Q: environment shininess, and Q: texture sizes

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

1.

When ramping up the environment shininess instead of the specular, SL seems to mostly reflect a static picture of the skybox, correct? In experimenting I see very little (but not zero!) influence from nearby local lights and no reflection of non-light objects. I also don't see any color influence from the specular map image, though I do see influence from the global specular tint field. Is that all to be expected?

 

2.

Is the minimum optimal texture size 1x1 or is it something larger? Are there overhead costs and such that make, say, a 4x4 actually take up the same or a larger amount of memory than a 16x16 or 32x32? And is there a small size at which SL stops using lossy compression?

[ChinRey]

3 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

In experimenting I see very little (but not zero!) influence from nearby local lights and no reflection of non-light objects.

That is correct.

 

3 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Is the minimum optimal texture size 1x1 or is it something larger?

It depends on which viewer the texture was uploaded with, or more specifically, which JPEG2000 library the viewer uses. The official viewer and Firestorm use Kakadu which has a 4x4 pixel limit to image size. Other viewers use OpenJpeg that has no such limit and allows you to upload 2x2, 1x2 and 1x1 textures too.

 

3 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

Are there overhead costs and such that make, say, a 4x4 actually take up the same or a larger amount of memory than a 16x16 or 32x32?

The exact answer depends on whether we are talking streaming data or VRAM use. At sizes as small as this you can always expect the smaller texture to use marginally less bandwidth. The VRAM use is always four times the number of pixels.

 

3 hours ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

And is there a small size at which SL stops using lossy compression?

Yes. I' can't remember what the limit is but textures with 4096 pixels or less do not use lossy compression.