Review Policies

When reviewing content for approval in the Space Platform ecosystem; we follow these principles and guidelines. Please not these are not exhaustive lists, and we follow the spirit of these rules, not letter when reviewing your content. Deliberate attempts to obfuscate or avoid these rules may result in a ban in future content uploads.

Account Tests

• Email is verified
• Curator identity information is valid
• Account is in good standing

General Content Tests

Maturity Guidelines, areas in red should not be seen except on mature content, areas in yellow should be rarely seen (less than 25% exposed in total)

• Content must work.
• Content is substantially original work, and not simply a resale of assets purchased from a 3D marketplace (unless specifically authorised by the creator).
• Content must not break the experience for other users.
• Content is not obscene, libellous or defamatory.
  • Mature content is dictated by skin coverage and general societal standards.
  • All mature content must be tagged using the Content Rating system.
• Content should not feature trademarks, copyrights, celebrities, trade dress and other IP which it is not authorised to include.

Additional things we do not allow, but should not need to point out:

• No content that promotes illegal activities.
• Content likely to unreasonably disturb or offend the general public
• No content that promotes fraud or harmful activities, including but not limited to content that may be harmful to others, their reputations, disseminating fraudulent goods, schemes or services (e.g. Ponzi and Pyramid schemes).
• Offensive content (Crude humour is OK, within reason.)
• Racist, sexist or derogatory content
• Drug references
• Harmful content (Viruses, content designed to trigger epilepsy, etc.)
• Any content likely to cause issues with our upstream hosting providers and/or authorities.

Avatar Specific Content

• No avatars depicting human characters under the age of 18, without a special exemption - please contact us, they will typically be granted on medical, therapeutic or training grounds.

Non-Region Content

• Content does not impose unreasonable degradation of client frame-rate.
  • An avatar wearing multiple items should not go above 12,000 polygons. Exception: if you use LOD systems, higher poly counts are allowed.
  • Ideally an avatar should be closer to 8,000 polygons. This should be split based on the proportion of body covered. (e.g. a Jacket which covers 50% of the mesh should be between 4,000 and 6,000 polygons. Shoes which cover 15% should be 1,200.)
  • Clothing content should use the minimum materials possible. While multiple materials is sometimes required for fancy effects, in most cases it is not; and you can bake or atlas your textures. (This often comes from content built in Marvelous Designer and uploaded directly without UV mapping and retexturing but using multiple materials.)
• Content filesize is reasonable for the scale and complexity of the content.
  • Clothing content should typically be around 1-2mb after compression.

Scripted Content

• Content does not place a undue strain on viewers or servers
• Content does not disrupt the core user interface in such a way that the average user cannot cancel or return

Region Content

• Private regions which are marked not-for-sale are subject to minimal screening (account and general content tests only)
• Regions marked for-sale (available to purchase in the shop) are subject to complexity limits similar to non-region content. Typically we'd like to see 30fps on a mid-spec desktop viewer as a minimum with one avatar in the region. Use of Occlusion Culling, and LOD Groups can significantly improve performance of a region.

Exceptions

• Exceptions will be made for particularly impressive content.
• If your content is well-made, but comes in slightly heavier than our typical allowances, we will approve the content.
  • For example: if you have used normal maps or DX11 Tessellation, and still need a few more polygons - and we can recognise that the content simply requires this; we will approve the exception.
  • This is the exceptions, not the rule. Generally we will enforce the above limits.

How we test

• We will examine the uploaded content as-supplied to our processing server
• Our tests may cover multiple platforms (typically Standalone, WebGL and one mobile target), we expect to see graceful fallbacks in content available for general use.
• Content will be benchmarked using our special benchmark setup (this typically involves loading 100 copies of the content into a region, and measuring performance impact)

Appealing a review

• If your content was rejected and you feel this review was unfair, please open a support ticket with the 'Regarding' as 'Creator Program', and include your curator account name, and the item ID for the affected item.