
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 Creators Sell Poorly-Optimized Mesh to Satisfy Customer Demand (Comment of the Week)
Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.)
Reader "Seph" makes the interesting argument that creators are creating triangle-heavy products to please consumers:
I don't think Penny said either of those things, but I can see how customers might demand massive amounts of triangles, even though it actually does nothing for graphics quality -- similar to how in the US, there's a market for huge SUVs with impressive grilles, even though they actually do nothing for driving quality. (And in both cases, they harm the environment for the respective world they're in.)
Seph's expanded comments help explain why mesh creators are making the equivalent of Cadillac Escalades for Second Life's fashion crowd:
Continue reading "Second Life Creators Sell Poorly-Optimized Mesh to Satisfy Customer Demand (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Tuesday, April 04, 2023 at 03:01 PM in Comment of the Week, Economics of SL, SL Mesh | Permalink | Comments (6)
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