Bigger, better postcards for SL

2005-09-05

There's been something deeply troubling me in SL: namely, how badly butchered the JPEG compression is when you send out snapshots to a site like Snapzilla. I will say this without hesitation: in 1995, it might have been tolerable, but in 2005, it sucks. SUCKS! Pictures have a memory capacity of like 1024 words each so I'll share. The "compression" used really crushes the life out of some photos?namely those with smooth gradient bands that require care. Interestingly enough, there appears to be some adaptivity, and strikingly different areas of varied and contrasted color aren't affected so badly, but if you like sunsets, this will make you cry.

First up, the suckage that appeared on Snapzilla. Source page.



And then, let's have a look at this, Snapshot to Disk:



On the second image, nothing was retouched. Image was taken directly, used a bog standard JPEG compressor (garden variety) on it with a moderately high setting. Nothing you can't find in most graphics programs. Difference in filesize? A whopping… 20 kilobytes. :p

Consider this: with all the data you download from SL, and in this modern day and age of broadband, that's a characteristically puny amount and a low price to pay for the new depth your pictures will take?anyone can appreciate the clarity, it is clear as sunrise to see.

This is important for several reasons:

  1. The first is that the lousy pic can lend a bad impression to someone wondering about SL and is sent a snapshot from a Resident friend. "Are the graphics really that blurry?" It's a naive but honest impression.

  2. Next, it's about preservation. So much valuable history has been archived on Snapzilla and temporally put up on the from page of SecondLife.com, and I don't think much attention will be paid to the past treasure trove until further down the road when the nostalgia phase really starts to arc. Then there'll be more appreciation, because so much history has already been lost. I hear it from Residents all the time, "Wish I had taken pictures!" ME TOO. (I won't go on about how it sucks that SL's internal pics are taken in a power-of-two format so things get disproportioned.)

  3. Third reason is this: hand-in-hand with the other two, and mindful of the timeline, SL is supposed to be cuttingedge and experimental. I see stuff fall through the cracks and it disappoints me, and I wanna help out where I can. Making feature suggestions, bug reports, are ways of doing this. That being said, YES, I've already filed a report on the topic at hand and hope to send a ping every now and then and see how things are coming along at Linden Lab.


Along with "better", I said "bigger". Given the progressively increasing resolutions of computer monitors, it makes sense to at least have an option to send out awesome 1024×768 pictures. After all, the max size of an inworld texture is 1024×1024, so why not?

In the meantime, I'll be continuing to take pictures, watching, waiting… hoping this dream comes true. :)

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