Texture Resolution

Last night I was talking to a land owner. Her covenant included a clause about textures and that they may not be over 512.

She was kind enough to show me how to find out the textures of an object.

I noticed most objects were in fact, 512 or below.

She seemed to know what she was doing.

This 512 resolution is probably a good thing as it will help keep the lag down on my parcel. Correct?

I have land now, the sim owner had object on the land that included the beta channel with resolutions of 1024. How bad is that?

Thanks!

I dont think it affects lag, just rez time...but I'm not techie so I dont know. 1024 for me is clearer than 512, more crisp. Just takes a few seconds longer to rez tho.

Memory issues?

Right, that one. Lots of big textures cramp your video memory, and something has to give once it fills up. The viewer can spend more time showing you SL, and less swapping textures in and out of cache, if the sizes are kept down.

Head on over to the Texture Tips forum for more info.... specifically, check this topic out:
/109/e6/150360/1.html

To a small degree, yeah........sort of. What the sim owner is trying to avoid is slow loading for people with less than a higher end computer and the servers spending extra time sending the data that a texture larger than 512 would require. It does help speed up texture loading for everyone.......though people with more powerful computers probably won't see much difference. The people using computers closer to the average will probably see some faster load times. Textures having smaller resolution sizes do load faster simply because the data needed for the graphics rendering is smaller. It's not a bad thing........but I'm not sure it really makes much difference. Sculpties are far worse.

That depends entirely on how the textures are used. As a hard and fast rule for a sim, it's a bad rule. A much better rule would be to avoid *excessive* use of textures larger than 512 x 512. I will agree you don't want to use a LOT of textures larger than 512 x 512. But there are cases where they are warranted, and even cases where they are advantageous.

For example, I can use a single 1024 x 1024 texture to replace three 512 x 512's, one 512 x 128, and two 128 x 128 textures. The asset server makes ONE request instead of six, gets it all at once, and when the texture rezzes, the entire house, furniture item, or whatever shows its full set of textures in the same instant. The technique is called a "texture sheet" and pro builders and texture artists use it a lot to IMPROVE texture loading speeds and REDUCE lag.

If you are texturing a large one-prim surface, and that surface needs a lot of detail, like a detailed store sign with lots of text, or a one-prim wall with a pair of windows that have Venetian blinds in the windows and several pictures on the wall, it may be impossible to get sufficent detail with anything less than a 512 x 1024 or even a 1024 x 1024 texture.

On the other hand, it is just plain stupid to use twenty 1024 x 1024 textures to detail a single small object, like a handgun. Yes, if you zoom in super close, that huge set of textures may make the gun look incredibly detailed. But most of the time, who will ever zoom in that close?

It sounds like your sim owner is trying to do what they can to keep lag down in a laggy sim. But they would be better served to go after excessive bling, laggy scripts, particle spew, and other things that use far more sim resources. A single resident walking into the sim with prim hair made of 200 twisted toruses and a resizing script in each prim in that hair, half a dozen pieces of jewelry with seperate bling scripts, and an animated prim pet following them around would be far more trouble to their sim than one resident that has a house that uses two textures larger than 512 x 512.

A 256x256 texture uses 1/4 the memory of a 512x512 texture. Keeping the texture sizes down can greatly improve performance (on the viewer end, not the sim end).

However, there is a texturing technique where, for example, sixteen small textures of 256x256 could be combined on one texture of 1024x1024. Assuming that you know that all sixteen textures would be accessed together (all texturing the same object, for example), the one big texture is more efficient. Same memory size, but the one big texture requires 15 fewer database hits.

It depends on the size of the parcels, and the draw-distance people are using in their viewers, but your textures may not affect the rest of the sim. If you are up in a skybox with no neighbor who has built anything within 256m, no one else will be even accessing your textures, so it wouldn't make a difference to your neighbors (does anyone have draw distance above 256 m?)

It's not possible to enforce, but it would be a win if covenants could include a sort of "texture budget." Each tenant of a 4096sq.m. parcel could use up to, say, 50 megapixels of texture resolution (where a 1024x1024 is 1 megapixel, a 256x256 is 0.0625 megapixels), plus as much as they want of a landlord-supplied palette of shared textures. Such a budget would need to include sculptmaps, too, and really only needs to apply at ground level.

Besides keeping neighboring builders from stepping on each other, it would mean that products would need to list their total texture loads, giving creators an incentive to use textures responsibly.

Faces/prims sharing the same texture can potentially (depending on the face/prim properties) render faster as well since it cuts down on the amount of texture switches.

(SL-Dev snippet)

(Follow-up)

Aside from the above focusing on texture size isn't that helpful unless you're also focusing on the use of transparent textures.

If you're inside of a room with no windows and 20 1024x1024 opaque textures are used on the walls then you're still going to see a far better FPS than a room with 1 512x512 transparent wall texture (even if the only actual alpha part is a tiny window) because it'll force everyone (inside and outside) to render everything past that wall as well.

Part of the problem with SL is liberal use of textures that are too big, but an even bigger problem is the use of alpha textures *everywhere*. A 5 prim opaquely textured wall (aside from the window texture) is far better than a 1 prim wall-with-a-window-texture on it (unless the builder went to the trouble of placing opaque prims inside of the wall to still provide occlusion).

as Cerra said, being a hard and fast rule, it's a loser. especially if people decide to go around it by just using more unique textures and mashing them together.

There are at least a couple distinct classes of "texture lag" being discussed here. One is image download (which is the gradually appearing grayness when arriving at a new location, and is partially a function of connection bandwidth), and another is viewer and graphics card processing of the image data after it's been downloaded / cached (which reduces steady-state FPS as a function of client hardware).

The thing is, it's invariably the download lag that kills me, despite having a reasonably high bandwidth connection. Anywhere with a normal population of textures and sculptmaps, I can turn on the texture console, sit stock still, and watch for ten minutes while textures gradually populate. *That* is what I'd like to fix, because once I get the damned things loaded, my FPS is fine. I'm sure it's not "gamer class" FPS, but I don't care--especially because the download lag makes me reluctant to go anywhere, lest I get stuck for ten minutes waiting for stuff to rez.

Never heard of texture contracts for tenants.

How does one "find out the textures?" Never heard of that, either.

LL made that particular bed and we can only lay in it. Up until we finally get script limits, the only restriction has been on prim counts. Prim counts drive land use, not textures. In many cases alpha textures are used to save prim count. To lighten texture loads, something has to give on prim count.