Maximum Texture Resolution

What is the maximum texture resolution?

I uploaded a 2048x2048 texture and got no complaints from the system (which was surprising -- it didn't even resize it before upload, either), however the texture was definitely not at that resolution in the game, so it must have been resized. It was, however, fairly high resolution and looked stunning on a 10mx10m board.

(I apologize if this is documented somewhere.)

Thanks,

-Zax

I'm pretty sure that no matter what you upload, textures are all re-encoded to jpeg-2000 and no texture will be stored larger than 1024x1024. As you noticed, it will happily accept 2048x2048 but these are - I'm almost positive - resampled down before storing. This information isn't documented anywhere but has appeared as forum folklore - supported by my experience with importing hi-res photos.

You might want to refain though. Large textures are slow to download for every player and often will never be seen at full resolution. Bicubic reduction from 1024x1024 to 512x512 preserves a lot of fidelity; even 512x512 reduced to 3x15 (yes, three by fifteen) preserves more detail than I imagined.

That said, the resampling algorithm does prefer powers of 2 for the uploaded image: 256x512 is fine. Should you find yourself with an anamorphic image (e.g. 640x480) just downsample it to 512x512 (or 512x256) and put it on a rectangular prim to restore the orignal ratio.

More than you wanted to know?

No, actually. That's perfect. Thank you!

About 1024x<#> textures...

In my SL job, one thing i have learned is LAG and the causes of it.

1024pixel textures can be felt the moment they are uploaded. My computer is 3.4ghz, with a FX5700 Ultra video card, so I have no computer problem. But when a retailer posts a 1024 texture in Galleria City or Skywalk i know immediately when i get in range and probably everyone else does as well - my SL graphics pause and chunk along for a little bit.

Also it was posted last year in the technical forum that textures of 1024 & higher can crash SL with some video cards.

The best thing you can do for *everyone's SL experience* is to reduce your textures as small as possible without significantly degrading the quality of your texture and you will help keep everyone's SL experience smooth and texture lag-free when in visual range of your builds.

Briana Dawson

A texture is only downloaded to the client if it's visible, right? That is, I could have an object that normally displayed a low-rez version of the texture, but by request or during special times could be switched to a high-rez version and only then would that be downloaded.

Or would the clients download all contained objects and texture within another object "just in case" they were needed?

I want to balance lag with quality. Personally, I'm on an Athlon 1.4ghz (1600+) with a Radeon 9700 Pro, so my experience is worse than most. I do have a 6 megabit DSL line, but SL maxes at 1 megabit, so it doesn't help me much in SL (though audio streams don't degrade performance any). Anyone, my point is simply that I'm probably more sensitive to most about lag, but I do want things to look nice, too.

That said, if you set the texture quality to low, won't it only download a low quality version? Most people probably use it based on their video card capabilities and don't think about the bandwidth required on the highest setting...


I'd like to know why the cache is limited to only a gigabyte, too? Hard drive space is cheap...

Ok - turn on your DEBUG menu; you press ALT+CTRL+D, and then hit "ALT-3" and you will see a texture screen pop-up - it looks really really hectic - but that screen will show you the texture resolutions all around your visual range. You can then click on an item and the textures that item has on it will be highlighted in that window list by turning yellow.

If you have a vendor with various size textures, the people around will only download/see the texture that is displayed on the vendor. So, to answer your question, "No, the 'client' does not download everything inside the object once in range of the object but downloads only what is displayed by the object'".

Briana - the high tech uber girl who wishes she had taken the blue pill - Dawson

Ah, thank you! That's very useful.

-Zax