A Tale of Two Content Creators

A Tale of Two Content Creators

A short story of two ways content creators can

respond to criticism and what their decision

means for you.

I can be rather blunt when positing a marketplace review. When I was in art school, the value of blunt, honest criticism was drilled into me because if you can't accept criticism you'll never improve and your career won't last long.
In Second Life, the rules are a bit different. You don't need years of school, decades of training, to become a content creator for SL. Anyone can put their creations on the marketplace and become a seller....and that's fantastic!

There is, however, a downside. Since the Lindens themselves lacked any sort of background in 3D rendering when they set about creating SL, they neglected to develop the tools in such a way as to discourage the bad habits common in inexperienced artists which can be harmful to performance. Lag and poor framerates are not the result of "old, badly written code", they're the result of unoptimized content.

There is a lot of unoptimized content in Second Life.

When I purchase such content I try to shine a light on these issues where I see them in the hope that more people will begin to understand how 3D rendering works, and why they need to reduce their polygon counts and texture use as much as they can.

 Sometimes it works, sometimes it backfires.

 Years and years ago I was building a fantasy sim in Second Life and I purchased a fantastic looking set of viking style buildings. These buildings looked great. The creator clearly had talent and I told them as much. However, their texture use was death on framerates.

A single small house, the smallest of the buildings available, used around twenty 1024x1024 textures. Twenty! Many of these textures were nearly identical. The walls for the building, interior and exterior, were nearly identical, with only the slightest of differences in backed shading. These textures were so similar that they could have used the same texture on every wall and no one would have noticed the different.

In addition, many of these textures were filled with blank, unused data. A 1024x1024 texture where half the texture went unused. These textures could have been condensed into a single file at no loss to visible detail.

 When I reviewed the item on the marketplace, I mentioned all of this. In retrospect I should have contacted the creator directly, but at the time I felt these issues were obvious and should be treated as such. The creator did not take the review kindly, accusing me of setting out to destroy their business and banning me from their sim.

 Currently, they are a very popular content creator indeed, but their content still suffers from the same overuse of textures that their old village set did. They seem to have gotten better about wasting texture area with unused space, but there's still a lot of room  for improvement and they still do not use repeating textures to increase detail without driving up texture memory. For some of their creations this has meant very blurry, N64-ish looking items even with their high texture use. They seem to be trying to get around this by throwing yet more textures at their creations which is not the way to go.

 I'm not naming names because I'm not setting out to shame anyone. That's not the point of this. The point is that abusing textures in this way, filling up content with what amounts to gigs of unnecessary files, is why everyone has such terrible performance in SL. I want to see creators like this succeed by recognizing this problem and learning to create better looking items that don't kill framerates.

And sometimes it works.

During that same period, I was also putting together a fantasy look for my own avatar and purchased some items from a store that had the exact same problems described above. I purchased a body harness where each strap, although appearing identical just mirrored, was a separate sculpt map and texture. There was a chain across the front, each link in the chain was it's own 1024x1024 sculpt map and 1024x1024 texture.The whole thing had to be like 30-50 sculpted prims, each with its own 1024x1024 sculpt map and 1024x1024 texture.

 It looked fantastic but was murder on framerates, and I said as much in my review of it.

 This creator also sent me a message. This one was a positive message. They said the information I'd provided was eye-opening and that they would be using this feedback in creating their next product. As they switched to mesh they began releasing content that was far and away better looking than their old sculpted work, but also much lighter on textures.

 They released a mesh version of that same body harness and despite looking far more detailed than the old one it uses only 3 textures, total. And that's only because it includes spec and normal maps. I will name this creator, Dais Abonwood, because everyone should shop at their store, Dark Prophet Designs.

 And that's why I speak up about these issues. Not because I'm out to destroy someone's business, or try to humiliate them or whatever. If I comment at all it's because you're doing something right, and I want to see you improve.