Poly pizza turned 3, so here’s a free city pack!

Hello friends,

Poly pizza turned 3 years old last month! Yipee!!!! Thanks for sticking around so long and helping the project grow so much. Around the same time in 2021 the site would be lucky to see ~200 visitors on a good day, and now the daily average is about 7x that. I never imagined it’d grow so much I’m so stoked that it’s still a useful little tool!

To celebrate, I’ve commissioned a little city pack by the lovely JToastie. It features 57 models, some new and some old. Hope you enjoy!

Here’s some fun stats:

• Models have been downloaded 2.2 million times
• 4.8 million page views
• We just hit 10k models uploaded! When we launched it was around 6k

Also a big shout out to the GOAT supporters who subbed in 2021 and are still going strong, you absolute units have carried the server bills this entire time and I’m so grateful!

Big thank: Bigelowed, Lachlan Sleight, LTMichalski and GrantZeebs

Some small site updates

Search is a lot better now! Before I was using a fuzzy matching algorithm to search for models which was great if you made a typo but also matched unrelated models with the same text in them. e.g. Searching “coffee” also matched “coffin”. So now I'm using text embeddings, which has totally fixed the problem and has some cool other benefits.

Semantic search is probably the biggest one, and it’s just a fancy way of saying it understands what words mean now. So you can search for “Australian animals” and get relevant results even if not everything has been tagged with “Australia”. It also means pets (mostly) no longer show up when you search for hot dogs (although this furry character comes up, which I guess is technically correct lmao)

Some cool side effects are that it means searches in different languages now work, it also means model suggestions are 1 million times better now, which was a low bar because they were pretty shitty before. This all comes with a bit more cost but it’s definitely worth it and thanks to all the site’s awesome supporters it’s not an issue.

Fucking mailboxes

so this is an issue that has affected like less than 100 people ever BUT it has shit me off for years so I had to fix it. If you’ve ever searched for mailbox you’ll find a bunch of random models in your results, and this isn’t because the search code was bad (i mean it was but that's unrelated) it’s because I was using an awful vision model to auto tag models and it just thought everything was a mailbox. So I've swapped out the model for a much better one and re-tagged everything. You’re welcome mailbox fans.

I’ve also run all models without tags through the auto tagger, which had the effect of surfacing a bunch of old models with names that wouldn’t normally appear in search, like this guy.

Also I’m having an issue on the server where something is leaking memory somewhere and I have NFI why. So if you upload a model and get “FBX conversion error” give me a shout on the discord so I can restart that bad boy. If anyone out there has linux/node server experience pls halp 😭

More models!

There’s been some great new artists uploading absolute bangers to the site and I’d love to feature some of them.

Mini poly has been absolutely killing it, I love how much character they can get out of so few polys! Definitely check out their profile.

Rey shapes has been making some really cool vertex coloured stuff, like this big plant (I love big plant)

Scaranto’s got some great stuff, like I love how detailed this go kart is

MaverickFX has also been consistently uploading great stuff, like this lighthouse

AssetHunts has been smashing out some really great packs, their collectable items pack has so much good stuff in there.

One more thing…

My other project, Pretty Good Playtesting, is now in free public alpha! So if you’re making a game and want to make it better, faster you might like it.

Anyway here’s to another 3 years, I’ll be celebrating with very high poly pizza from my local joint.

Cheers

dook

This post was approved by Director Of Growth, Angie