Penny Patton

You've got that backwards. The question you should be asking is "what percentage of SL residents would use content created by these tools?" And the answer is somewhere in the neighborhood of 100%. Let's say someone invents a car with square wheels. Clearly it does not work. Do you assume: A. The car failed because the design was flawed. or B. Nobody likes cars. LL's attempts at new user orientation activities have always been flawed at best, completely wrongheaded most of the time. The new user experience you're describing illustrated the shortcomings of the SL content creation tool set. Plenty of us told LL that when they introduced it. They didn't listen and they failed to learn from the mistake. Instead of learning that square wheels are a flawed design, they decided that nobody likes cars. You're absolutely right on this, and I don't believe LL should allocate 100% of their resources to large projects that will take years to complete. I've always felt LL should have multiple teams. Have your A team working on those big, ambitious projects that take years to complete, while your B and C teams knock out many of the smaller features and fixes. LL has to take the long view regarding how they allocate resources, but this also means keeping a forward momentum that is tangible to the userbase. There's a lot of low hanging fruit LL ignores because too often they allocate all of their resources towards the big projects. They could have a small team knocking out a weekly or at least monthly stream of fixes and features and I think the userbase would feel as though much more progress was being made. I wish I felt the same way. I feel like I bang my head against the Linden brick wall and once every few years it moves an inch forward and half an inch backwards. In the meantime, I continue to have terrible headaches. I think they've made some promising statements in the past couple of years. Animesh is long overdue and I'm already seeing it get used to great effect. There's still a lot LL needs to deliver on, and much, much more that they need to work on but have yet to even acknowledge. On a very much related note, a year and a half ago Oz told me they were introducing new camera controls and were including my camera settings as a new standard preset....but then it never happened and the last time I asked Oz about it he seemed to have developed amnesia. I has to ask some friends I knew were at the same office hours meeting to make sure I hadn't imagined it. They remember Oz bringing it up, too. I swear there must be something in the water over there. Someone should get the EPA to test LL's pipes and watercoolers.

Because the same features that would let us make games in SL would also allow us to create more engaging non-game environments. Not to mention those same "gamey" features will allow LL to make more effective tutorials, mitigating SL's steep learning curve. SL used to have a vibrant educational community, and that community would benefit greatly from such features. Not to mention the ever popular sailing and airplane communities in Second Life. For example, in one of the clubs I sometimes go to they added NPC animesh characters around the club. These characters were scripted so you could interact with them. In addition to adding to the atmosphere of the club, they'd point out club features and how to use them. Things that would otherwise be easy to overlook. "Gamey" features can also be instrumental in getting people to socialize. If you go to a club where there's nothing to do but stand around, play dance animations, and try to find someone else who's active and wants to chat you're going to be far less successful than if you go to a club and there's a working, and engaging, bocce ball game on the deck outside. (This is part of the reason bars in real life tend to have pool tables, dart boards and other games.) Also remember that the better LL's business is, the better SL's future is. So getting elitist about who LL should be marketing SL towards is self destructive. The Linden builds were my entire point. The new user experience, apotential new SL resident's first exposure to SL should draw them in, not push them away. I'm always highly skeptical of people who make claims like this. Every single time it turns out they're ignoring some pretty glaring performance issues (like texture thrashing, low fps, or graphical stutter), that they're just so used to seeing in SL that it's become background noise to them. From the computer you described, if you are not getting a consistent 60fps at max settings and never need to turn your graphics down at all for busy areas, then SL is running fine on your 5 year old PC. For how SL looks, you should never experience texture thrashing, severe fps drops, or any other graphics issues. Lowered expectations tend to be the kool-aid of choice in SL. And regarding "potato PCs", most of them should run SL fine, too. Or at least respectably, depending on just how spud-like the computer in question is. Which brings us back to that self-destructive elitism. "SL runs fine for me, so who cares how it runs for anyone else?" How are you enjoying those fee hikes LL introduced because they need to shore up their profits in the face of a dwindling userbase? You got to have a broader view of these things. Yes. Undoubtedly. How is this even a question? I agree completely that LL should be seeking multiple opinions and I also agree with some of the suggestions in this thread on LL reaching out to active and inactive users for feedback, and that LL should be making better use of their ability to collect relevant metrics. I have also read Longevity in Second Life (ok, so I only read it just now, but I have read it), it's a very interesting study and I believe it correlates with a lot of my views on how LL should be developing SL's social tools, (the study seems to show that people stick around more when they have a broader range of friends in SL with whom they interact regularly) improving the marketplace, the creation tools, and generally working to reduce confusion with regards to SL and products sold within SL (as the study also shows that as people spend money in SL they become more invested. Moreso when it's money paid to other SL users rather than LL directly. ). The emphasis being on the social engagement angle. I see the study was done in 2009, I think it would have been interesting to see what additional data they'd have gained by continuing the study through the SL bust and first year or two of the SL recession. I don't usually toot my own horn here on the forums when it comes to my credentials, especially considering that I subscribe to the "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" view of SL social interactions, but I majored in computer animation, multi-media and game design. I have nearly 20 years of design experience and I also happen to have been in SL since 2005. In addition I've been an art instructor, teaching all ages between pre-schoolers to adults, and in both the public and private sector. While I do agree LL shouldn't act on my opinions alone, I do hope that my background, as well as my body of SL work, adds some perspective and weight to those opinions.

If you want to improve SL's ability to draw in and retain new users, you have to identify what keeps people from checking SL out, and what drives away those that do before they get "hooked". Here are the major complaints you'll hear from people who've checked out SL but didn't stick around: There is nothing to do. It's ugly. Despite looking ugly, it also runs poorly. It's confusing. Number 1 "There's nothing to do" is the hardest for LL to tackle. It requires new features and new content creation tools. I'd also argue it would mean improving the existing tools which could also fall under number 4, but I'll get into it here as it applies to giving people more to do in SL. We finally got animesh, and so the ability to create believable NPCs and that's great, but there's still a lot LL needs to do. Improve SL's physics and give us the ability to create more immersive vehicles. Sailing and flying are already popular SL activities, imagine how much moreso if we could make boats, planes and cars that all felt more responsive, more like actual vehicles. Sure, upgrading the physics to the point they'd need to achieve this might break existing vehicles, but it would totally be worth it if it meant a big enough improvement for new vehicles. Fix Search. It's very difficult to find relevant content and experiences in SL. Shop and club owners tend to toss in any popular keyword they can, whether or not it applies to their shop/club/event. How can LL curb this problem? By improving and expanding the "interest tags" feature they seem to have forgotten about. We should be able to apply a limited number of keywords (I'm thinking three, five at the very most) to land, marketplace listings and events. The limited number would encourage people to only use tags that really do apply to them. Then interest tags could be an additional factor in search results, or a complete filter so that people could search exclusively by tags Create an SL calendar. The calendar could be integrated with profiles, event listings, groups and land. When at a location in SL you could open the calendar to see upcoming events listed at that location. With the calendar open you could see all events for all of the groups you were a part of, or filter to specific groups. For events you were interested in, you could set reminders, so SL would remind you when an event was coming up. You could see account creation dates for your friends so you could wish them a happy SL birthday. Group anniversaries. Partnership anniversaries. Etc. The big thing is that we need the tools to create more immersive, more game-like experiences. We already have more such tools than I suspect most SL content creators are aware of, but LL doesn't make these tools obvious or very user friendly. The fact that one needs to learn how to use scripts to create something as simple as a chair or a teleporter one can simply walk into to use, or even an animated texture illustrates the problem. If people could create such simple scripted elements more easily, they'd be even more common than they are now. Many game engines and other software for creating interactive experiences have a "visual scripting interface". For example, there is absolutely no reason one could not build a prim chair, select it, and from a simple menu set the chair as an item avatars can sit on, and through that interface adjust the sit target and even apply multiple animations that could be selected through a dialog menu, all created and applied to the chair without the resident ever looking at a line of code. Such menu/UI driven interfaces people should be able to set up NPCs with interactions, pathfinding and scripted events. Interactive elements like a control panel in a spaceship that opens a door, including all of the lights and sound effects. You'd find much more engaging content springing up all over SL. Here is an article I wrote illustrating that last point with a comparison to both professional and end user tools in other software. Number 2 "It's ugly" is another tough one, but not impossible. The main take away should be that presentation matters. Mainly LL needs to expand it's art department to create, and guide the moles in creating, more impressive public builds, like the new user orientation sims, the welcome areas, and other public Linden managed areas. The moles are a talented bunch, but they're largely talented SL enthusiasts. With a little more guidance from professional design leads you could get a whole lot more out of them. More ambitious projects, more engaging experiences. And a much better looking SL experience. SL also desperately needs sound and music people. Why is there no SL sountrack? Why are most of the public builds almost entirely lacking in sound design? People notice that kind of thing and it detracts from their experience. And LL needs to lead by example. When LL shows something can be done, residents are more likely to pick up on that and use similar features in their own creations. More "professional polish" in all aspects of SL's design. Better UI sounds, a better looking interface. Better looking starter avatars (they've improved dramatically over the years, but they're still frequently 7' tall and often suffer poor proportions, or just looking kind of generic). A new system avatar. Brand new. (For those already chomping at the bit to complain that replacing the existing system avatar would break a lot of legacy content, I'd like to preemptively point out that SL could support multiple system avatars and allow users to toggle between them. In fact it already does. The male and female avatars use different mesh models and have different slider weighting.) For the new system avatars they should look as good as any of the mesh bodies sold currently. They should support materials. LL could even introduce a new type of system clothing, simple wearable models that system clothing textures could be applied to, similar to how the clothing that comes with the popular Aesthetic mesh body is made. And the new system avatars should have their slider weighting improved. Currently, we can make avatars between 4 and 9 feet tall, but you can only have proper proportions if you stick between 5-6.5' for women, or 5-7' for men. Go outside that range and even with maxed out sliders arms will be too short, heads will be too small, etc. And women are not allowed to be as tall as men can be. In a world of our own imagination, this is rigidly enforced by the appearance editor. LL could fix all of these issues. Number 3 "it runs poorly" is another difficult issue, but not insurmountable. People tend to misplace the blame for this, believing SL runs poorly due to an aging engine or LL's bungling programmers. This is not entirely the case. The fact is, SL runs pretty impressively well when the content rezzed inside of it is moderately optimized. The main problem is that avatars are frequently using over 200MB worth of textures apiece. Sims regularly exceed 8-10GB worth of textures. Avatar attachments, unbound from Land Impact limits are frequently excessively high-poly. Add to all that content creators who don't understand how LOD works create content that only renders properly at the highest LOD, then tell their customers to go into SL's debug settings and set Object Detail far higher than you can through the regular graphics options. There are solutions to all of these problems, I'm not going to get into them here and instead I'm going to provide a couple of links. Click here to see just how much you are being affected by unoptimized content. There's also some links in the article to tutorials on better optimizing content for SL. And here I explain how Linden Lab could hitch "new content rules" to new features, preserving legacy content while nudging the content creators and the SL resident population at large onto a trajectory that will see old, unoptimized content slowly being phased out in favour of new, optimized content over time. The "slow and steady" approach that creates the least amount of disruption for the userbase, but guaranteeing major improvements over time. In addition to all of that I'd argue an LL run content creation blog is an absolute must. LL needs to engage with the users on this topic. There's a lot of misinformation on the forums about what causes lag and other performance issues, with no real official line from the Lab itself. LL could provide layman explanations on the impact of high poly attachments and excessive texture use on framerates, rez times. Explain why "texture thrashing" occurs and how sim builders can reduce, or even entirely remove that particular problem from their own sims. LL can't just lay out new rules, or even provide new tools, and expect the userbase to just go along with it if the Lab doesn't explain why these changes are made and how the userbase benefits. Such a blog could also be used to demonstrate new features and share good content creation habits in ways that every SL user could understand, not just those who spend time reading technical documentation on the wiki. Number 4 "it's confusing" requires a major attitude change within the Lab itself. I already pointed out how LL could put more engaging content creation into the hands of a much broader range of SL users with a "visual scripting" interface. But LL would also need to make everything about the SL experience more intuitive, and do it without sacrificing the freedom and creativity we currently enjoy. A better designed tutorial that users could revisit as much as they need. I've long argued LL needs to create tools for interacting with the viewer UI, so much like a videogame a tutorial could open menus and point people directly at buttons and features, this would also open up a lot of possibilities for experience designers, but in the short term this could be done with YouTube videos LL could trigger to pop up during scripted tutorial experiences or as a part of the viewer's own help system. LL needs to also better identify what trips up SL users, new and old and figure out how to fix it. I regularly run into people who don't know about "alt+camming", some of them are people who've been in SL for years. Pushing people towards mesh bodies just to look as good as long time SL residents is a barrier both financially and in terms of easily figuring out "how to SL", so here again a new system avatar would help. The reason "display names" turned into such a fiasco is how confusingly LL made that change. I still see people using their display name like a titler, so more a lot of other SL users they have no name, just their title. These are all things LL needs to work out before rushing into a new feature. There's much, much more to this I could get into, like how the Jira is an atrocious method of getting feedback from the broader userbase and that it's crazy how the SL viewer, even projects viewers, don't have a feedback feature. I agree with Zed that SL has astounding resiliency despite its many flaws, and that with a little work LL really could breath all new life into the platform. In fact, I'd argue that until LL can figure out how to make SL more of a success, until they learn the lessons SL should have taught them, any attempts like Sansar at a new platform are doomed to failure.

For what it's worth, I do agree with Coffee that expecting the average SL resident to understand why some content is bad for SL is unreasonable. However, I disagree that it is 100% on the heads of content creators alone, because most SL content creators are themselves simply SL enthusiasts who got into creating content for SL and were never exposed to proper content creation habits like you'd find in a game design course or game modding communities. This is why LL needed to step in from the beginning, and why the only way real change will happen will be if LL steps in now. LL needs to better communicate to both creators and non-creators alike how unoptimized content impacts performance. A blog laying it out in layman's terms with examples would be more effective than a wiki page in this regard. LL needs to provide content creators and consumers alike with better tools for recognizing badly made content. In the stock SL client you cannot easily see how much VRAM or triangles your avatar is using. It is especially difficult to track down individual problem attachments. It is entirely impossible to know how content sold on the marketeplace fares in this regard, unless the creator volunteers that information. LL should figure out how to encourage that in more product listings.

Here again, you're confused. I'm not talking about distorting textures to maximize the amount of pixels used and I'm not saying people should be using more tiny textures. I'm talking about the fact that too many textures in SL look like this: When they should look more like this: Combined with textures from other parts of the model that are also only using a fraction of their actual texture. In SL content creators often give each part of the model it's own texture, that texture using only a tiny fraction of the pixels, when they could easily be combined into one large texture without sacrificing any detail, because they'd just be combining their textures in a way where they're not eating up 16MB of memory on four 1024x1024 textures where 3/4 of each are blank empty space and instead using a single 4MB of memory on one texture where the whole texture is being used.

Let me try and reword what Da5id tried to explain to you. Let's say I rip a truck model from Supreme Taco Truck Racing XII. As everyone knows, STTRXII uses the latest in graphics so the models don't use the same normal and specular maps that Second Life uses. Because I'm a lazy Second Life content ripper, I either upload the maps that the model does use, which look terrible in SL because they're not the same sort of maps SL is looking for, or I just skip the materials altogether and upload the model without it. Because I'm a lazy SL content ripper who doesn't know what they're doing I've probably also messed up the alpha channels, too. So now this truck, which looks amazing in Supreme Taco Truck Racing XII looks kinda rubbish in Second Life. If I were a smarter, less lazy content ripper what I might do is convert the material maps from the STTRXII formats into the formats that SL looks for in normal and specular maps, and I'd be sure not to screw up the alpha channels in the original textures, this would lead to a truly Supreme Taco Truck in Second Life, comparable to a lot of other content made specifically for SL. You do have a point about screen real estate when it comes to smaller details, but you're forgetting (or ignoring) something. SL users will often upload horrendously large textures for tiny details. Like buttons on a jacket. However, unless you zoom in far closer than any SL user, even a photographer, is ever likely to zoom in, you will never notice if that 1024x1024 jacket button was replaced with a resized 64x64 version of the same texture, so it really does not result in a worse looking jacket to do exactly that. And you keep forgetting (or ignoring) that one of the most common content creation faux-pas in SL is that people auto generate UV maps that only use a portion of the full texture, meaning all that extra pixel density isn't even being used by the model, it's just sitting there, hogging up memory, while adding nothing to the model. Another thing you keep forgetting (or ignoring) is that I'm not suggesting LL needs to impose rules that are nearly as strict as what game devs hold themselves to. As I've always said, LL only needs to curb the worst habits to see major performance gains.

And it's not surprising, look at how many people on this forum will argue that the textures don't impact performance at all.

It is my small hope that by sharing accurate information, and pointing out when someone is spreading misinformation, I can help at least some people improve their own SL experience and drive up awareness. Possibly even enough awareness to nudge LL out of their hands-off approach to the problem as people realize just how much they're being affected. People tend to be shocked at just how much of an improvement they experience when they arrive in an optimized sim. The more such sims that are out there, the more people will see the difference firsthand. There is too much misinformation regarding this topic in Second Life. I've frequently seen this scenario: Someone has a flat normal map for multiple parts of an object. Each part using a different flat normal map. And each of these unnecessary normal maps has an alpha channel masking out around the UV portions of the texture driving the memory cost up even more.

It's true, though. I've told her these same things in multiple threads before now. As recently as YESTERDAY.

Here's some free optimization tips. 1. Spec maps can almost always be 1/4 the size of the textures on the same face. If your texture is 1024x1024, make the spec map 512x512. 2. Using a black and white AO map as a texture, you can usually cut that down to 1/4th the size without seeing any difference. 3.Have a face where the normal map is almost entirely flat? Use the default blank normal map instead of your 1024x1024 flat normal map. 4. Have a face that is almost completely flat but there's one tiny spot that actually uses the normal map for added detail? Section that part off as a separate face. 5. Alternate to the two options above. Have multiple faces, only some actually using their normal maps for extra detail? Section off a part of that normal to be your "blank" normal, it can be as small as 2x2, then on your faces that are flat, us only the flat part of the normal map. 6. Novel idea, don't put a normal map on a face that isn't using it. 7. Don't have repeating parts on your textures. Have a chain link necklace? Instead of using a 1024x1024 with 50 repeats of an almost identical set of pixels, use a 64x64 texture with the texture of a single chain link and repeat it across all of the links in the chain. You can do this for things like roof tiles or anything else with a repeating pattern. Need some variety? Have 2-6 versions on one texture. 8. Baked a scene with multiple copies of the same mesh model, let's say a room with the same lamp on each wall. Rather than giving each lamp a separate, but nearly identical texture, use the same single texture for all of them. 9. Use normal maps instead of adding geometry to your model. That is what they are for. 10. Don't add hidden pieces to your objects. Mesh hair doesn't need a root prim with a store logo on it. A mesh cabinet with a door that cannot be opened doesn't need a fully modeled interior. 11. Clothing does not need to be completely 2 sided. For say a sleeve model in just enough to give the illusion that the shirt continues up the inside of the sleeve then cap it off. Make the texture darker inside the sleeve, fading to black where it caps off, to complete the illusion. These are all things, just off the top of my head, that people can do to optimize their work and yet in SL they almost never do. None of them requires new skills. None of them adds that much more work. And most of all, none of these tips result in content that looks any worse.

Like I explained in the other thread, this is simply not true. Hitch the "new rules" to all new features going forward, and maybe sweeten the pot with some perks, and you create a situation where existing content is preserved, but people are increasingly encouraged to adopt the "new rules" at their own pace. It has worked before and it can work again. People will not stubbornly refuse to adopt new features forever, especially as the number of new benefits they're missing out on continues to grow. Wrong again and this is where your lack of knowledge in content creation always trips you up. Almost no content in SL uses it's excessive amounts of resources in ways that make it look "better". Most of the resources are being eaten up in ways that are invisible to the casual observer. Store logos on hidden root objects. Baked textures that only use a tiny portion of the actual texture, leaving the rest blank. Excessively, redundantly high-polygon counts that add nothing to the detail of the model that any one in SL would be able to see. A fully detailed mesh model of a brain, complete with full materials, hidden inside a mesh head where it will never, ever be seen. You know this because I've told you this. I've explained, with pictures even, how wasteful people tend to be with texture maps, complete with an explanation on how they could fix it so their content uses a tiny fraction of the texture maps, but without losing a single pixel of detail. But it never sinks in for some reason. You stubbornly hold on to this rubbish myth that "optimized content just won't look as good". When you're starting out with 7 FPS, 15fps seems like a miracle. And the reason they're pulling single digit fps the moment you put a second avatar on screen is because the average SL avatar is using around 300MB worth of texture memory. Some even push it past a GB. I've been able to help drastically improve their SL performance by having them removing a single attachment. It is not an either/or Sophie's choice scenario. LL is fully capable of approaching the problem from both ends. And here again your lack of knowledge about content creation is causing you to fly blind with your arguments. "Magic up new skills"? No, try "use the skills they already have and just be a little smarter about it." And there's another problem you're overlooking. GPUs aren't magic fairy dust sparkle machines. LL can improve the rendering pipeline to the absolute best of their abilities and your computer will still be choking on those 50MB shoes and 200MB hair while you wander through a sim using 10GB worth of textures that are constantly choking your bandwidth with an endless download stream. Will you see an improvement? Sure, but probably not quite the sort of improvement you seem to expect.

You are really determined to justify this "optimization won't make a difference" myth. Whatever, it works whether you believe it or not.It matters, whether you believe it or not. Any other professional with game design experience will tell you the exact same thing.

Ok yeah, I think I understand now. I'm not sure how it prevents them from changing the setting. Is it not something they can change from preferences on the log-in screen, before actually logging in?

Sure, but you point out yourself that LL has done a bad job of communicating just why optimization is necessary. My position has always been that LL needs to do better in this regard, I strongly believe there should be an official content creation blog, using Linden/Mole created content as examples of how to optimize and why it's important. I also believe LL should provide better tools to content creators to help make optimizing easier. In any case, many content creators might not know how to optimize right now, but that's largely because they've never tried. Put them in a position where they have to optimize their content better and they'll figure it out pretty fast. It doesn't require any skills they don't already have if they're making content in the first place. If they won't learn, there are plenty who will be more than happy to take their business.

No, no. I understand all that. What I don't understand is what point Coffee is trying to make by pointing that out. No one suggested blocking vintage hardware, so why make that argument as if someone was suggesting we do it? SL would also lose a lot of concurrency if we banned all residents whose usernames include vowels, but it wouldn't make any sense for me to point that out as a response to this thread because no one in this thread has voiced an anti-vowels stance.

I'm not sure what you mean by this post. I agree that blocking older hardware would be a bad idea.....but unless there's a post I'm just not seeing, I don't think anyone suggested blocking hardware. And if anything, the fact that so many SL users rely on older or less expensive hardware is yet another reason why optimization is so important. As I demonstrated, even a laptop with onboard graphics can run SL on medium settings at a respectable framerate and no other performance issues in environments with bare-bones optimizations to the content. Up until it died, my backup SL computer was a Toshiba Portege from 2007. I was able to use that with deferred rendering enable and still get around 20fps. And no, that's not a typo, the laptop was released in 2007. Onboard Intel graphics, no videocard. Could run SL with deferred rendering enabled and at around 20fps. I used it regularly when I was away from home. I couldn't leave the safety of those optimized sims, it would crash almost immediately anywhere else, but as long as I stayed in a handful of sims that weren't overburdened with excessive texture use, and I derendered avatars with excessive textures, I could run SL better than a lot of people experience with much more powerful machines.

I get that, but at the same time I suspect most SL users are pretty oblivious to it. And LL would only need a small percentage of users to agree in order to get more feedback. Actually, scratch that, almost nobody is going to care enough to log into the Jira to give feedback. And only a fraction would probably feel like coming to the forum to try and hunt down a thread to provide feedback in. And none of them would show up to the in-world meetings. Maybe what LL really needs here is a better formaat for people to submit feedback. Like when you go to log out of a project viewer it could pop up a feedback dialog.

Ok, just to be clear, this still has zero bearing on my arguments regarding content optimization, but the fact that the average SL user rarely knows about a new feature coming until it's released and then everyone gets in an uproar because it's buggy and full of unforeseen consequences actually is an issue I think we can all agree LL has a problem with. So I'm thinking, maybe when there's a feature they want more people to test before release LL could set up a system so when you log in there's a random chance you might get prompted to try out a test viewer? A brief blurb on the feature being tested and the kind of feedback they're looking for. This could be a way to get a lot more feedback before the feature is about to be released gridwide. Just a random thought.

I don't think the problem is so insurmountable. Solution 1: Fix it so LOD is used properly by rigged mesh. Make it abundantly clear, scream it from the mountains so all SL users and content creators know this is happening, then delay rolling out the fix while you reach out to the most popular mesh body creators so they can make any necessary changes and release free updates. For said content creators, making such a fix would be annoying, but not difficult or all that time consuming. Solution 2: Make ARC accurately reflect the lack of proper LOD. Sure, ARC shoots up for a lot of people, but....so what? Is ARC actually used by anything? It wouldn't be the first time avatar complexity calculations have drastically changed.

Yeah, when people say BoM doesn't work with materials, what they're saying is that there's no way to apply materials via BoM. So if you wanted to use BoM for clothing, your clothes would look painted on. Way moreso than applier based clothes, because your skin materials would still be applied to your whole body, even where your skin is replaced with the clothing texture. I'm not as up to date on BoM as Theresa and some others, but I've been seeing things recently that have piqued my interest for it. I don't think it will replace appliers, but it will almost definitely replace makeup and tattoo layers, and will have other, more creative uses since it works with the long forgotten skin appearance sliders. So you could, for instance, make a tattoo and change the tattoo's colours via the skin sliders. Neat stuff. ETA: Theresa can probably confirm the lack of materials support really made me upset with the project. And for the intended purpose of getting rid of clothing layers, it's still a miss. But these other uses for it, like getting rid of alpha cuts in body meshes, have begun to change my mind on it being a total wash.

In a year or two we should necro this thread and have a good laugh at how people thought animesh was dead on arrival and would never be used. https://pennycow.blogspot.com/2019/06/just-how-much-does-unoptimized-content.html We're talking doubling or tripling the average user's framerates, while simultaneously running at higher graphics settings than they are now. And this isn't a theoretical maybe that we can't know unless LL actually takes the necessary steps. It's how SL works right now. You optimize content, you see the results. Clear as day. This holds true on toasters with onboard graphics as much as it does with high end gaming hardware. Everyone sees a substantial performance increase. If you knew how 3D rendering works, you'd know that unoptimized content will continue to choke things up no matter what improvements LL makes on their end. Let's take your autobahn analogy and make it more accurate. We have a road that is jam packed with traffic. Hundreds upon hundreds of vehicles all trying to get through, but stuck in standstill traffic jams. 90% of the traffic are empty vehicles. Let's say buses with no passengers. Just taking up space. Choking the flow of traffic. The flow of traffic is your performance. You're arguing that the vehicles all need engine improvements. That if the cars could drive faster this would solve the traffic jam problem. I'm arguing that we need to get the empty buses that account for 90% of the traffic off the road. That traffic can flow more easily when the road isn't packed bumper to bumper with buses that serve no purpose.

This will be my final attempt to explain this to you. Remember when mesh was introduced? Ok, good, now, mesh came with new rules. Prim limits didn't apply, now it was "Land Impact" and how Land Impact was calculated was different than how prim cost is calculated. This happened and, at that time, absolutely ZERO existing content was affected by the new rules. The only way existing content would be affected by the new rules was if you linked it to a mesh object. Once you linked it to the mesh object, the new rules would apply to the entire link set. The new rules were hitched to the new feature: mesh. But it didn't stop there. Shortly after, keyframe animation was introduced. You had a new way to script moving objects like elevators. Since this feature came out after mesh, it too had the new rules hitched to it. Now ,even if you built an elevator entirely out of prims, if you used the new feature to animate it, the new rules (Land Impact) would take over. Then materials came out. Since this too came out post-mesh, this feature also had the new rules (Land Impact) hitched to them. So if you had a prim object and you applied materials to it, the new rules would kick in. Now, if you took this prim elevator, removed the keyframe animation feature and materials from it, it would revert to the old rules. See? Do you understand? This is the same way LL could introduce more new rules. Wear an attachment using the BOM feature and BAM the new rules kick in. Remove that attachment and you revert to the old rules. Same with animesh. Same with any new feature LL introduces afterwards, building on the growing list of new features that you can only take advantage of by adopting to the new rules. So over time people do, at their own pace. Now do you understand why this: is a completely nonsensical argument with absolutely no bearing on anything I've EVER said relating to this topic? Do you see now why I keep saying your arguments make no sense? That you're shadowboxing? Do you understand me now?

You're misunderstanding me. I'm saying the amount of memory textures use is a better metric than the number or pixel size of the textures. A single object might usefive textures, but have them all be 256x256 and that is way better than an object using one 1024x1024 texture because it's using less memory. Or, you might have a set of 12 filler buildings to use in a city sim, and the houses might use a single 4096x4096 texture atlas. That's way better than if each building was using a different single 1024x1024 texture apiece. It's the memory use that affects performance. The memory use is also the file size so that affects downloads. Reduce the total texture memory use of a sim by 2GB and that is 2GB worth of texture data your viewer doesn't have to download.

Ok, I don't know how to put this any more plainly. That, right there? What you said? THAT. IS. EXACTLY. My. POINT. It doesn't happen overnight. Not with viewers and not with content, either. But it does happen with time. It always does. What do you not get about this? All of your arguments seem to stem from this belief that no matter how LL approaches it, introducing new rules will have an immediate, apocalyptic effect. I keep saying that LL can afford to take the long view on this. That is precisely why all of my suggestions involve implement new rules in ways where most people won't be effected for years. And by then most of the popular new content will already work within those new rules so most people would still be unaffected. How are you not getting this? I seriously don't know how to put it more plainly. All of your other arguments are the same, do you not think if LL introduces new rules there won't be an adjustment period where things get smoothed out? That they'll just upend everything from the outset and call it a day? No, of course not. And the examples I've given of ways they could do this all work with that in mind. And seriously, what is it with you and Bakes On Mesh? I did not bring that up all as an alternative to current mesh bodies. I only mentioned it as an example of a new feature LL could include in hitching the new rules to. You're shadowboxing. In the suggestions I gave the creators of the current popular mesh bodies would have plenty of time to update their bodies to work within the new rules, even if onion skins remain the best approach to applier/system clothing. You could cut the poly count of something like the Belleza Freya in half, put it side by side with the current version, and no one would be able to tell the difference. That's another thing you always seem to forget when you come up with these arguments. You have this assumption that optimizing content is something creators just won't be able to adapt to. It's super easy. And LL doesn't have to be all that strict with the new rules to bring about major improvements.

That's always been the argument. However, LL gives out free avatars, I think it would be difficult to argue that this has ever hurt avatar and clothing sales. And they don't have to release EVERYTHING. Premium gifts are a once-a-month thing. I think. It's actually been a long time since I've heard any mention of them. Anyway, they could release a small pack of content once or twice a year. That's a drop in the bucket.