Stormwood: Mesh Paving Stone Kit - Roman

The creator has beautiful pictures advertising her product on MP but the product itself does not compare. Even the grass between the stones looks odd, more like vertical spikes in a row than an imitation of grass. At L$500 this was an expensive purchase that I am disappointed with and will never use.

The highest detail model is well made, with decent textures and look great.

The problems arise in the technicalities however. The creator hasn't bothered to make nice LOD Models (Secondlife uses different 'levels of detail' models for different camera distances)

You can see here http://prntscr.com/gj399c , that with the camera not too far away, with Preferences at LoD 2 (The default setting that most visitors at your sim will have) that there are holes in the side of the curb stones. As a mesh modeller, I can tell you this is poor design and actually results in worse performance for your Sim as players have to turn up their LoD setting to make up for creators poor Lod Modelling. The pop-in is very noticeable and makes your sim feel clunky and unnatural to look at moving around.

Second issue is to do with performance. The creator has put 1024* textures on things that do not need them. See this texture for instance http://prntscr.com/gj3cdy there are massive black gaps of unused space. You could achieve the same amount of detail with a 512* texture. If all products in a persons sim are like this, an average visitor on a average computer is lucky to get 5fps and will likely leave as a result. The creator uses bump maps with very dark specular maps, meaning they might as well not have bump maps, and this also equates to wasted computer memory too, which could have been spent impressing visitors elsewhere.

I know this review sounds harsh, but I wanted to provide a perspective from a technical background, as it frustrates me that SL is so laggy when it need not be.