Archive for February 25th, 2016

Those who follow my products have probably noticed a slight change in my product picture template, so I figured that it wouldn’t hurt to explain it a little.

Primitives where a nice and “simple” metric, the problem is that they did not account for many important factors. And I don’t think it’s enough to “just” present the prim count/land impact anymore.

Land Impact

This estimates the object complexity and the burden it places on the region, the physical shape’s complexity is what impacts this value the most, objects that are very small or very big are negatively impacted. It’s the replacement for the old primitive count, and while it is available for most products, there are numerous ways to lower this metric to a point where it doesn’t mean much anymore.

Script count

They have a huge impact on the health of a region. Many avatar accessories have more than 10 scripts to do seemingly mundane functions.

Script count is only one side of the story, it doesn’t tell us how complex those scripts are or how much strain they put on a region, but it will give you an idea of how much memory your object is using.

Draw Weight

This metric is a measure of how taxing this object will be for your (and everyone’s) graphic card and accounts for everything graphical including (but not limited to):

• polygon count.
• material settings.
• texture count.
• texture size.
• whether a mesh is rigged or not.
• animated textures.
• flexi-prims.

You don’t need to know the exact formula, a lower value is almost always better for your SecondLife experience. If you are curious about the draw weight of something you are wearing, simply right-click > edit it and click on “More info”, the “Display Weight” is what you are looking for.

How do I use this?

I Believe that, It is better for SecondLife as a whole if you have all the information available before you decide to support a designer. You don’t have to be a 3D expert to make an educated purchase, but designers should provide more data than the  primitive count.