LOD & LOD Factors - Stop listening to out dated advice

[Beq Janus]

One of the best ways to tell if content has not been optimised for Second Life is when the creator puts a notecard in the product telling you to ramp up the debug settings.

It was common practice, when Sculpties were dominant, to increase the "Object details" setting in prefs or even go directly to the debug setting RenderVolumeLODFactor. This was because, for the most part, the creator had little or no control over the lower LODs (not without sacrificing vertices in the High LOD at least) and it was horrible to walk along the streets and watch the building collapse into heaps of triangles. With mesh, this changed. One of the biggest advantages of Mesh over its sculptie cousin was that the creator has full control over the LOD models. Good content creators focus on providing an object that looks nice to the majority of users, over the expected normal set of viewing conditions. Yet still, we see a lot of cases where (often beautiful looking) content is tossed into SL without a second thought for the LOD behaviour and rather than fixing the content the creator tells the user that they should change their settings "to view it properly". This is simply bad advice, and in following it you are making your machine work harder than it needs to simply to compensate for one creator's inappropriate design.

Because of changes in the forthcoming release of Firestorm that intend to discourage this behaviour I wrote a blog post that I hope manages to explain things in an accessible, non-techie way.

For LOD's sake, Stop! - Why bad advice may be slowing you down.

I hope it helps to explain the terminology and persuade people that the time to get more selective about your purchases is now. There are new features on the way in 2018 (such as animesh) that will enhance our Second Life experience but these will expect our computers to do more work and any effort our hardware wastes on poorly optimised creations will be effort it cannot use on other things. 

Beq

Edited January 21, 2018 by Beq Janus

[iamyourneighbour]

"B-but I want them to see my 12000 vertices mesh from two sims away !"

- Every new mesher who doesn't care about optimization

[OptimoMaximo]

8 hours ago, iamyourneighbour said:

Every new mesher who doesn't care about optimization

Forgive me, i would remove "new" from your statement

[OptimoMaximo]

Then there is the variation where the designer makes an optimized mesh and the customer comes saying "but it's badly made, it NEEDS to be seen 2 sims away because the others do even if i actually own only one sim and it's a useless feature to me. If you don't, Others = high quality, you = beginner"

Edited January 22, 2018 by OptimoMaximo