Content Processing
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When you upload a piece of content to our servers, we run a variety of processes on it before building the final export packages. We build one package per platform (e.g. one for WebGL, one for standalone, one for each mobile OS, one for each console.) This processing does take some time to perform depending on the content type. Regions typically take around 15 minutes to process depending on their size (a large multi-gigabyte region can take up to an hour), whereas virtual goods (such as Clothing, Gestures or Vehicles) less than 5mb will process usually within 20 seconds.
The content will go through a series of steps to be uploaded to the Sinespace client:
1. After you have clicked on the Automatic Submission button on the virtual good component, your item will be being uploading to our servers. You will receive a notification stating this on your registered email address. You can also check on curator.sine.space to see the status of the upload. At this stage, the status of your item will read 'Processing'.
2. Once the item has processed, you will receive another email stating that your item is now on staging. This will be reflected on Curator as well, with your item having the 'Staging' status. You will need to log into Curator to see the progress of your item. Now you can preview the item and check it is working correctly on our preview servers. You can do this by starting the Sinespace client, and tick the 'Preview Server' box and log in as usual.
3. If you are happy with your content and it is working/showing correctly, you can then send the item to be reviewed by our review team. You can do this on curator by clicking on the 'Send to Review' button.
4. Our team will review your content and decide whether or not to accept it and push it to our live servers or reject the item. If the item is rejected, the team will add a note to it on curator to say why it has been rejected. If you don't receive a note, please send us a support ticket and we will look into the issue with the content. You will need to fix the issue and then re-upload the item with the same item ID. You can see how to use the same ID here.
5. If your item is accepted, we will push it to the live servers. The region or virtual goods will then be available to all users in the 'Explore' tab (for regions) or in the Shop for virtual goods. The content will not show up in the Shop if you have set it as 'Not for Sale'; it will only show in your inventory.
When you upload content for processing it, we will process it in the order it is received, with a handful of exceptions. Virtual Goods less than 10mb in size will always process on a separate priority queue regardless of account status (this is to ensure you can quickly preview content that does not take long to process).
Other content will process on the larger region queue. We have a separate priority region queue for customers subscribing to a large region plan. Generally speaking we do aim for content to process quickly; during periods of large user growth, we may need to add additional processing servers
Depending on the platform your textures are likely to be re-compressed into a native format for that platform, e.g. DXT1/5 on Standalone, JPEG for WebGL, etc. you can configure these settings prior to upload in the 'Importer'. We recommend against picking a specific format, and instead using the 'Automatic True Colour / Automatic Compressed / Automatic Crunched / Automatic 16-bit' master options; as specific formats may be substituted on a platform by platform basis.
We will strip mesh data down into a compact binary format. The specific format varies platform to platform (such as using 16-bit precision on mobile, and 32bit on desktop). Included animations will be often converted into rotational space, and re-sequenced onto a series of timelines. We may also strip data which is not being used by your materials (e.g. Vertex Colours or UV3/4 if your shaders do not require them.)
From time to time, we make make changes to our packaging formats, either to introduce new compression schemes or allow for new features to be supported. Often this will break compatibility with previous releases; so we have support for content reprocessing. When your content is published, we keep a copy of the original files uploaded to the processing server and can use these to automatically reprocess content into the newer formats. Generally this should not require any intervention on your part.
