SL Tutorial: How To Cut Land Impact & Memory Load Of Second Life Buildings By 40%+ With Modding
So a common complaint we receive is definitely lag. This complaints kind of comes with the Second Life territory unfortunately, but there are some things that people can do to help reduce this.
Common Things:
Removing unnecessary scripts from items such as trees and landscaping – anything that is texture change via a menu – also has a DELETE option – which should be utilized once the objects are placed and as you build. Rez scripts should be removed after rezzing large scale items from rez boxes. Some common rez script names are as follows: Huge item, positioner, rez faux, ZeroRez, SD_LinkedPrimController, building all, buildingAligner Reciever, component – part, rez-free, component_MLS and link component. All of these are unnecessary once the build is placed into its final position. When and if we are called to the sim for lag issues and find these scripts running you will be contacted by our support staff. These actions are to keep our sims running to the best of their ability and ensure the quality of your living experience with us remains nothing but the best.
In crusing through my daily news feeds and follows I came across an article by Penny Patton that helps to describe modding your structures and objects to reduce lag, prims and make your sim run so much smoother! I also do alot of exactly what she does here when building my own land up. It helps so much with sim stress! Check the links below for the step by step guide & Make sure you hit follow on her blog!
Read about how RL professional visual designer Penny Patton can make Second Life look as good as Fallout 4, even on an older computer — now read her step-by-step guide to doing that with a single building (this post-apocalyptic scrap house above) which she bought in the SL marketplace, through modding:
“I realized that by setting the entire building to “no physics” and replacing the physics with an invisible shell of box prims set to “convex hull” I was able to save yet more land impact. This doesn’t always work, but it works often enough to give it a try and here it ended up saving me a tonne of Land Impact points…. This scrap house is covered in various unique corrugated metal panels. They’re not identical. Out of the box there’s like 6-12 different panels each with it’s own texture, spec map and normal map. All of which are 1024×1024. Each texture uses 4MB of memory on its own and it’s simple arithmetic to see how that adds up. What I did was remove every type of panel except 2. Then I copied the remaining 2 panels to replace each of the panels I removed. Not difficult, but a little tedious and time consuming. But worth it!
Reducing VRAM/Texture Use
VRAM/Texture Memory is less common knowledge in SL but I’ll try and summarize. Your graphics card has a set amount of memory to use rendering what you see in SL. All the textures you see have to be in that memory to be displayed, but so much more relies on that memory so you cannot max your card’s memory out on textures alone or you see massive framerate losses and “texture thrashing”. Texture thrashing is when you see textures going blurry and re-rezzing. You also have to download all these textures, which contributes to lag and slow rez times.
360MB might not sound like a lot of memory, but it’s only one building in an entire sim and then you throw avatars and their memory use into the mix. My videocard only has 2GB of VRAM. It’s a midrange card, a few years old. Newer, more expensive cards have up to around 8GB. Onboard graphics have very little, if any, dedicated memory.
Following so far? Ok, good!
This scrap house is covered in various unique corrugated metal panels. They’re not identical. Out of the box there’s like 6-12 different panels each with it’s own texture, spec map and normal map. All of which are 1024×1024. Each texture uses 4MB of memory on its own and it’s simple arithmetic to see how that adds up.”