SL Tutorial: Penny Patton's Quick Tips for Optimizing Second Life Builds to Have High Frame Rate AND Still Look Great

Ever since I posted about "Nar Shaddaa", this beautiful Star Wars-inspired bar created by Penny Patton, two questions from readers kept coming up:

• Does this scene really have such a great frame as claimed -- even for older computers?
• How can I optimize my own SL scenes as well as Penny Patton?

Answer to the first question: Yes, if you follow the usage guidelines. But don't take my word for it, check out this in-person tour by Amanda Magick, using an old Mac.

For the second question, here's Penny Patton with some starting tips:

"Unfortunately," she begins, "there's no simple way to break it down. Linden Lab makes it extremely difficult to build optimized environments. There's no real tools for it. You just need to know what to look for and what to avoid."

Here's how:

Image via Amanda Magick

"When building, I keep my Object Detail at either 2 or sometimes 2.5 and try to only use content that still looks good at those low detail settings.

"I try to avoid buying content that uses an excessive amount of textures. This means I only buy stuff I can see somewhere in-world so I can inspect it for texture use.

"For things like buildings and skyboxes, try to use some that use repeating textures. Then you can apply your own reusable textures to them and use those same textures for multiple objects around the environment.

"I always try to avoid objects that use textures with lots of wasted, unused space.

"When it comes to environments, the Land Impact system tends to keep high poly content reigned in, at least if you avoid content that falls apart at low Object Detail settings. So really the main thing is working to keep texture use reasonable.

"Here's a blog post I made with some of the other common, simple tricks."

That post has some impressively clever hacks to improve performance, such as this one:

Set Physics to "None" on objects that don't need physics!

Ok, so a good build needs physics, otherwise your visitors will fall through the floor! But not everything in a build needs physics!

Here's a great example! A shelf full of decorative beverage bottles in a club/bar scene. The shelf itself is physical, so you can't walk through it, but the bottles on the shelves have physics set to "None" to save sim resources. This means the sim has to do fewer physics calculations. Where it's most helpful is items on the floor/ground. Tiny stones, small plants, a stray pizza box or pile of clothing, set objects like these to have no physics and you'll see less lag in your sim.*

Much more here to get started and her blog just has so many other helpful tips so just bookmark it already. And follow her on Twitter while you're at it.

Comments

[camilia fid3lis nee Patchouli Woollahra]

The main caveat with setting Physics to none on objects intended purely for decoration is that the root prim absolutely MUST have physics of some sort whether it's Convex Hull or uploaded. The workaround is to link incidental/purely decorative objects to a root prim (visible or otherwise) before setting their Physics to None. and (if possible), set the entire linkset to "Phantom" for extra LI and Physics impact reduction (however minute)

[Llilith Storm]

Setting physics to none just does a convex hull physics shape to an item. It seemingly completely and utterly ignores how Second Life itself works. Also static physics shapes aren't really the complication for a sim it is objects that have actual physics on and not a physics shape at any given time. The biggest gripe in actually optimizing a sim tends to not be with building objects (unless they are horrible), but with how many avatars and other things are going on in the sim at any given time.

Some of this seems to just completely and utterly ignore how sl works though and I say this having owned one of the lowest impacting dance clubs / locations in SL at a time when optimization was hard to come by. You know what effected the sim more than anything? Freaking temp on rez physical objects like lemons falling from trees or temp on rez flowers etc.