2K textures upload pricing poll

[Imaze Rhiano]

I2K textures are coming - but how much uploading those textures should cost? Give ur vote with reaction

• 🏆[THANKS] They should cost same amount as normal textures (10L for basics)

• 😁[HAHA] Between 11-40L

• 😕[CONFUSED] Between 41-100L

• 😢[SAD] More than 100L How much?

Edited April 7 by Imaze Rhiano
added tags

[Wulfie Reanimator]

I want free internet points too!

[VeeTach Littlething]

Will 2K textures be made for terrain?  I'm looking forward to using those.  Should make sims look gorgeous!

[Flea Yatsenko]

Is there any ETA? It's going to be so much easier and quicker to use a texture atlas on a 2k than 4 separate 1k textures.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

On 4/7/2024 at 10:00 AM, Imaze Rhiano said:

2K textures are coming - but how much uploading those textures should cost?

L$ 10,000

That's L$ 40 because they are 4 times the area, and 4 times the VRAM usage, and L$ 9960 for the stupidity factor, and the gratuitous waste, caused by idiots using island UV mapping to make what they call "texture atlases" but which are NOT that at all, and which almost invariable waste a significant percentage of the texture on the "dead space" between the UV islands, which means 4 times the wasted texture space and 4 times the wasted VRAM.

 

This plan is a clear case of "drive out of SL anyone who doesn't have a $US 3000  5095 RTX XL Pro 'Entry Level' GPU card".

 

[Extrude Ragu]

The plan as I understand it is to make better use of the discard levels feature of Second Life textures. IE, only people with suitable hardware and cammed to a suitable distance would ever download the full 2K texture.

I'd also heard they were considering letting the user cap the maximum downloaded resolution in a new setting.

I think that pricing an item based on how 'laggy' it is is a fools game, as all it means is that the mainstream creators, the ones you really want to optimize their content because it's everywhere, are the only ones that can afford to lag the game and becomes something of a status symbol that unfairly disadvantages new creators, creating even more elitism.

With all that in mind, I think 40L$ makes sense, the texture uses approx 4x as much storage having 4x as many pixels as a 1k texture.

 

BTW, I'm not saying that we should do nothing to reduce lag in Second Life, what I am saying is trying to achieve that with price incentives just ain't gonna work.

[Flea Yatsenko]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texture_atlas

[Ayame Musashi]

On 4/13/2024 at 9:50 AM, Zalificent Corvinus said:

L$ 10,000

That's L$ 40 because they are 4 times the area, and 4 times the VRAM usage, and L$ 9960 for the stupidity factor, and the gratuitous waste, caused by idiots using island UV mapping to make what they call "texture atlases" but which are NOT that at all, and which almost invariable waste a significant percentage of the texture on the "dead space" between the UV islands, which means 4 times the wasted texture space and 4 times the wasted VRAM.

 

This plan is a clear case of "drive out of SL anyone who doesn't have a $US 3000  5095 RTX XL Pro 'Entry Level' GPU card".

 

Let the Potato PC Holocaust begin. I am all for the cleansing. LL should simply implement a system that down scales textures shown to people using low graphics settings, instead of making everyone else suffer. I have been in SL for 20 years. I have upgraded my computer more than once specifically for SL. When I upgraded from 16GB of memory to 32GB, this was the single best improvement to SL by far for many years, though I now have 64GB to allow running SL, and Blender, and Substance Painter, and Photoshop all at the same time. Memory is relatively cheap at the moment. Get some! The latest upgrade that really was a game changer for me, was getting a new graphics card.

On 4/13/2024 at 7:00 AM, VeeTach Littlething said:

Will 2K textures be made for terrain?  I'm looking forward to using those.  Should make sims look gorgeous!

Yes, 2K and PBR will be available for SL terrain textures. Finally we can have land that doesn't look like early 90's video game mess. It's not going to be perfect, but will be an improvement.

I think the cost to upload should remain the same. Premium members (of which, I am not) already get free uploads. I doubt that will change, so you are not really preventing anything by increasing the upload fee. I think a change in the cost to upload 2K textures would only benefit LL, and would be seen as another way that they sponge money from the creators. And if Premium members still get free uploads on 2K textures, it will be seen as another ploy to try to drive sales of premium membership. There is no way LL can spin an increase in the upload fee for 2K textures that doesn't look like it is self serving.

Mind you, not all creators sell their creations or make money from their hard work, but they DO add interesting environments for people to experience, and help create the actual world. Without creators there would be no world.

And for those who do make things to sell, LL already has their fingers all up in that. They charge an extra fee for buying lindens from the exchange. They charge a fee for selling lindens on the exchange, they charge a fee if you upload anything, and mesh models already cost more to upload than the flat fee for textures or sounds. And if you sell anything on the marketplace, they charge a fee for every transaction made. 10% I believe it is. What's worse, with the Marketplace, is that if you need to refund a purchase made on the marketplace, you don't get the money LL took. So refunding a marketplace purchase cost you the 10% of sale that LL originally took, as you are having to cover that to pay the customer.

Then there is the big money, which is land rentals. The monthly fee for a full sim, is 8x-12x the monthly cost of a web hosting server with the same specs. Current private owned sim count is 18192 sims, of which 55% are full sims, and 43% are homestead sims. (https://gridsurvey.com/) That is about 10,000 full sims, and 7,800 homestead. Full sims cost $209 a month, which means LL is making $2,090,000 a month from full sims, and homestead sims are $109 a month, so that's $850,200 a month for homesteads, for a grand total of $2,940,200 a month. Nearly 3 Million Dollars that LL is making from land rental each month.

I used to own a full sim for several years. At the time I bought it from LL, I had to pay $1500 for the setup, and then $200 a month, and then eventually had to let it go due to finances. I now have a homestead that i have had for a few years. Add on the fact that I am a creator, uploading mesh, textures, and sounds on a regular basis, and LL is taking plenty of my money and doesn't need more. They do not need to make more for offering us something we should have had long ago. And setting the cost higher is not going to prevent abusive individuals from being abusive. It will only benefit LL.

I almost agree with Zalificent, about the stupidity tax, but I don't think those of us who are actually diligent in managing our poly counts, and the efficient use of UV maps, should have to suffer for the stupid. Maybe access to 2K texture uploads should require users to pass a test. though the pessimist in me says, abusive people would gain approval and then ignore all of that and go back to being lazy and abusive.

What really worries me with the 2K textures, is that there are many clothing makers who break a single pair of jeans into 8 faces, and use 1K textures on each of those faces. so a single pair of jeans is 8 x 1K textures. I have seen this with many creators, and even some of the most well known and popular. I wont name names, but you know who you are. So the next obvious step is going to be creators applying 2K textures to 8 faces of a single clothing item.

🏆

That's my two cents.
~Aya

 

[ChinRey]

3 minutes ago, Ayame Musashi said:

Yes, 2K and PBR will be available for SL terrain textures. Finally we can have land that doesn't look like early 90's video game mess. It's not going to be perfect, but will be an improvement.

It depends. To improve the ground texture we also need to change the repeat rate and it's not clear to me if the update also fixes that issue.