Dealing with a laggy neighbor

Right now, i've got a nice litle house set up on an island sim, beachfront, nice ocean view, really kickass in other words. The only problem is that the owners of the lot right next to mine own a house that uses very high res textures on the outer walls. In other words, my frame rate goes in the toilet whenever i'm down there and not up in my skybox. This is a managed community that i'm in, and i've considered reporting them for it, but thats the absolute last resort.

What can I do to keep my frame rate up without ticking off the neighbors?

Ask them to change down to a lower rez?

Offer to take their textures, resize them and reupload them for free?

edit: I've never found that textures have much of affect on framerate, it's just load time that goes to pot. Are there lots of different high res textures?

Won't work. The house is a prefab, very very large, and no mod.

I thought SL resized textures to 512x512 max, JPEG format and you couldn't bump over that? No?

It could be that the problem isn't the textures but the size of the house and the number of scripts it runs. If it has auto-opening doors and lots of poseballs that listen on channel 0, that could be part of the problem.

Have you tried running Scan-Foo on it yet?

Umm.. have you talked to your neighbor about it?

No, SL will let you upload up to 2048x2048 resolution textures with alpha channels. Allegedly when you upload they all get converted to JPEG2000, but they're still 2048x2048. Strangely, when you download a texture your only option to save it as is a Targa.

Rabid door sensors could be laggy, lag from channel listeners is overrated. I've had over 4000 listeners (on non-zero channels, admittedly) in a 3m area before and the 'lag' wasn't noticable. Even on non-zero channels the listeners still get parsed when people talk, even if only to say 'Are you on this channel?'

High-rez textures can noticably impact viewer performance in large quantities. I had a neighbor who was using a lot of them and my framerate would plummet when I turned toward his shop, and his store and the products (rugs) were scriptless.

If I'm not mistaken, the new 'Occulsion' features should help you immensely - especially if you're experiencing this problem indoors.

This new feature makes it so that your video card wont have to render objects & textures that are within your draw distance, but blocked by a wall or structure. Today, everything within your draw distance gets rendered.

The feature should be out tommorow if everything goes as planned - so you shouldn't have to wait too long

Wait this wasn't included already. I thought that was one of the most basic things most games did to speed up framerates and down size the impact on the graphics card.

its mch miore complicated in sl cause the world definition is dynamic, in most games its static and you can take a lot of shortcuts

the lag you experiment is prolly due to the swapping of textures between your ram and your video card memory, the only viable solution is to get the prefab maker axed

One problem: This rpelaces loading lag with checking for alpha textures, opaque textures, etc, and finding what you can see before it loads. All it does is replace one form of lag with another.

I think you're thinking of "Attachment culling" which indeed has already been put in place. Object occullsion is different, and supposedly a much bigger deal.



Hehe you might be absolutely right on that. I guess we'll know tommorow either way

hehe, there used to be an option to turn it on in the debug menu. It dropped my framerate by a third . So, in theory, they figured out how to do it without a direct tradeoff, but some improvement.

Well, i did some looking around, and found out two very interesting things.

1st of all, after a bit of scan-foo work,there are only 18 scripts on the lot, 6-8 of which are active. Two in the house itself (its a Hoffman prefab), and the others in other things i'm not going to mention here. (This IS someone's house after all )

2nd, i tried the sneakier method and ran GLIntercept after giving everything a chance to load. I got 7 512x512's, 11 256x256's. Most of the 256's were land textures. A couple of the 512 ones were totally blank. Maybe i hadnt given some of the interior stuff time to load, idk.

So anyways, SL is busy drawing what is inside the house as well, which would explain a lot. The house is packed with stuff!

Occlusion Culling FTW.

Ah... my neighbors must love me. One of these days, I need to buy some furniture... LOL

I'm a very laggy neighbor. I have a large store, and sell from boxes, which means hundreds of different textures. I keep my textures to 256 to try and cut the load down some, but I know the sheer amount will still create lag.

I solve this problem by buying up all the land around me.

A way you could try to reduce it further is, combine sets of 4 of these 256 px textures into 512 px ones, then use such sets to texture multiple prims (using UV scale and offset) ... large part of performance killer for gfx card is having to swith to a new texture over and over and over and over ... so the more you can reduce that, the better.

I'm going to give that a try. Thanks for that tip. I already sometimes combine 4 256 images into 1 512 to use as Forum ads, so it wouldn't really be any more work to just upload those ads, and would save on upload costs. Bonus

Where do you get things like scan-foo and GLIntercept. Ive built my own castle and was curious for checking my own lag in my place, or any other programs that are good for this would be great.

Ok, Scan-Foo you can buy from a shop in-world

And GLIntercept is here.

GLIntercept requires a bit of setup, if you like, i can send you an INI file i have for it that makes it only capture things on hitting a hotkey instead of always (which will lag you into the next ice age).