Textures in Inventory

Okay, I'm not sure if this is better here or in the texture and design forum. They're questions about textures, but mostly from the consumer's POV rather than the designer's.

I've heard that the textures around you will load faster if they are in your own inventory than if not -- that seems to make sense. On the other hand, we're also told that keeping a huge inventory slows things down. So... is it or is not advantageous to collect textures that you might not use for building yourself but that are likely to be used in the environment around you? Which factor outweighs the other?

When I started out, I was copying Library textures into my own inventory, on the grounds that there I'd remember what they were and that they were available. I don't need that reminder anymore, so is there a load difference between textures in the Library and those in your own inventory? If you are using them to build, is it better for other users' experience for you to use the Library versions?

Does the system have a way of recognizing textures that I have renamed? I.e., if so-and-so's wall in a sim I visit uses a texture I have in my inventory but it was originally named something helpful like xagdeib257 and I've renamed it as White Stucco Wall, will the system still recognize it?

Thanks.

Good question. As a texture collector, I've noticed no difference. In fact, it's been a source of annoyance to me that textures and prims that I'm actually wearing, or otherwise own in some fashion, seem to be the last to load. Which seems a bit nonsensical. Except for the fact that it's not information useful to me. However, the information should be available to me locally, and shouldn't depend upon server lag, but nevertheless, it still does.

Are sure you didn't confuse "inventory" with "cache"? If the textures are cached because you've been to a particular location before -- like home -- then those textures will load faster. Never heard the one about Inventory, and if you've been stuffing your Inventory for that reason alone, I'd trash any free textures that I didn't need.

I'm a texture artist, and no, copying library textures to your inventory will only slow you down, by increasing the load on the asset server while you're logged in with that avatar. An avatar with only 100 items in their inventory works FAR faster than that same avatar with 10,000 items in inventory, just because of asset server loading. If you want SL to run fast, trim your inventory.

I would agree with an earlier poster that you're confusing something you heard about cache with inventory. SL keeps a cache file in which it is supposed to retain the most recently viewed textures, for faster texture drawing. The problem is, it doesn't work at all well, and hasn't for quite some time. The new First Look viewer is supposed to help with that, and does improve rendering speed. It has other problems that they must fix, but that is another discussion. You hae no control over what SL puts in cache and what it does not. You can only control how big the cache file is.

Copies of textures have a new UUID code, and are treated as a completely different texture by the asset server. So if I texture a post using a wood texture directly from the Linden Library textures, and you texture a post using a copy of that very same texture kept in your inventory, they won't rez at the same instant. If they were both textured from the same source, they would rez at the same instant. Technically, a Library texture rezzes just a bit faster than something from someone's personal inventory.

Renaming a texture that you already have is different. If you have a texture in your own inventory, have textured things with it, and you rename it, that has no effect on the texture being recognized. Again, all textured have a UUID code - a unique ID string, that is how the asset server knows them. The name that you see is for your benefit only.

We can file that one away with the way prims dozens of meters away rez faster than the walls right next to me that are supposed to be occlusion-culling everything else. *g*

No, I'm not confusing cache and inventory. Perhaps the person who told me was? I'm pretty sure it was at one of the first classes I went to in SL, but I've been to a few where the instructor didn't seem as well-educated as could be. I think I asked the question originally because I was still assuming that your personal inventory was stored on your hard disk, so it seemed logical at the time.


So, practical implications, if you have a group project for instance, it'd be better to have one person do all the texturing, even if her coworkers have access to the same textures?

What happens if a prim is textured with one particular copy of a texture (one UUID) and then that particular copy gets deleted?

And yet... I have two different copies of a texture in my inventory. Same texture, same name, but acquired from different freebie packs at different times, and I've even tested changing the permissions of one copy. So clearly different copies.

But they have the same UUID and rez at the same time.

Oh? Well, I may have been wrong on that point then. I wasn't in-world when I composed the post, so wasn't able to verify that. I'm certainly not always right, though I do try.

I do know that the asset servers retain info on assets long after you delete your copy. I don't know that they ever fully purge something. One would hope that, for example, if I import a texture, decide it's bad, and never use that texture on anything before I delete it, that the texture would not remain forever in the asset system. A good asset system should be able to detect that some assets no longer exist anywhere, in-world or in anyone's inventory, and would be able to purge those. I doubt LL's system does that though.