SL Shopping Tutorial: How to Inspect Items Before You Buy So You Don't Get a Lag-Causing Lemon

Chic Aeon has a very valuable, illustrated tutorial for customers (and creators) of Second Life content who want to avoid buying items with mesh textures that have been poorly optimized -- a hot topic of late, because many if not most SL content creators poorly optimize their textures, contributing quite a bit of lag and poor performance for everyone in the vicinity.  Fortunately, 
the latest release of the popular third party viewer Firestorm has some tools to find out if an item has been optimized before buying. 

At right, for instance, is what you see using the Inspect feature (as Chic does)-- a furniture item for sale with a crazy amount of poor optimization. She writes:

I found a very small bench (very small) that had NINETEEN textures on it and a vertices (think more vertices - more lag even if that is simplistic) count that was astronomical... Put enough of these heavy mesh and unreasonably textured  items together and moving can become an issue. It is up to BOTH the creators AND the consumers to pay attention. 

The folks that have been complaining about objects "disappearing" at a short distance and not being able to move in their house after they added their furniture now have the tools to make better choices when purchasing.

Much more tutorial advice here. I highly recommend other SL bloggers use her tutorial to inspect and call out items with poorly optimized content -- and send me the links after they're published, so I can highlight them too. 

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with people poorly optimizing content (or buying it) in the privacy of their own sims, but in public regions, it's a tragedy of the commons kind of deal. The problem becomes even worse when popular and highly profitable SL brands sell poorly optimized content -- making as much as six or seven figures in real income every year while making the overall SL experience worse for everyone else.

Comments

[sirhc desantis]

Yes when available in my viewers of choice, fine. Fired up FS to check and yeah - great. Til then, another tool. Uninstalled after.

[Chic Aeon]

Thanks for posting this. As anyone who reads the comments here (or the SL Forums) knows I believe a middle ground is possible. A matchstick head doesn't need its own 512 texture for example.

All that being said, the more I worked with the new tools and the more those that make mesh (some for a RL living, some in virtual land) delved into the whys and hows and workarounds of SL mesh production -- the more I appreciated what Beq Janus http://beqsother.blogspot.com/ and other Firestorm devs gave us.

There are some caveats of course. There can be readings that would be -- well, think "false positives" on a blood test for example. There ARE ways that you can optimize mesh that will read identically to the numbers for very poorly made models. But for the most part, heavy mesh with tons of textures DOES contribute to the constant complaints of lag and slow rezzing -- especially from those that frequent busy clubs and have less than the hottest new computer on the market.

My personal "OMG- no!" problems with mesh are the very bad LOD issues. Those are easy to test visually but even so, the new tools are a big help for those of us that like the info in easy to read numbers.

I don't know about other mesh makers, but I use the new LOD settings chart every day testing my uploads on the beta grid. Sure I cam out as far as I can to see JUST how far away you can be to see that book stack *wink*, but I still like to see the numbers. And, having the information for the Linden Viewer right next to the FS numbers (and YOUR numbers if you have YOUR LODs set up higher than the default) is a big help for creators that want to improve their mesh.

As Beq said in a forum comment, this really isn't about naming and shaming; it is about giving consumers tools to make more informed choices if they choose to use them AND a way for creators to improve their products.

Each mesh maker will decide where they fit along the graph from "super game asset mesh" to "OMG that is SOOOO gorgeous I must have it no matter how laggy it is". I am aiming for the "works well for most folks and still looks pretty" area of the chart :D. I am hoping others join me there.

[Zandrae Pyreanor]

Another thing to consider is that for some niches in SL there is a highly limited amount of choice. For example, female avatars have 7 times as many choices for clothing as male avatars do, and a large amount of male avatars choices are limited to the same t-shirt, muscle shirt, suit top, pants, and so on from the clothing designers that do make men's clothes. If you're looking for period piece men's gear, you've got a handful of limited choices and you can't afford to be picky about the impact of what you get because it's often the only option you can find. It's all about settling.

Lewd things for males, particularly males who are of the homosexual persuasion, have very little choice. I can think of one furniture seller offhand that sells m/m oriented stuff. There's really no other choice.

... except to make it myself.