Dear Santa,

On my wish list of things to have in Second Life, I would like..
First, a tear drop shaped prim. Yes, I know you can mix a cone and ball to get this shape, but the texturing is next to impossible and durnit, the world needs more RedSquare-esque roofs.
Second, perhaps I am just missing something here, but last I checked, images ported in were to be 1024x1024, 512x512.. and so on, basicly, squares. Yet, When you post these same images on the profiles, it stretches the pictures. Any possible way of making the profile images squares like the imported textures are?
If you can do this, I promise to leave a plate of cookies by the hearth for you.
~Eve~

Eve:

Regarding the first request, a "teardrop-shaped prim" would be rather difficult to do with the current parameters said prims use. Furthermore, the texturing would not look very good on such a prim, due to the nature of the surfaces.

A remedy for this situation would be to take the textures you use and distort them in a paint tool like Photoshop. If you have none, here's an excellent Photoshop alternative that's free.



I also see you're on the Good Little Boys and Girls list this year, so I'll let you in on a little secret:

The texture size in Second Life makes very little difference.



When you upload a texture of, say, a 2:3 ratio, it will be smushed into the closest equivalent. Let's say, 512x512.

Yet, when displayed at a 2:3 ratio in-world, it should look exactly as you made it, without any distortion! You basically "factor out" the size.



If you're wondering why it does this, the reason is quite simple. All textures in Second Life are converted to a JPEG-2000, which uses powers of 2 for its image sizes.


I hope that helps. Remember, we at North Pole, Inc., are always watching! After all, we're affiliates with the NSA.

Signed,
Head Elf Jeffrey Gomez, for Santa


PS. We're also hiring a replacement!

This was wheat.

Lurved it! Great questions, great answers.

The spirit of of the season... in Second Life!

Your posting speed scares me, Torley.

Not that I expected any less.

You forgot to mention that JPG2K is a "lossless" style of compression whereas regular JPG is a "lossy" style.

The difference can easily be seen on the red and pure blue textures. Red moreso than blue. For a demonstration, just take two itdentical bitmap pictures (with some ammount of red) and run them through:

1. A regular JPG "optimizer" at say ... 50% compression.
   
2. Now run the same file through a JPG2K "optimizer" at the same compression rate.
   

Pull both files up and compare.

The blocky squares that fuzz the edges of the JPG format make the picture look "grainy" are what's called (strangely enough) "JPG Artefacts." They're leftovers from the compression routine when it had to combine pixel's color information with its neigbors. Much like Chinese to English, somethings do get lost in translation.

I applaud the decision to use JPG2k over JPG or god forbid BMP (bloatware), though additional support for the .GIF file and/or the occasional PCX would be nice.

faster, apparently, than the speed of cheese