About importing textures to Second Life?

Question

I've never played Second Life but I am curious about some features in it. I heard from a friend that you can make your own buildings and clothes in SL and import your own graphics as the texture. Now here's my question:

Does that mean Second Life's space in your hard drive will keep growing as more and more people create and upload their own custom items?

Answer 1

No. Its a good question. But SecondLife is already huge. If it operated that way you would already have seen the result.

SecondLife uses "vector" art. That means that the images are sent as drawing commands instead of pictures. Instead of a picture of a cat, you get sent some very compressed instructions for drawing a cat.

There are some images used to "fill in" an image but they are also very compressed. Such as, the cat might include a unique fur pattern but it only needs a few dots of fur, which it then uses to fill in the spaces on the cat. Both the drawing instructions and the tiny fill pattern are so tiny that SecondLife can send them each time you need them instead of storing them on your machine.

But mostly it operates using a "cache". Thats a temporary storage. you do hang onto the cats info to speed up your seeing the cat the next time you see it. But if you dont see it for a long time then it gets deleted to make space in the cache for other things. If you visit the cat much later then there is a tiny lag while you get the temp files again.