Pretty amazing reader debate around my interview with professional game artist Penny Patton, who pointed out the problems with poorly optimized mesh items being sold in Second Life, and how to solve them. (That one shirt above, as I noted, has way more triangles than Kratos in God of War on the PlayStation 4.)
Reader "Seph" makes the interesting argument that creators are creating triangle-heavy products to please consumers:
Customers buy products that look great, regardless of what it does to their performance. If they preferred performance, I guarantee creators would be selling performance.
Linden Lab rolling out PBR and some better lighting features will help creators rely on more modern material maps and rendering instead of mesh density. More modernizing of Second Life's graphics engine and content creation pipeline will help more.
In the meantime, no creator is doing this to sell less but make performance floater watchers happy. Penny can keep calling them ignorant and lazy, but making customers happy is anything but.
I don't think Penny said either of those things, but I can see how customers might demand massive amounts of triangles, even though it actually does nothing for graphics quality — similar to how in the US, there's a market for huge SUVs with impressive grilles, even though they actually do nothing for driving quality. (And in both cases, they harm the environment for the respective world they're in.)
Seph's expanded comments help explain why mesh creators are making the equivalent of Cadillac Escalades for Second Life's fashion crowd:
Most people are wearing beautiful well made things that are very intricate but yes, very dense in mesh because that's the only way to achieve competitive detail right now without proper modern materials and lighting.
So it's not about how to make a really good black t-shirt. It's about how to be competitive with other designers and always one-upping yourself for your customers. For you its a no brainer to put shirt buttons on a normal map and hope customers have ALM on and happen to be in good directional lighting where maybe that detail will pop. For a working designer in SL though its a no brainer to mesh that button and ensure the detail pops because all their competition does that and a flat unshaded textured button would awful.
If one designer won't use increased mesh density and more material maps to make something better looking, another will, and the former will be at a disadvantage that costs money and livelihood.
The fix? Linden Lab keeps making strides like the upcoming PBR materials. Making better performance and better looking one in the same rather than things at odds is the only way this will ever improve. Accusing ignorance or lack of education is short-sighted. The most popular and most worn designers are incredibly talented and overqualified for Second Life's level of content creation and know exactly what they're doing and why.
No question that SL content creators are incredibly talented! But upgrades like PBR can only improve the performance quality of the world so much. If creators are making heavy mesh items as competitive differentiators, then that's actually a strong argument for Linden Lab to impose system limits on uploading them in the first place. That would put the onus on doing better with a limited range of triangles to work with.
Because that way, creators can tell their triangle-hungry customers, "Sorry, my hands are tied."
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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