New World Notes

Black Dragon Creator Praises Optimization of Slink Mesh Bodies -- And Challenges Creators Like Maitreya to Follow Slink's Example

Black Dragon viewer creator NiranV, who has been ranting about the utter environmental disaster that most SL mesh bodies are, has rare words of praise (along with some advice) for the Slink mesh bodies created by Siddean Munro:

The body being 15k triangles is pretty good. That's really good optimized, although the hands and feets weighting in at 63k alone is quite heavy, there's still some work to do there.

I'd start by not bundling hands and feet together and rather making them a "pick-one" scenario where you attach/detach only the one you like. That alone would save a tremendous amount of triangles. Further she could make use of Bento to offer the "styles" of feet as animation override, given that the styles are things like normal, standing on tip toes etc. Anything else would fall under the pick-one scenario anyway.

To summarize this, there's still a bit to go but this is definitely the right way to go and other creators like Maitreya should definitely have a look at this example how to do it.

Alicia responds by adding more background on Slink feet -- and problems Slink faces when trying to compete against market leader (and leader in poor optimization) Maitreya:

Slink Mesh Bodies Are Well-Optimized for Second Life Avatars -- Here's How

Slink, a popular virtual world brand for avatar enhancements, produces what's basically the Tesla for mesh bodies in Second Life -- not just sleek and stylish, but energy efficient and good for the environment. This is because their creator, Siddean Munro, painstakingly optimizes them to have the least number of triangles without hurting visual quality.

This is an important update to a much-discussed New World Notes post from 2018, where I included Slink among the list of mesh bodies found to be poorly optimized, a key source to virtual world pollution -- i.e., lag and non-displaying avatars. Ms. Munro disputes Slink's inclusion in that post, so I will update it accordingly. And since then, in any case, she has updated her mesh bodies to be more efficient.

"I do work hard to make sure all my meshes are as optimal as they can be, use as few textures and scripts. as possible and that they are also laid out and written efficiently," she tells me. 

As evidence, she offers this image below:

Linden Lab Needs to Punish Poorly Optimized Mesh -- Or Reward Well-Made Mesh (Comments of the Week)

Good reader thread responding to my somewhat tossed off remark that, "While you should definitely encourage users to customize their avatars, you also want to impose optimization restrictions so avatars don't become a bloated lag-inducing disaster like they have in SL."

The problem, as Alicia observes, is the company behind Second Life has enabled (encouraged?) poor optimization:

Linden Lab has set the maximum for textures at 1024x1024, and most creators end up making their textures too damn big (any texture size over 1024x1024 max), which then will be forced to the max of 1024x1024; but, remember that LL never set limits on how many verts/faces a mesh item should have. The textures issues, on the other hand, can easily be fixed if people simply went with the allotted sizes (64x64, 128x128, 256x256, 512x512 and the 1024x1024 max) SL can manage.

Also, knowing how to keep the MB down on the textures also helps if the person knows what their doing in GIMP, PhotoShop, or any other photo manipulation program. When it comes to mesh, you still have mesh hair that shoots an avi's complexity near or past 100k, and the same thing can happen with jewelry, clothing, etc. Verts/faces counts also increase/decrease when you resize any mesh object (trees, shrubs, etc.) All of these individual issues ultimately becomes a huge problem that never gets handled as LL only wants to continue working as is...

Everyone knows that LL will never impose restrictions on how maximum number of verts a mesh item can have.

Pulsar argues that Linden Lab should set out rewards and/or restrictions around mesh:

Why It Will Take Awhile for Bakes on Mesh to Make a Difference in SL

Commenting on Cassie's video comparing SL mesh bodies, and her note that Bakes on Mesh doesn't seem to improve performance [Ed. Not exactly, see update below], Patchouli W provides this analysis:

BoM's true value contribution will only surface once onion-skin geometry is stripped away from BoM-optimized versions of the same body and people stop wearing more than one copy of the body geometry because of the removal of said onion-skins. The other optimization that will need to happen - and this is trickier because of limitations on how BoM works currently as well as so many legacy mesh clothing items being reliant on them - is the removal of legacy alpha cutting in favor of a BoM model that can handle 'cuts' made by using system layer alphas - this would reduce the amount of duplicated geometry required to fake smooth transitions between disparate pieces of geometry as well.

Only when these two changes are pushed through in full will the full value of BoM in cutting the impact of mesh bodies on the SL grid be fully realized. Then there's the issue of trying to port this work over to cope with normal and specular/env channels baking, which is an entirely new kettle of fish since the way normals are blended is a little different compared to diffuse and specular texture layering.

This may be true or not true, but what's striking to me is all the 3D graphics technical jargon one must know to understand the state of Second Life mesh. Or as it was expressed in the immortal line from The Limey:

Cassie Demos a Dozen Top SL Mesh Bodies & Documents Their Performance

In case you missed it, here's the massive review of top mesh bodies from master YouTuber Cassie Middle -- which is how she created this super valuable spreadsheet listing them all by avatar complexity, triangle count, and so on.

Some of the bodies she demos here are Bakes on Mesh, but Cassie tells me she saw no difference in performance for BoM bodies, as compared to traditional mesh. (Probably because creators are still figuring out how to use and optimize BoM.) However, she adds, "It's very fun to use; I can use a ton of older tattoos and skins, I can stack them on top of each other, and it still looks amazing on the bodies."

The video itself is a labor of love and an insane amount of time: 

Highly Detailed SL Mesh Bodies Don't Require Excessive Triangles - Look!

Pictured: A well-optimized body from Niramyth Productions

Some readers have complained about posts like this one last week pointing out how poorly optimized and resource heavy the leading SL mesh bodies are, basically saying, "We want a lot of avatar detail!" 

This, however, is a major misunderstanding: It's perfectly possible for a mesh body to be well-optimized and have high detail. By way of demonstration, take a look at the mesh body above, a picture sent over to me by Black Dragon developer NiranV. 

"It looks HIGHLY detailed and is super low poly with just roughly 24,000. Of course head, hands and feet add a bit more too but overall it seems to be around the 40,000 mark." By contrast, most of the popular SL mesh bodies have triangles in the mid to high six figures, and don't look any more detailed than this one.

"I mean just look at the details," NiranV goes on. What a difference good textures and a bit of normal mapping can do. That body looks right out of Unreal Engine and it doesn't use any shitty onion layers. But don't tell the Maitreya/Belleza fanboys, they will screech."

Maybe they will -- or maybe they will demand more from the owners of the Maitreya/Belleza brands.

Oddly enough, some readers (especially on Facebook) have claimed that calls for better optimized Second Life content are an attack on Second Life itself. They're really about calling for a better virtual world. As reader Tonia Thraw explains:

An Optimized Second Life Looks & Perform (Almost) As Well as a AAA Game

This is a jaw-dropping sneak preview to an upcoming roleplaying sci-fi game, and while you might assume otherwise on first glance, it's not a AAA game for consoles: It's based in Second Life. Called New Frontiers (Discord channel here). Lead developed by JDB Bing, it's expected to officially launch in a few months, but you can sneak preview it in person: Click here to teleport.  

Shot in the Black Dragon viewer at about 30 FPS (perfectly decent for an RPG), Mr. Bing tells me the sim is being optimized for high performance: "There isn't a bunch of a 1024 textures everywhere," as he puts it. "Mostly we are trying to stay away from resource-wasting items and sticking with creations from Isil/Tokeli/Skye. They use materials aka speculars/normals along with limiting their polycount and texture usage."

As such, it's a clearcut case study on the importance of optimization, and what Second Life users, creators, and Linden Lab itself are missing out on, when they refuse to put a premium on optimizing:

Bakes on Mesh Will Greatly Improve Second Life Performance -- If SLers, Viewers & Mesh Brands Adopt It

Left and right: Bakes on mesh when using the updated SL viewer... and a current 3rd party viewer (photos by Rhonda Huntress via this thread) 

Linden Lab just announced the official release of Bakes on Mesh [aka BOM], which aims to optimize mesh-based attachments. (Lack of mesh optimization has utterly crippled Second Life performance in recent years.) And while actual SL users are struggling to get it to work with their existing mesh and current viewers (see above), it does have great promise. NiranV, creator of the Black Dragon SL viewer and Second Life's sharpest critic of poor performance, is cautiously optimistic. 

"Bakes on Mesh idea is nice and it's a much needed thing, especially with onion layers," as he puts it to me. "This could potentially reduce texture memory usage by up to 75%, and polygon counts too." He's planning to merge BOM to his own viewer soon, and Firestorm, Second LIfe's most popular viewer, is already doing so.

One key challenge, however, is BOM's compatibility with existing mesh-based avatar content. It remains to be seen if the leading brands will update existing content for their customers -- or require them to buy new BOM-based mesh.

Linden Lab Should Show More Interest in Optimized SL Content... and Less Favoritism to Resource-Heavy Creation (Comment of the Week)

Massive discussion over last week's post about Linden Lab promoting Catwa, culminating in this rant by Soda Sullivan.

First, shame on you Wagner for simply dismissing in your lead paragraph the fact that Linden Lab though it was okay to put its finger on the scales of the market and promote a single creator of mesh heads over all the others.

The irony that they chose one of the baddest actors in polygon resource designs is ironic. It is basically a nice kick in the teeth for any content creator trying to make a less resource heavy product and get into the market.

For the record, I didn't "dismiss" that fact, but instead wrote "that's a very worthwhile debate for another time".  And by all means, I'm totally happy if "another time" is now!

Soda goes on to dismiss SLers who resist comparing Second Life to AAA games, which have better graphics and much better optimized mesh content -- and spares her chief ire for Linden Lab CEO Ebbe Altberg:

Linden Lab Officially Promoting Resource-Heavy Second Life Content That Drastically Hurts SL User Experience

The official Second Life Facebook page recently featured this post promoting a user-made video tutorial for the Catwa Bento Mesh head, one of the most popular and bestselling user brands in Second Life. Some SLers have called this company favoritism and free promotion for content that has competition in the virtual world, and that's a very worthwhile debate for another time.

Perhaps even more notable, however, is this question: Why is Linden Lab promoting mesh-based content that is so resource-heavy, it substantially degrades the user experience for nearly every Second Life user? As reported last year, the top-selling mesh bodies in Second Life -- Maitreya, Belleza and SLINK -- are extremely resource-heavy, and tend to degrade performance of everyone around them, including the users wearing these bodies.

They're so resource-heavy, in fact, a former Linden Lab engineer once told me that using them is effectively like launching a DDOS attack inside Second Life. And now, Linden Lab is effectively promoting those attacks.

But wait, this is just a Facebook post about the Catwa head, not a whole body -- just the head can't be that bad, can it? I asked SL graphics expert NiranV, developer of the acclaimed, graphics-optimized Black Dragon SL viewer, to take a look in the Catwa shop. This is what he found: