Cackle Amore

That's cause you two focused on the toony nature of that inital one, hence why I tried to find a pair that were closer to a realisim style which you somehow seem to think still aren't good enough compared to your toony macho vampire werewolf man look. The third person from that other thread was missing context that to the initial post and only focused on the fact that character model was already fulled fused to clothing v: Also, are you saying your own screenshot was altered, or talkin bout the last guy I posted, if so, what's altered about it? Though I can see one spot you might think looks altered, the facial hair, but I can easily also show that it's part of the model All those tiny squares scattered around the jawline, the hair isn't much different from a lot of other existing hairdos on SL, sadly, hair's just kind of one of those parts of a model that tend to take up a lot of polys to capture the wild organic nature of it.

How bout this guy then, surely this can't be less realistic than ye olde gruff vampire SL man. Model quality is pretty much the same as the gal I posted above with a maybe stronger lean to realisim in the overall style. [I'd link the source, but it seems to be a dead end, all I could get was the image link to open]

@KanryDrago Well, I'm afraid our standards for "realisim' are at odds then, cause to me, your fellow looks much toonier than the gal I posted v:

So what.. was what I posted too realistic this time? v:

There's context missing to this. I was saying a full male and/or female body made in a similar style. not one with a built in outfit you can't change. The topic was about optimization and I was trying to point out that a good body can still be made with less polygons than what current ones in SL tend to have. He also left out the other half of that statment

Here's a better example then that's closer to SL's range of realisim [Source https://www.artstation.com/artwork/8b3KO ]

And most wouldn't notice the difference if it had a slight more realistic style to the shape, It could still look better, made better, less taxing on the systems, and possibly even easier to make stuff for. Mostly just talking about the body, the head is certainly more toon style, but most human bodies don't come with heads. ---- And I suppose we'll just have to simple agree to disagree on what we consider the "standard of current mesh" Also social experiences don't have to be photo realistic, plenty of em doing well enough for their markets with toonier styles I was mostly trying to show that well made shapely models are still possible without needing 100x tricount.

Also, to add on to stuff about how things can still look good if not better with optimized styles. If someone made a Male/Female body on SL like this, it could easily rival the current main ones in style and quality.

And while polygons aren't quite as a big of an issue these days, it's still poor practice to make em so absurdly high, specially when there's going to be like 10-20+ of em bunched up together, each with a multiple 1k textures covering em. And then trying to right click on em causes a brief big of lag, even if you got the selection highlights turned off.

I have heard they're looking graphic engineers, but not much luck with the marketing appeal for it by the sounds of it.

Oh ya, large structures are certainly among those that can reasonably get away with 1024x textures, it's often mainly the smaller things that should aim for 512 and below. That's where I feel like a main issue of texture sizes is at. Now course, even buildings can get out of hand if they have too many large textures, like say if it gets up to 5-10 textures for one building, probably some of it that could be reduced in size. Basically, save the bigger textures for the "star of the show" so to say, for sim decor, that would probably be like the main central building, for avatars, that would be the body, and maaaaayybe the face as well, it's kind of a grey spot for me. For myself, I'd do like one whole full body as 1024x, and the head as 512x. Or just 512/512/512x as is the case of the SL body template being in three parts.

I got a decently high end game computer that can easily handle most high/ultra settings on games today, but SL still staggers behind when I wander into sims full of people, fullsims using nearly every inch of LI space, and/or even the main lands. I can normally run on mainly ultra settings just fine in less crowded sims, sometimes I'll even forget I have shadows still on until I stumble back out into a heavily crowded place. Also you talk of your experience being "forced" to changed or accept, but why should that not count for older computers? There's no reason they should be forced to upgrade to top of the line hardware for a 15 year old game on a regular basis. And stuff can still easily be made to look good without having to slap a couple layers of subdivide on the model, there's a lot of it that's simply a trick of the eye, I love to explore video game worlds and just kind of look over random models laying around in the setting, try to see if I can get a rough idea of how it was made. Fact of the matter is, if we want SL to run better, it's mostly up to us to help by making the content everyone uses better. LL can only do so much to cover for our mistakes.

Well ya sure, of course things made properly for a game won't be as photo realistically detailed as something made for a rendered image or movie, but we aren't playing a rendered image or movie, we're playing a video game. ["Is SL a video game?!" topics aside, at it's core, it's a video game, running on decade old game engine] And video games need limits, specially for an old engine. Most games as old as SL would be playable at ultra by 90% of it's playerbase by now, but we can't, because lots of other creators don't want to even bother help making it run better.

Well, if SL went poof over night now, I'd be rather bummed, but after wards I guess I'd probably settle back down with Sansar and Tower Unite. Though I guess depending on what makes SL go kaput, could be a chance Sansar will go with it.

Mods asleep, necro necro threads.

A mix of making imgur albums with strawpoll.me links perhaps?

Nothing really wrong with limits though as long as they're reasonable. Like for example, Textures are technically capped at 1024x. Sure, having larger size could be handy, but sadly, a lot of other creators wouldn't use that properly as there's already so many giving 1024x textures to things that shouldn't have a sole 1024x texture. So, it's for the best, that cap remains as is. Lil old Gold Source has a rather strict tri limit for it's models [I a max of either 1k or 5k tris, don't recall off the top of my head, and can't have any blended weights, only full on 1.], which reflects it's age of course, but regardless, people have been making due just fine and it's still got a decently little lively niche community of people making stuff on it. To some extent, can even add a fun little bit of challenge. Either way, limits keep a game world consistent and running smoothly, and it'll be good for peoples skills in the long run as they get better at making things proper for an old game engine like SL. Things can still look nice with less polygons. I do my best to try and keep to a lower polycount, Most of the avatars I've made rarely stray far from 5k. A current avatar I'm working on that's a bit more detailed hovers around 16k tris. And the only 1024x texture on it is for the body while the head is around 512x, and then ears and tail and eyes all around and under 256x. You would have to manually derender me if you got the complexity slider at the lowest it'll go 😉 While it would be unfair to put all the blame on creators, we still share a good half of it because as I said, we're the main ones making all the stuff people use and see on SL, everything we make will need to be downloaded by possibly hundreds of computers a day along side dozens of other content of varying quality.

Oh, I was mostly replying to that last line of their comment "SL isn't getting less demanding"

It certainly isn't. I got a 1070, 16gb of ram, AMD Ryzen 7, and I'm still having to turn down graphic settings when I end up in any place that's heavily crowded, mainlands, and/or a full sim that's got nearly every inch of LI space filled.

Was a thing a friend once said to me "People keep making stuff that's film ready instead of making stuff game ready"

It's all a balancing act though, why should LL be the only ones having to fix things while the content creators get lazy? Like I said, we are equally at fault for the lag by being lazy with optimization. It won't matter how much LL tries to pick up the slack if the people making stuff just use it as an excuse to make even bigger drains on the resources, thus making LL have to constantly be chasing that 'slack' Avatars need some sort of LI system of it's own like land. People making stuff for sim building, decor, etc, have to keep that in mind when making stuff, surely it'd be only fair those making stuff for avatars also have to keep some limit in mind beyond just how many attachments someone can have. It wasn't much of an issue in the past when it was just prims and a fixed limit of what ever attachment points themselves were available with a cap of around 250 for linked. But that's not been the case for quite some time. Now it's a max of like 30 attachments in total, letting you stack how ever many things you'd like on a single one while the items themselves can have tons and tons of textures and polygons.

It very much is on us to restrain ourselves, we're the ones making the actual visual content that everyone's computer has to download at any given second. From the models to their LOD and to the textures that coat em. The coders can only do so much to cover for the mistakes of the artists. We are equally parts responsible and at fault for a lot of the lag that plagues SL as we're the main ones making all of it the content that exists on it If the mainland sims were completely wiped barren of everything currently on em, it'd probably run buttery smooth. I wonder if it'd help if people started including pictures of their models wireframes and texture sizes on the MP

They did some switchawoo among the review teams to get fresh eyes on them, and currently in the process of well, reviewing. We'll probably find out the results of it so far by the time the next group meets start up again. It's still being worked on, it's possibly on the final stretch in fact!

Ya, sadly it's still a pricey entry for most peeps, thankfully, they were wise enough to make sure desktop wasn't entirely left behind.