
Above: A single Second Life fashion item with nearly 50,000 triangles (Courtesy Penny Patton)
Longtime SLer and professional game artist Penny Patton recently bought a Second Life shirt and then saw something that shocked her. That one mesh item (see above) had nearly 50,000 triangles.
As a point of comparison, characters in AAA console games with high end graphics rarely have this many triangle. The ultrarealistic lead character in God of War, for instance, has on the PlayStation 4 version only has 32,000 total triangles. For the entire character and their clothing items, while looking even more detailed than that one Second Life shirt. (Click Kratos at right to see.)
But when Penny contacted the creator of this shirt in Second Life, she got an interesting response:
"They informed me that they could not reduce this because it results in a 'decrease in quality'.
"The [shirt has] 11 faces. Each face has three maps. Diffuse, Specular, and Normal. It's even worse because the specular actually only uses one map, a black 1024x1024 texture that was uploaded 11 times instead of reusing the one.
"It's absurd. It's also, sadly, common in SL these days.
"This is why SL needs hard caps on avatar resource use."
It's not only common, it's an ongoing problem, and hasn't really been sufficiently addressed. As a former Linden Lab staffer told me about poorly optimized mesh, "These items are effectively DDOS attacks on everyone around them."
Five years ago, we pointed out that most of the top-selling mesh bodies in SL are poorly optimized, and have even more triangles -- 200,000 or more. (Penny has also been writing about the issue on her own blog for years,)
Fortunately there are ways Linden Lab can address the issue head-on.
"I really want to stress there is not one thing Linden Lab should do to fix a problem like this," Penny tells me. "There's no 'silver bullet' solution that will fix the problem and make everyone happy."
That said, here's the solutions she recommends:
Second Life Mass Growth Won't Raise Premium Prices (Probably)
Lots of interesting conversation around Linden Lab's new (and still active) job search for a senior product manager to help grow Second Life into "millions of customers" as the virtual world expands to mobile. Kaylee West understandably worries if this growth will impact the long-term existing community and the rates they pay for premium subscriptions:
Historically the high end for virtual world premium subscriptions tops out at around $15/month, and I don't see average SL Premium rates ever getting higher than that -- though platinum Premium plans will probably start including larger and larger land allotments, or even whole sims.
The real thing for long term creators to think about is planning for a virtual world economy that has millions of users, most of them coming in via mobile. As Ryann Palianta comments:
Continue reading "Second Life Mass Growth Won't Raise Premium Prices (Probably)" »
Posted on Wednesday, September 06, 2023 at 12:53 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL | Permalink | Comments (2)
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