Topic on Extension talk:3D

Problem

3d file loads twice, it loads thumbnail and then the stl file which can take considerable time with huge files (potentially a Gigabyte).

Background

This breaks the expectation that one will quickly move through all files because it may take much more time to fully load the 3d object. This would be a bit like loading a thumbnail for a video in the file page and then loading all of the video (think ~4 GB, e.g File:Kašelj - Rudnik via Orle.webm) itself without any user interaction (an anti-feature of many sites). This considerably consumes user bandwidth.

Proposed solutions

1. Click to load the 3d object;
2. Only load the 3d object automatically if it is smaller than X KB (e.g. less than 2000 KB); or
3. A toggle option in the 3d viewer to automatically load 3d files (disabled by default) - useful for galleries of small 3d files

Notes

This seems like a critical issue that should be resolved before the extension leaves beta or is deployed anywhere, as it will adversely affect user experience.

Not exactly the same but an similar "problem" I suggested too:

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T164544 - Add "Level of Detail" (LoD) implementation for 3D files

That might "fix" the problem you mentioned indirectly (but will also end up in an discussion which size of file is reasonable for users and hardware, anyway).

Interesting idea, and yes it would fully resolve the issue if it also allows clicking to fully load the file.

There doesn't need to be much of a discussion about the right file size. Wikis have metrics about their multimedia usage, and the minimum supported browser requires specific hardware. In fact, some videos may be slow or unbearable in older computers, and yet they are still uploaded. 3d animated content has also existed since MS-DOS times, so most devices have supported lower quality 3d for more than a decade. The problem here is wasting people's bandwidth (and possibly crashing their browsers) without them being aware of it.

It may be slower but smaller files will likely still render in reasonably old devices.

Yes, full file should definitely be available - but we need an warning too, as we already have for large images.

Yes, some high definition videos (or even 4k+) dont work on older PCs but we already got the resolution chooser there, too. 3D files are more compareable to image files. As they get too big, the device might get out of memory or just can't handle the file properly / getting too slow. As for example files created using photogrammetry can get easily 1mio+ polygons. That's handle-able even for older PCs, but I think it's not for many mobile devices (but older ones don't support WebGL, but only afaik). And yes, I agree with the bandwidth issue.