I've been attending school for production animation. Part of our education is for how to create models for video games. This doesn't make me an expert, but it does help me express an opinion.
Many next-gen game engines (which Second Life currently is not, though I admit I'm impressed with how well it renders what's thrown at it while maintaining reasonable framerates) will have the MAIN CHARACTER of the main around 20,000 tris. Newer ones up that to as high as 80,000 tris, though generally those sorts of games tend not to have excessively detailed environments. I've looked many times, but have been unable to find a tri count for different sorts of primitives in Second Life. Assuming 1024 tris on a sculpty, the famous neckless in question is probably around 125,000 tris. But that's with a made up tri count. I'd need more info to make a proper call. My biggest beef with Second Life is that it does not educate content creators on the standard limits of their engine, and what's considered an acceptable build. So you get people creating excessively detailed and beautiful items that an art director would fire you for. I believe one of the fixes for this issue is for Second Life to determine what their engine is capable of, and release some guidelines for content creators about texture limits, primitive limits, shader limits, and etc, and include some better tools to help them determine how well content creators are fitting within these limits. Yes, every computer is different. That's why this wouldn't be a law, it would be a guildeline. Those that choose to follow it, may. Those that choose to create 172 prim necklaces may continue to do so. Because of the freeness of the camera in SL, a 172 prim necklace actually has a point, where in most games it would be severe, severe overkill. What if SL made a "test app" that used SL's engine, and attempted to render various polycounts, and submitted the stats and hardware back to LL, which would give them some hard numbers to work from? Heck, just a few special sims and an external tool that hooks into the viewer and sends back hardware details and stuff would work. Whatever is easiest on your end. -Stickman _______________________________________________ Policies and (un)subscribe information available here: http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/SLDev Please read the policies before posting to keep unmoderated posting privileges
