Unecessary hollowness

Lag is bad, and we're working on it. In fact, you should notice more improvements in the next release. However, there are some things users can do to reduce the overall lag of the system when they create content, one of which is to avoid unecessary hollowness of objects.

For instance, the cylinder and the tube look similar, however the tube is much more expensive to simulate on the server-side and display on the client.

A hollow cylinder looks a lot like a tube, however uses fewer polygons ==> faster to simulate, faster to display. This means that tubes will typically appear "smoother" on the screen, but this smoothness costs resources.

The cost of concave objects and polygon-count has been a limiting factor for computer games since the beginning of the industry. We have recently crossed the threshold where CPU and GPU technology has allowed us to start getting fancy. Due to the dynamic nature of Second Life we don't have the luxury of carefully eliminating all concave objects from the world in exchange for super-fast performance. Besides, concave objects are cool!

For example, hollow tubes are petty neat. What does a hollow tube look like?

Since the tube already looks like a donut with a square cross-section, a hollow tube looks like a donut with a hollow square cross-section. The hollowness is hidden inside the tube and is not visible unless you cut the tube open. The only reason one would want to hollow out a tube is if they were going to cut it open and somehow use the hollowness that is inside the donut.

Spheres appear almost as smooth as tubes and can often be used to make smooth curvy objects by stretching them to useful proportions instead of using tubes and torii.

Concave objects are great! You can make all sorts of interesting stuff with them. And we have some planned fixes that will help reduce the cost of concave objects...

But, in the meantime... non-hollow spheres, and convex slices of spheres are much cheaper to simulate than hollow and concave objects ==> when they are used instead, where possible, then the simulators will run a little faster. So, if users keep an eye out for where they can avoid uncecessary hollowness (and concavity) then they will help keep things running faster.

Thanks.