One of the greatest challenges of delivering 3-D worlds via the Internet is that 3-D content is often massive in comparison to the speed of the Internet delivering it. World explorers are understandably impatient: they will give up on worlds that take too long to start up.

Several approaches can be pursued to overcome this challenge:

• Minimize resource size, using procedural generation of content, compression, and minification.
• Minimize server round trips to get resources, by using zip archives, parallelized resource loading, and local caches.
• Schedule just-in-time loading, sequencing when resources are loaded according to when the user needs them

Acorn provides support for many of these approaches (refer to the Acorn Resources chapter). This recipe highlights various ways that world-builders can take advantage of Acorn's built-in features to significantly reduce load lag. These techniques should be applied when creating a world's resource assets and when packaging them for deployment to an Internet server.

Create Small-sized Resources

Be Creative about Procedural Content

Procedural generation of a world's shapes and textures often yields the most dramatic reductions in resource size, as meshes and textures are usually a world's worst size offenders. It is not uncommon for multi-polygon models or high-resolution textures to be many megabytes big, each of which can potentially add seconds to load time over a slow Internet connection, wireless or otherwise. Add those delays up across all of a scene's assets and users could end up waiting minutes (or longer) before the scene is ready for them to explore.

Since Acorn is a full programming language, take advantage of its flexibility by writing custom Acorn code that uses clever algorithms to transform a small, low-fidelity "skeleton" into something that looks complex and interesting. For example:

• Begin with a few simple downloaded geometic shapes. Once downloaded, run them through Acorn code that extrudes, lathes, randomizes, and otherwise enriches that geometry. Finally, apply some subdivision algorithm, such as Catmull-Clark, to smooth the finished model.
• Download only a single template part, such as a roof tile, grass tuft or a bridge trestle, then algorithmically generate a shape mesh which duplicates that part hundreds of times at set positions
• Make use of texture shaders or algorithms to create visually complex surfaces, such as water, wood, stone, etc.
• Use random noise generators to generate terrain (or add realistic bumpiness to a coarsely-defined terrain) or visual variety to a small, predictable texture.
• Procedurally re-color one texture to create other similar ones

Procedural generation of a world's assets will not be effective in all situations. It can also add to the time and effort needed to create meshes and textures, particularly since most asset creation tools do not naturally support this ability. However, the technique can sometimes reduce resource size by one or more orders of magnitude.

Low-fidelity Look

Some worlds may deliberately choose a low-fidelity art style, such as a retro design that mimics the pixelated look of older generation games, makes use of blocky voxels (like Minecraft), or resembles the stylized landscapes and figures of cartoons. These art styles can often get away with using low-poly shapes and simply-colored textures, both of which will take up far less space than an art design aiming for photo-realistic landscapes and models.

Also, not every part of a scene requires the same level of detail. Those parts of a scene that are far away or rarely looked at can get away with less-detailed assets. It's a judgment call, as always.

Resource compression

Minifying and compressing resources can provide some modest reductions in resource size. Minifying mostly involves removing comments and white space. Resource compression should be performed when a world's resources are being prepared for deployment, a subject which we will return to in the summary.

Minimize Internet Round-trips

Every time the browser requests a resource from the server, time is taken up waiting for the request to get to the server and then waiting for the requested information to transmitted back. If a world has hundreds of resources and they are requested one at-a-time, that wait time can quickly add up to seconds or minutes.

Package resources into zip archives

The best way to reduce this wait time is to package up a number of resources into a single zip archive. Thus, one request retrieves multiple resources, which Acorn automatically detects and unpacks. In addition to dramatically reducing server request delays, this approach also speeds up the return trip back to the browser, as resource are automatically shrunk due to zip archive compression.

It is common, for example, to have any world's initial world.acn file actually be a zip archive which includes within it the world.acn acorn program as well as all other resources that world.acn needs at start-up.

Simultaneous Resource Retrieval

There are situations where using zip archive resource packaging is not possible (e.g., cross-domain resources) or desirable (e.g., when resources are staged to be available at varying times). In such situations, it can be beneficial to take advantage of Acorn's ability to request more than one resource at the same time, while continuing to also allow user's to interact with the world.

One should time any resource load request far enough ahead of time that we can expect it to be available when the user needs it. Various early-warning signals might trigger this, such as knowing the user is a few seconds away from walking around a corner where new vistas open up.

Loading Resources Just-In-Time

That brings us to the last strategy, which takes advantage of two truths:

• Not all resources are needed at the same time
• Users are less bothered by waiting if they have something interesting to do while waiting

So, rather than forcing the user to wait a long time while all of a world's resources can be loaded, just start by loading only the resources the user sees and needs first. Then, while the user is busy looking at or doing stuff, start loading the next resources the user will need. This approach mimics how Youtube handles video streaming: rather than loading the entire video, it just loads the first few seconds and then starts playing that video segment. While the user watches what has already been downloaded, the next needed video segment is already being retrieved in the background.

For example: a user entering a world might see a quickly-retrieved splash page with a progress bar whose motion sets expectations and provides hope. Meanwhile, additional resources are being loaded and then presented: perhaps offering a login screen, an action menu, or an avatar selection/creation dressing room. While the user is interacting with this content, the world might anticipate what happens next and starts to load the entryway to the next scene. The 3-D content nearest the spawn point might appear first, with further out or lesser important content appearing as it becomes available or paging in as the user starts navigating the scene.

The point behind this approach is to sequence and stage the loading of resources so that the user becomes engaged early and constantly thereafter.

Summary

To tame the load lag monster, a world-builder should:

• Keep the world's resources as small and reusable as the world's aesthetic allows, taking advantage of procedural generation of shapes and textures.
• Organize the resources into folder groups according to when the resources need to be loaded and available.
• Create a resource production pipeline that automates the process of deploying the world to a production server. This pipeline would handle minifying all Acorn programs and creating compressed zip archives that package together resources that load together.