virtual community, adding their build to an ever expanding, persistent, virtual world full of diverse creativity and vision. That is the idea behind the mainland. A sprawling, persistent, world made up of a patchwork of thousands of creators.

It's not a bad idea, and appeals to many. Just not everyone. It's also held back by the lack of content optimization and lack of good building habits which result in a very laggy and inconsistent experience. Better creation tools which could encourage better optimized content (and discourage unoptimized content) would help this a lot. As would a Linden Lab able and inclined to show examples of good building habits to guide their users. Something the Lab has never done. Their builds instead tend to showcase a lot of what not to do and that is unfortunate for everyone.

Others want more or less the same as above, but wish to be a part of a more unified community theme. They want to build a skyscraper or have an apartment in a sci-fi city, live in a castle overlooking a fantasy world, or in a bunker beneath a radioactive wasteland of post-apoc adventures. The chaotic nature of the regular mainland prohibits these people from having that experience, so they have to find it in private estates, where landlords enforce the theme. Some, such as Caldeon, Insilico and The Wastelands have done very well with this. Their estates are not a part of that "persistent world" LL imagined, and when private estates first started getting popular a lot of oldbies and even Lindens complained about this, as if it were somehow doing SL wrong. People described it as "gated communites". It's not wrong. It's GREAT. Maybe it's not for everyone, but neither is the single, chaotic, mainland vision for SL.

And then there are those who want a more private experience. They want their own tiny little space. A home base where they can relax and bring their friends to hangout. They don't want to deal with neighbors, but they also don't have any desire to spend $300/mo for a sim.  Just a small skybox where they have complete control of their build and their surroundings. I'd go so far as to say this describes the vast majority of potential SL landowners. I say "potential" because this isn't really possible. A mainland skybox is a clumsy alternative and most people aren't willing to pay for that because of the problems that go along with it.* So they simply do not buy land at all. LL has told those potential customers that they don't want their money. LL has cut themselves off from the vast majority of their potential income because I guarantee all those people who want their own tiny $5-$25/mo mini-sim experience represent far more potential revenue than all of the estate owners and landbarons in SL combined. 

 Those in this group who do give in and buy some land are those who live exclusively in skyboxes, or throw up ugly walls around their parcels. They're not doing SL "wrong" either. They just don't want the same experience that the first two groups are looking for. And, unfortunately, forcing those people into the chaotic persistent mainland experience is a recipe for making everyone in both groups unhappy. LL is poisoning the well for all groups by trying to force that one, single vision of what they want SL to be.

34 minutes ago, ChinRey said:

one of the key problems and reasons for lag in SL: there are just too many prims to the sim!

You're not wrong. The problem is that Prim Limits and Land Impact are supposed to help keep render impact reasonable, and it could work if the land impact of content were calculated realistically with regards to the impact it has on rendering. But it's not. For example, textures have no effect on Land Impact whatsoever, despite the fact that the amount of texture memory SL throws at your computer has a HUGE impact on the performance you experience.

Overuse of bloated textures (on both avatars and environments) are the number one performance killer in SL. If you could solve that one problem you would probably see framerates for most users double. It's not the only performance issue that needs to be addressed in SL, not by any stretch, but it is a big one.

Another issue is that the way Land Impact is currently calculated, it discourages people from using LOD levels efficiently. Instead it encourages people to create content that can only bee seen at the highest LOD, and then tell their customers to crank object detail to maximum. This isn't just bad, it is pure insanity. I's LL encouraging people to create badly made content, then those content creators telling everyone else to crank their settings for object detail so the highest LOD models are rendered at all times, killing their framerates. And people do it, because they don't know any better.

 Here is something to keep in mind, though. It's actually not bad at all that we can put more objects in a sim than we should be trying to render at once. People just need to be aware that this is the case and use it more efficiently. If you have a homestead with a full build at ground level, but then another full, sim-wide build 1000m up, and another at 2000m up, the objects in one of those builds have no rendering impact on people wandering the others. Not unless their draw distance is set at over 1000m. In this case your main concerns are scripts and bandwidth. Reduce the amount of texture data being streamed to everyone in the sim and you reduce the bandwidth being used. Reduce the script time being used in the sim and people will experience less script-based lag.

 I wish my full sim version of my fantasy build "Mjolka Kyr" was still around. It was a full sim build. All building interiors were placed in skyboxes. There was a castle, a ruined castle with a dungeon, a graveyard, a mountain area, a forest area, a Skyrim style village, and an ancient Greece style island area, all spread across floating island, all packed together, and yet because of how it was arranged, people experienced fantastic performance. I got multiple IMs from visitors every day telling me about the amazing framerates and fast rez times they experienced. I had numerous people tell me that Mjolka Kyr was the only place in SL where they could turn shadows on. This was when mesh was brand new, too, so most of the build used sculpts and people still experienced high framerates and were able to crank up their graphics settings to enjoy features they couldn't experience anywhere else in SL. I'll attach some screenshots.

*I could write a whole book on those problems, what causes those problems, and potential solutions to those problems, but then this post would be a hundred times longer than it already is.

[Penny Patton]

Most of the doors you see on those buildings, the cave and mine entrances? You could enter those. The doors were teleporters. Click on the door and you'd be teleported into a skybox maybe 1000m up. I spread the skyboxes out so there were never too many in close proximity, this also helped keep framerates up and lag down.

[Klytyna]

8 hours ago, ChinRey said:

Klytyna once mentioned how Linden Lab at one time had recommended people to move to skyboxes to reduce the lag.

Nope, not me... I did mention that there's a commonly held Lastnamer Myth that "Anything over 1000m  up CANNOT cause any lag at all ever", but thats a different issue.

MY real issue is with the excessive use of the "Blunder 3D Auto Cookie-Cutter UV Fail" & "Blunder 3D Auto Spray the Corners with Squid Ink Bake Fail" buttons...

Those horrible "put the whole house on a single 1024 like cookies on a baking sheet, UV maps, that WASTE 40% of the map because it's not assigned to any of the polygons.

Back 10-15 years ago, when I was more active in 3D Modeling /Rendering, I 'invented' the term PPP - Pixels Per Polygon, to describe the problem.

You push that UV Fail button... You get that dreadful all-on-one-image UV, and to get a decent amount of PPP on various details of your mesh, you are FORCED to make a 4096 x 4096 texture map, where 40% of the damn image never gets used, but STILL CONSUMES TEXTURE MEMORY!

Earlier in this thread there's an example of a Cookie-Cutter-UV-Fail 1024 texture, it appears to be for some sort of door...

*I* see 3 materials... plain wood, plain metal, and the ends of the circular doorknob, with keyhole.

The CORRECT way to have uv'd that would have been with 3 512x512 maps that would download and rez faster than the 1024, a plain seamless 512 wood, used on TILED uv mapping for the wooden parts, a plain seamless 512 metal, and a matching 512 'end of the door knob' map, LESS downloading LESS texture memory, LESS texture thrashing, AND for all of the surfaces, HIGHER Pixels Per Polygon, less lag, better quality.

Here's a pro hint for all would be modelers... DO NOT complete the whole model, and the physics hit boxes and THEN think about UV mapping, you correctly UV map each piece as it's made, it's a lot easier, and a lot better. I used to know this guy, an architect, and 3d modeler called Moebius87, founder and owner of "Team Dystopia". He made over 100 3D low-poly scenery sci-fi city blocks, for use in 3d scenes where you need a sizeable cunk of a city in the background, in an app called Lightwave, he never uv'd any of them, that job went to friends and associates who basically had to take Moe's meshes apart, uv map and subdivide into materials zones, and reassemble. Took them a lot longer to fix his meshes than it took him to make them, I know because I did a turn as a Moe-mesh-fixer.

Low res seamless textures, tiled uv's, on optimised meshes, add an entire city without exploding your render memory... Oh for reference, each of those 'city block' squares is about the same size as an SL region, the 4 taller blocks (mine) are about 240x240x1000+ meters, so I won't be importingthese to SL, hehe.

There was another thread, recently where some guy was trying to tile fabric textures on a mesh template item, and was concerned that the 'shadow bake' basically rules out texture tiling.

This is where the Blunder 3D Squid Ink in the Corners button fails, those damn awful over strength AO shadow bakes.

Worst example that springs to mind is a set of 'mesh tunnel sections' for constructing dungeons/castles etc. The creator realises that people may NEED to tile the stone textures on the walls, to get the stone work they use to fit nicely, so... They added extra mesh layers in all the corners where walls, footers, headers and pillars meet, with a Blunder-3D baked AO shadows, applied as ... ALPHA BLEND, which forces up the LI, the Render weight, and the GPU lag, it's a bloody awful way to add hidious unrealistic overdone AO shados.

Real Ambient Occlusion is something that tends to be subtle, only noticable if you really look for it, and limited to a SLIGHT darkening at very close range, a matter of inches not feet. But the stuff being loaded into SL, looks like some maniac has run amok with a large squid, spraying every corner, fold crease and nook they can find.

I'm not a fan of the "I'm a new 3d hobbyist and have no ability to uv map or texture, but Blunder-3D has easy to mis-use auto-fail buttons for me" school of 3D.
 

[ChinRey]

7 hours ago, Klytyna said:

Nope, not me...

Must have been somebody else then.

I'd love to write long and elaborate replies both to Penny's and Klytyna's posts but I do agree with practically everything they say anyway.

Right now I'm rather busy trying to script a set of Filemaker databases to generate lsl scripts. That's more than enough to make anybody's head spin and there really isn't room in my brain for long forum posts at the moment.

I may not sign off from this thread completely but if you're lucky, you won't see another rant from me here.

[Nutria2016]

Let's face it, SL is an ugly, outdated looking virtual world without the Advance Lighting Module enabled and the proper materials. Considering most users have this disabled due to using old computers, creators will use baked textures so their products can look nice for people who have it off. It's true, some people overdo the baked AO, but IMO it looks better than a flat seamless texture with no additional details added.

Seamless textures work great on large buildings, especially if you add another mesh layer on top of the floors/walls with baked AO.

However when it comes to smaller objects such as general decor and furniture, I believe baked is the way to go. Older video games did the same due to limitations.

I'm hoping the Advanced Lighting Module becomes the norm someday soon.

Edited November 20, 2017 by Nutria2016

[ChinRey]

14 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

However when it comes to smaller objects such as general decor and furniture, I believe baked is the way to go. Older video games did the same due to limitations.

No, they didn't. That is, they didn't use baked texture to increase efficiency but because they weren't allowed to use tiled ones.

Seamless tileable textures were patented by Pixar in 1993 and for long it was one of their key technological advantages over their competitors. It took a while for others to find legal ways to use this resource saving concept.

And please, stop that nonsense about "old computers". We can discuss who Second Life is for until the cows come home but when it comes to hardware, it is not about old vs new, it's about regular consumer desktops and laptops vs specialized game and graphics computers.

As for the way baked shadows and such are usually used in SL today, I think Klytyna said it all much better than I can but take a look at these three places:

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Coniston/35/165/1030

and

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Buttermere/67/183/3011

and

http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Verdigris/63/46/71

They are old prim-and-sculpt builds, using and reusing a few low resolution textures, the third one even relies heavily on a texture from the library folder. What makes the difference, is that they were made by true texture artists who knew a thing or two beyond how to click on the bake and UV buttons in Blender. The builder's skills, artistic and technical, is always what makes the big difference, not the tools.

Edited November 20, 2017 by ChinRey

[Klytyna]

16 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

Considering most users have this disabled due to using old computers, creators will use baked textures so their products can look nice for people who have it off

1. In a recent thread about who uses ALM, most ofthe replies said they did use it. 

2. Even without ALM, shadows still work in SL, and many have them enabled, baked shadows especially badly over done shadows that NEVER match the real shadows from the lighting do not "make things look better".

I suspect the SL shadows and lighting NEVER matching up with the baked shadows on badly textured crap-mesh, is a significant part of the popularity of windlights with excessively high ambient settings that wash out all the actual shadows leading clueless buffoons to assume you need ALM to have shadows at all

16 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

Seamless textures work great on large buildings, especially if you add another mesh layer on top of the floors/walls with baked AO.

3. No, Your typical SL Blunder 3D user always overdoes the baked AO, so it looks like some clueless idiot whos registered legally blind, ran amok with a large ripe squid spraying ink into every corner. Looks like crap, universally.

In addition the 'separate alpha blend layers" with massively over done "several feet wide Ambient Occlusion", LAG like a b*tch, there was one mesh maker in SL, made what was briefly, a popular 'mesh store prefab' that used this "Cretin-Mesh" technique, it stopped being popular as the damn building lagged even the best GPU's due to being a badly made P.o.S.

 

 

[IvanBenjammin]

17 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

Let's face it, SL is an ugly, outdated looking virtual world without the Advance Lighting Module enabled and the proper materials. Considering most users have this disabled due to using old computers, creators will use baked textures so their products can look nice for people who have it off. It's true, some people overdo the baked AO, but IMO it looks better than a flat seamless texture with no additional details added.

Seamless textures work great on large buildings, especially if you add another mesh layer on top of the floors/walls with baked AO.

However when it comes to smaller objects such as general decor and furniture, I believe baked is the way to go. Older video games did the same due to limitations.

I'm hoping the Advanced Lighting Module becomes the norm someday soon.

Its not going to become the norm if the majority of creators continue to produce non-ALM content.  

Older video games used to layer up textures inside their materials, as well as vertex color shading - two things we can't do in SL.

[Qie Niangao]

7 hours ago, Klytyna said:

... leading clueless buffoons to assume you need ALM to have shadows at all

I guess count me among those clueless buffoons. How do I get shadows in SL without ALM enabled?

[Nutria2016]

AO baking isn't inherently bad. Also, I do agree baked shadows shouldn't be used. Gloss and AO baking is fine though. Some creators overdo it, and others don't. Shouldn't refuse to do it and shame the people who do just because of a few bad apples.

 

On 11/19/2017 at 7:35 AM, Klytyna said:

The CORRECT way to have uv'd that would have been with 3 512x512 maps that would download and rez faster than the 1024, a plain seamless 512 wood, used on TILED uv mapping for the wooden parts, a plain seamless 512 metal, and a matching 512 'end of the door knob' map, LESS downloading LESS texture memory, LESS texture thrashing, AND for all of the surfaces, HIGHER Pixels Per Polygon, less lag, better quality.

 

I disagree with this very much. Although you do get a higher pixel density, you're also saying goodbye to any basic lighting, shadowing, and additional details such as imperfections (scratches, dirt, worn edges) that make the object look more realistic. Lots of professional developers today bake the standard AO and lighting to add more detail.

Final Fantasy XIV, a currently popular MMORPG which I like to play, does this for example, because even though the game supports advanced lighting and shading by default, all assets look better with some baking involved.

 

 

You'll achieve much more detail by baking. It's pretty much the standard today.

Blender recently got a new shader for PBR textures, and they look fantastic when baked into an object for SL. Baking textures is a great workaround. Plus, it sells.

Creators just need to be more cautious when baking and not overdo it (adjust the lighting and AO values).

Seamless textures have their place in large objects. If you want to achieve great detail with smaller objects such as furniture, bake and edit your textures.

11 hours ago, Klytyna said:

1. In a recent thread about who uses ALM, most ofthe replies said they did use it. 

 How many of the thousands of SL users participated in the thread?

Edited November 21, 2017 by Nutria2016

[ChinRey]

10 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

How many of the thousands of SL users participated in the thread?

Are you suggesting that the forum contributors aren't representative for the SL userbase as a whole???

Next you'll be telling us that the builders giving LL feedback on their projetcs aren't representative either and that's blasphemy!

 

10 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

AO baking isn't inherently bad.

No tools in our builder's toolbox or raw materials on our storage shelves are inherently bad. The difference between a good and a not-so-good content creator is not about how great ideas they have, it's all about how well they understand - intellectually or intuitively - the better way to make the idea come true. We should never rule out any option on general principle, we should always look for the one that is the best for each specific case.

There are some basic rules though and... ummm... sorry Chic but since Klytyna already mentioned it, yes, that example you posted how to make a good UV map for a baked texture is actually an example how not to do it. I wasn't going to mention it so I posted a worse one by an anonymous maker instead but I might as well now that the cat is out of the bag anyway.

[Coby Foden]

11 hours ago, Nutria2016 said:

How many of the thousands of SL users participated in the thread?

Number of participants was naturally small in the thread. But to get a good estimate how many per cent of SL users use ALM a sample 1000 users would be enough.
Maybe Linden Lab would be able to get the data form the viewers what people use?

Anyway, I have started to like clothes without any baked in highlights and shadowing at all. If they have excellent normal map and specular map they look really great and natural with ALM on. If there are baked in highlights and shadowing they should be very subtle, barely noticeable. Again, great looking clothes if the the normal map and specular map are done right.

Unfortunately many designers don't have the knowledge and skills to do normal map and specular map right. I have seen lots of, else nice looking, clothes being ruined by extremely bad specular map and glossiness setting which washes the diffuse map colours making the item look plastic. And to make things worse most of the the clothes are no mod.  Why, oh why?

Linden Lab should make a new feature "Wearable avatar items cannot be made no-mod anymore! All your customers will  be happier now." 
I wonder were this no-mod thing popped into SL? In real life it does not exist.

And to the original OP's question, the answer is:
Texture file size has nothing to do with texture optimizing in SL. The only thing that matters is the pixel size of the texture.

 

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Coby Foden said:

Number of participants was naturally small in the thread. But to get a good estimate how many per cent of SL users use ALM a sample 1000 users would be enough.

A representative sample of 1000 should be enough yes. But really, I don't think we can expect the people who are active enough SL'ers to spend quality time on the forums are representative for the SL population at large.

 

3 hours ago, Coby Foden said:

Unfortunately many designers don't have the knowledge and skills to do normal map and specular map right.

Oh, please don't mention it! It's the same syndrome as those UV and AO maps mentioned earlier in the thread: Disengage brain, push buttons, upload, job done!

It's sheer luck if they even get the swizzle coordinates right.

[Penny Patton]

It bears repeating that the overuse of unoptimized texture work in SL, including the excessive use of baked shadows, are the very reason so many SL users cannot enable ALM. Any decent mid-range computer from 6-7 years ago, can run SL with ALM enabled and enjoy framrates over 30fps, if they're in a sim where texture use has been optimized.

 I'm not going to say that baked shading details are always bad, but when you look at a game like the Final Fantasy MMO in the screenshot above, you can see how efficient the overall texture use is. The whole vehicle appears to use that one texture and there is very little unused space. Also look at how subtle the shading is on the texture compared to the screenshot from the game. The vehicle looks much more detailed than its texture map in the screenshot because of lighting and materials. We can use spec and normal maps in SL to emphasize the light and shadows present in the environment and it looks so much better than going overboard with baked shadows on textures. The game is also going for a cartoonish/hand painted look to its textures, games going for more realism tend to dial back the shading in the actual texture maps and achieve those details through use of materials and in-game lighting.

Klytyna is quite right that on larger structures like buildings, and indeed wherever you can get away with it, you definitely want to use seamless textures you can tile, but here again most SL content creators leap to just throwing more 1024x1024 textures at it, in a misguided attempt to use baked shadows, or to include details that are better left to material maps. All in the name of "making it look good even with ALM disabled" when their target audience would be able to use ALM if not for all of the content made this way.

[ChinRey]

21 hours ago, Penny Patton said:

It bears repeating that the overuse of unoptimized texture work in SL, including the excessive use of baked shadows, are the very reason so many SL users cannot enable ALM. Any decent mid-range computer from 6-7 years ago, can run SL with ALM enabled and enjoy framrates over 30fps, if they're in a sim where texture use has been optimized.

Quick test.

• "decent mid-range computer" from four years ago.
• Latest version of SL Viewer
• Standard mid ghraphics setting plus ALM
• Empty skybox 1000 m up in the air, away from anything else and all textured with the default 32x32 blank texture
• System avatar with system clothing plus flexi hair and sculpt sneakers (ARC about 60,000) - half visible on the screen'
• fps gently fluctuating between c. 45 and c. 50

You can add quite a lot of content to that scene before the fps drops by as much as a thrid of course.

But after I did that quick test, I moved down to the ground. This was Mesh Sandbox 3 on the beta grid and it was completely empty, except for my littlest avatar, the ground and the sky. The fps was 33. Covering the sky with a big white prim increased fps to 35. Covering the ground with a prim and exposing the sky again, brought the fps up to 40.

If we want a low lag environment, we don't want to fill it up with high poly meshes and high resolution textures as most of Second Life is today of course. But we do not want to derender all those things and expose the system ground underneath either, because that to is a lag monster of epic dimensions.

 

Edited November 22, 2017 by ChinRey

[Penny Patton]

4 hours ago, ChinRey said:

But we do not want to derender all those things and expose the system ground underneath either, because that to is a lag monster of epic dimensions.

 

What causes the ground to have such a performance impact? The baked terrain texture? The geometry? Does adjusting the terrain detail slider help at all?

I have not noticed a framerate drop like that from terrain alone, but when I've done ground level builds it has always been in estates, usually single estates with no neighboring sims.

[ChinRey]

57 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

What causes the ground to have such a performance impact? The baked terrain texture? The geometry?

The baked texture may add a bit but the ground mesh of a sim is made from 65,536 vertices and 131,072 triangles. You will hardly ever have all of it on the screen at the same time of course but it's still a lot for a gpu to handle. An uneven terrain tends to be far less laggy than an absolutely flat one and the only explanation I can think of for that is that it reduces the number of visible ground polys.

 

57 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

Does adjusting the terrain detail slider help at all?

Good question. Let me try...

With the same setup as my first test, reducing terrain detail from max to min. increased the fps by aproximately 1. So yes but no.

 

57 minutes ago, Penny Patton said:

I have not noticed a framerate drop like that from terrain alone

It depends on how much load your gpu can handle. A more powerful unit will not only give a better fps overall, it will also handle increased load with a lesser drop. Also the ground mesh is obviously (and thankfully) culled on a vertice/triangle level at a fairly early stage in the rendering process - unlike what seems to happen with all other objects. That means that the total number of polys in the mesh matters less, it's only the ones that are actually rendered that really count.

Speaking of polycounts for the base visuals in Second Life, here's the windlight screen, the mesh the sky and water is painted onto:

That alone is about a thousand triangles.

Edited November 22, 2017 by ChinRey

[IvanBenjammin]

Interesting, and puzzling.  The only land I have is my rented homestead, and I can't mess with the terrain there without destroying my store. I wonder if terrain generated from a heightmap vs. one that's sculpted has any impact? The number of textures being blended?

My guess is that its a performance drain because it has to be dynamic. If anyone with the rights can edit it, and those edits need to be propagated to everyone else, it can't be stored on server in the same way that mesh is. Is it constantly fetching/updating data, and therefore causing a bottleneck?

I'm so over the fact that residents need to reverse-engineer SL to work these things out...