Making SL a better place READ IT!

Ok guys read all of it it wont take long! If everyone can follow this, SL will BE a better place! (loading times and all) It's a bit of a rant, but if everyone does their part this will help SL.

TEXTURES

1. When uploading texture. If it does NOT have an alpha channel, PLEASE put it in JPG! SMALLER THE BETTER! PLEASE TO NOT UPLOAD TEXTURE THAT ARE OVER 1 MEG!

2. When placing textures, PLEASE REUSE THEM! I see to many ppl that upload 4 diferent textures for the 4 different sides of a block. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, think of the people who havn't loaded it yet!

3. If you want your texture to be able to change colours, RTFM and PUT IT IN GREY SCALE!

4. For colour, USE THE BLANK TEXTURE AND PICK THE COLOUR! I've seen this too... they upload 10 different colour models for a change of colour. If you use the colour tool you can save youself some cash, and save me some loading time!

AUDIO
1. PLEASE, do not make stuff queue up! I've been to an event and I had 87 sounds queued! All these were songs. PLEASE USE DISCRETION!

OBJECTS

1. This is by far the worst one... Simple examples, I hear all of you bitching "whe don't have enough prims", well this happens WHEN, you build a "french" window frames out of PRIMS! you use 12 prims to make the bars... WTF! USE A TEXTURE! 1 texture for all of your windows is way easier on load time then 12 prims for 10 windows.. and look how many prims that saves you!

2. I've seen ppl with minute details made with... PRIMS! Why? Use 1 (one) flat prim and print a texture on it (texture with alpha)

PARTICLES

1. This is for all you particle hoggers! I usually only see this in the sandbox, so it's not worrying me just yet. But what gets built in the sandbox usually ends up in the world. You see particles are an ART, NOT the more the better! I see some ppl in the sandbox that use over 5000 particles to make an effect, and when they think they don't have enough... they put more. But little to they know thier particle draw is at 2048 and mine is at 4096 so I see the increase, but they don't. This results in dumping, they just keep pumping them in. They add them enough of them to make my project look like crap, because I can't see the 20 particles i'm rezeing.

2. OVER USE OF PARTICLES, This one will be short. To anyone who has seen my "fusion engine" it only takes 100 particles per cycle (cycle = # of particles visible at once) And I find it looks great. To get the best look, all you need to do is TWEAK, NOT add!

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, I offer myself to teach optimizations classes! How to better use the SL ressources! Small class that DEMOs in world problem and how they could be fixed using other methodes, methodes that will ease the strain on SL and it's users. The fix would result in less loading time\space\prim count and most of all less frustration!

I will be adding to this as examples come forth.

P.S. If you run into a problem feel free to IM me and ASK me how you can reduce usage and make SL a better place!

***TIPS FROM THE PROS*** (ADDED)
TEXTURES

From: Phoenix Zircon


From: Neil Protagonist


***EDIT
ADDED after the COLOUR! debate
This is a beer AD put out by Molson. http://www.canada4life.ca/videos.php?video=1
The whole collection
http://www.canada4life.ca/videos.php

** deleted **

"Color"

Frenchy

I like what you say about the prems. I had a very nice farm house from a box and for a while I thought it counted as 1 prem. Well a friend of mine has some program that lets them see how many prems and I had 180. I like to had gaged. Well I have completely removed the farm house and have a very nice 2 story home. I remembered the problem with the farm house and I can tell you I must had deleated over 200 prems from things like French windows, fancy eves on the edge of a roof, and removing extra knolbs from doors. My new house has 80 (est) prems and it is two stories and twice as big as the farm house.

No, Colour... Proper British....

Sorry bad spelling there, instead of prems I ment prims.

I concur.... "colour" is correct

Oh BTW say "lor" and say "lour"... if you pronounce "color" like it's spelt you'll look like an idiot! Silly Americans.
And I ain't British!

You Americans should enjoy this video. BTW my name isn't Joe!
http://www.canada4life.ca/videos.php?video=1

true.

Yes, I think Zedman has got the point....

Everything else i pretty much agree with but....




...You hate me, don't you

Ok I'm a bit confused. I was told by Linden no less to save my texture files as TGA not Jpeg. So what is thew correct way. Then you went on to say that for windows use a texture with an alpha. So how do I choose what type to use. Since 1.2 has gone into effect textures will have to be used...alot. I really need to know what formats are the best to use. I wish they had a way to store textures we never intend to sell on our hd's the way they have avatar textures. Would save a ton of grief not to mention money.

Azmara, use TGA only if you need an alpha (clear part) if you are uploading a picture use JPG. I'll be offline for about 2 hours... nuking my computer (yearly format)

Azmara, actually officially it should not matter, "all files uploaded get converted by the server to Jpeg2000", so jpg or tga shouldnt matter (aside from perhaps a 32bit tga which has an alpha) Primarily its the scale of the image that matters most.

However on the note of the shouldnt matter, just like many things in sl that "Shouldnt Matter" it seems to, if you load a 512x512 jpg and a 512x512 tga onto different blocks, the jpg loads in half the time, but the official word is that it shouldnt matter. But the same was said about texture scaling, particle count only being for burst modes etc. Stick with what nash was saying if you dont need trans, dont upload a tga.

Here is a good rule of thumb for optimizing texture scale.

take a snapshot of the object in question at the average size it will be shown, measure the amount of verticle (or horizontal) pixels that it represents in screenspace and make your texture the next power of 2 up from that (unless its already a power of two)

-Neil

Actually, about the spelling, AFAIK I believe Noah Webster tried to change many English spellings to look more like they were pronounced. Some of them stuck and some didn't, but I think color was one of the ones that did (over here we pronounce it "color" not "colour".

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that images you upload are compressed when stored on the server. If you upload a targa file, you're not going to be downloading a noncompressed texture every time you see it in world. But I agree some of those "practices" are a little wasteful. But hey it's their L$...

Whoops, Neil beat me to it (that's what I get for being sidetracked for half an hour lol)

Well my good comp is being thrashed to peice right now (format). Thx for tips Neil! I'll post it on the top. As for conversion, I know about it... but usually all conversion are ratios and %. So if you start out with a 10k jpg and a 500k TGA, the conpression ratio will be the same... so the space taken should be different. The TGA (in conpression form) will still be bigger then the JPG. EX my ATF shirt, I had uploaded a 700k TGA (oops) it took me a good 5 seconds to load a crisp image! Then I was like bah too big, went back into PS and choped\cut\made a worse rez. Now it's much smaller, I reuploaded it and it only took about 1 sec to get crisp. Even though they were still compressed the 2nd one was smaller!

I think all textures are actually converted to a JPG style or some sort of compressed format either before sending to SL or when its all there.

But still, JPG is the way to go for non alpha... and Lindens should consider using PNG or an alpha enabled fractal compression type for alphas, as they can be a lot smaller than TGA.

The stuff in that list really should be on a website somewhere.

Or on a machine in the world that just constantly hands out notecards with it.

The upload format doesn't matter, except to the person doing the uploading. Once a texture is uploaded, it's converted first into a neutral format, and then into JPEG2000. The size of the resulting file that gets streamed to the clients depends entirely on the complexity and dimensions of the file (gradual color changes compress better than abrupt ones, large areas of a single color compress extremely well) and not on the upload format. An alpha channel adds to the size of the uploaded file, but if the alpha channel is constant throughout the image (an entirely opaque image, for example), the addition is only a few bytes.

JPEG2000 is superior to PNG in almost every way: it supports both lossy compression (with compression ratios that PNG can never match) and lossless compression (with comparable compression ratios). It supports alpha channels, and (IIRC) animation. The only major advantage PNG has over JPEG2000 is that PNG is a patent-free, open standard, while JPEG2000 is owned by ISO and is encumbered with patents.

ITS COLOR!!!!!!!!! ><


americans don't need silly extra letters to know what it is

I'm going to look into what has been said about an uploaded and converted TGA loading slower than an uploaded and converted JPEG because it should make absolutely no difference. It doesn't matter how compressed a JPEG is other than for storage purposes. When it's displayed it uses the same amount of RAM as a normally uncompressed image like a TGA or BMP. Using JPEGs will save you hard drive space on your machine but when you upload them they will be uncompressed into memory then recompressed as JPEG2000. The only way they could then be smaller than a TGA of the same dimesions is if the JPEG2000 encoding favors JPEGs in some way, which seems extremely unlikely because JPEGs tend to get blockier the more compressed they are and JPEG compression favors blurry source images.

There's also the issue that a JPEG2000 compressed TGA will look better than a JPEG2000 recompressed JPEG. If memory serves from talking with Lindens about this the flavor of JPEG2000 compression they use is lossy. Recompressing a JPEG gives you two cycles of quality loss.

As I mentioned in my post, many things that "shouldnt matter" simply do. I have seen the results quite a few times, jpgs upload will load faster than the exact same image as a targa. I agree that it "shouldnt" be, but its been verified by several people at this point, it looks like its just another bug the lindens will have to figure out.
If you would like a demonstration of this feel free to come see myself or Neph, we ran into it a lot on the build in Char, I am now in the process of retexturing everything with jpgs because of it. (should have done that in the first place lol)

Neil

Ok sorry another quick question, Neil mentioned a 512 x512 file. Most of mine are way smaller then that. What is the recommended sizes for texture files on an average. I have noticed a few have been very blurry looking. Is this because I made them to small. And thankyou for clearing up the alpha thing for me. It makes it much easier to understand =)

The 512x512 is jsut a reference. Any power of 2 is acceptable as that is what vid cards like to see. For example, pick any 2 of the following and make a texture with those dimensions and it will be far more efficient.

2
4
8
16
32
64
128
256
512

Those are power's of 2. Any combination of any 2 of those numbers will yield a vid card happy texture.

16x128
256x512
512x32

Etc... Make sense Az?