10
Jul
Doors & Windows; (Deutsche Version)
Doors. The problem with Second Life is doors.
Being excited about another freebie from a creator whose buildings she really liked, my partner El and I went to a sandbox to unpack it and examine it. It was a large building, some kind of palace, using great textures, as we had expected. However, the building looked “flat”, as El remarked. It took me a moment to figure out what she meant: In contrast to the other palace we had for a while, the new one had no windows. Well, it had windows, but these were just part of the textures, and not actually built out of prims. Let me show you:
In the first picture, the windows are created out of arched sculptie prims. In the second picture, the windows are simply cutouts in the texture. The problems with this approach are manifold. First, it makes for the flat look. That’s especially annoying in a world where things are, by default, 3D, and gives the impression of an overall low quality. Second, there’s the issue with overlapping alpha textures (as can actually be seen in the right window of the second picture). When two transparent textures are close together, the graphics card has to ‘guess’ which one is on top of the other, and sometimes (about half the time) does the guesswork wrong, which ends up with the transparent texture ‘behind’ being displayed on top of the other. Also, a prim is either phantom or no phantom, so a door made this way will not enable anyone to walk through except the prim will be turned phantom and thus enables you to walk through the wall around the door as well. Additionally, textures for windows need to be of a higher resolution in order to give them the detail they need (as they not only need to texturize the window, but also the surrounding wall) and they’re less flexible. And finally, it is plain harder to find or make any good window or door textures.
I’ve been labouring with this problem ever since I started building, and actually even longer, when I looked for buildings, whose windows are not painted on. (Anyone who ever went out to buy a building in SL knows that most of them are made with alpha-texture windows.) In all the years of building I have always avoided this, building around windows. It makes, however, for a lot of headaches in Second Life, as making a window with prims instead of textures naturally uses much more prims than the texturized approach, which will, as windows multiply easily on a single build, lead to a much higher prim count. This is another instance where LL’s prim-based approach on sim performance falls flat on it’s belly, as it forces builders to go for lesser-quality solutions which do not neccessarily improve sim performance. Do the math: The second picture uses a 1024×1024 texture for the windows, not including the texture for the glass, which is just attributed to sloppy texturing, as it could be included into the first texture easily. Making this window with prims would need about 5 prims for the window frames and 1 more prim for the glass, but instead of the 1024 x 1024 texture we could use a regular wall texture of 512×512 pixels and another 512×512 for the glass. As the 1024 texture is 4 times as big as a 512 texture, we actually save two 512 textures in this attempt, and loading textures adds much more strain on the sim and uses more render power than loading just prims, because the file size of textures is much bigger.
It’s not different with doors; rather, it’s worse. Mostly, what you find for a door, is a photograph of a RL door that’s been cut out and uploaded into SL. That creates several issues: Firstly, the photograph will rarely be the perfect resolution for SL (for example 512×512 pixels in size) which makes for some stretching when SL presses it into its preconfigured sizes, creating stretch artifacts as it does. Secondly, in most cases you’ll just have the front of the door, and while you could use the same texture mirrored for the back, you’ll still have to come up with something for the sides of the door, otherwise they’ll look ugly – and believe me, there are people paying attention to that. And finally, it will again make your door look flat, since all the panels, the door handles, or maybe carvings, which are visible on the texture will be just that: a texture. Here, too, the solution is to build the door out of prims, which will drive up the prim count of your building more.
Now, sculpts provide some solution to this, as it’s possible to make a paneled door out of one single sculpt, but still… using a great number of sculpts will make for a lot of viewer side lag, which is not the result you want. The only, and best, solution for this would actually be to increase the prim limits (or get rid of them altogether1 and switch to OpenSim, which allows for a much larger prim count) and make builders actually pay attention to detail and make their 3D-creations truly three-dimensional.
A house is not a box. It’s an intricate set of cuts and hollows, of corners and angles, and will thank you when you treat it as such.
- Why is it, that LL’s servers get better and better, yet the prim limit always stays the same? [↩]
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