limit avatars to 1000 prims

For the prim weighting idea Argent, I would still just go by the polygon count (which should be possible to read easily) rather than trying to make a system. The poly count will tell you all you need to know, if the frame-rate is dropping then scale down the higher poly prims first.

One thing on the issue of complex avatars, I have a suit of armour that I like, and it has various parts that can be deployed, and additionally can be teleported 'away'. Meaning lots of prims that are there, but not visible. These still add to poly count which is annoying, I raised it in another thread, but there are a number of avatar effects out there that are the same (lots of invisible prims until they are needed). These shouldn't even be rendered except when you need to edit them, as they aren't even visible.

Maybe, but that's not the main point: if people want more than reasonable privileges, let 'em pay for it.

Well, I'd ask Argent to verify or counter that last point. 'Cause if you don't have "view avatar in window" clicked on... there's a chance the renderer totally ignores your own avatar as non-rendered. I dunno... Argent?

But as for that critter with 256 prims in the tails... let's think a moment and liken this to land. Imagine that no prim limit existed for land. Oh, people would go nuts! Then if someone recommended a land prim limit of say... 117 prims per 512, aw, there'd be a riot! "I can't work with 117 prims! Why, the chair in my living room alone takes 800! I want my chairs to look good!"

Well, since there is a prim limit, people learn how to make great looking chairs in 5 prims. That's how it works. I appreciate that a 9-tail, 256 prim avatar may look good... but does that mean that avatar has to have a 256 prim tail to look good? Are we to believe it couldn't possibly look good with a lesser prim tail?

Limiting prims on land and then not putting any limit on avatars-- which cause much more lag-- is counterproductive. But on final thought, I'd say that rather than 200... 256 prims (binary number after all) would be the perfect limit. That would still allow people enough prims to have a great-looking avatar, and offer a reasonable limit on excessive rendering.

Why would we want to do that? Try walking at a party sometime with 50 avatars on the sim, and the reason will become immediately clear.

One alternative would be to allow as many prims as the av wants... but prims under a certain size simply don't render further than 2m away. That way someone standing next to you doesn't have to mess with rendering all those prims, but someone zooming in on the av to take a closer look can see the detail. However, just like with scripting, with every prim the system has to take processor time to figure out "should this prim be rendered or not"? So that's the downside, regardless.

Now alternately, LL could just try fixing the core-lag issues in the first place, and prim rendering might become a moot point. But even then, allowing people to put as many prims on an avatar as their greedy little hearts desire to me is not condusive to the greater good of SL. I remember one girl wearing hoochie hair who blatantly announced to all those around her, "I don't care how much it lags, as long as I look good." And she was serious. That self-centered mentality is why system controls are put in place... and why land is prim limited to 117 / 512. If they didn't have land limits, 100,000 prims on a sim wouldn't be enough.

To the contrary.

For UV mapping purposes SL client breaks down each face of cube into 3 x 3 x 2 = 18 triangles. That means one cube converts to 108 triangles for rendering purposes.

9000 cubes mean 972.000 triangles, i.e. nearly a million faces. Per frame, that's quite enough to kill performance on most average systems.

re: the original post, 1000 prims is a large number. Doubt there's many AVs who would actually hit it, but to put that limit there is probably a good idea. If just because 'building race' increases amounts of prims put on AVs rather than remove them, so such limit is bound to be met more and more often.

Umm... the Nvidia MX400 is rated at 20 million triangles per second, the 7900 GTX is in the 550 million triangles per second range. The black cube is the fastest and easiest prim to render in SL and even a midling card can handle the triangles needed to render them. Also, I don't think you can even get 9000 prims to attach to an avatar anyway and I believe the official record is about 6000 or so.

That's theoretical fill rate in ideal conditions -- all data preloaded and locked, no textures, no processing of any sorts, etc. Very different situation from real applications.

Or to put it simpler, 550 mil triangles would in theory mean you can render 9 mil triangles per frame, at 60 frames/second. Instead, even engines as powerful as Unreal Engine 3 suggest characters shouldn't exceed 3-12 k triangles each (based on expectation of 5-20 visible characters in scene) ... and the "large" scenes should _peak_ at 0.5-1.5 mil drawn triangles total (i.e. including the characters et al) This means, real performance is ~1/10 th of theoretical claimed maximum.

edit: also, consider these 9000 mentioned cubes wouldn't be the only thing rendered... they'd be *added* to already existing load. As such, they may well be the proverbial straw breaking the camel's back and sending the card in one way trip to the lag city. A nearly 1 mil triangles worth straw.


30 visible attachment points on AV * 255 prims in linked set: 7650 prims, plus however many particles are generated with embedded scripts. I guess the 9k number included the HUD attachment points, as that means 38 points for 9690 prims total ... but obviously, these are only seen by the person wearing the HUD parts.

So, with 1/10 the performance, 55 million is still enough to render 1 million triangles at 55 FPS which is 10 more FPS than the servers are running. An MX 400 with 2million effective triagles is only going to be able to run at 2 FPS which is only a couple of frames per second less than what they get now typically and that's not even considerind LOD issues which will help significantly.

My point still stands that cube prims aren't as big a problem as just a few tori and other twisted and mangled prims are.

If I remember correctly... SL only renders the visible surfaces of any object. Which on a cube, would cut the above calculation by half, not to mention cubes that are behind cubes and thus totally culled.

But I agree with the 2 or 3 that have commented that I have never seen or even heard of an avatar wearing 9,000 prims. Such a "limit" would be unrealistic, since so very few (if any) avatars would even approach that limit.

Let's consider this mathematically. If one divides 9,000 by 256 (the maximum number of objects that can be linked at one time) we come up with 35-- which would be the total number of attachment points to which such an object could be affixed to the avatar. I believe someone mentioned an av having only 30 attachment points... which makes 9,000 prims on an av a techican impossibility. Even limiting to 30... can we imagine an avatar walking around with 256 prims attached to 30 different spots? Talk about cumbersome... he'd be a walking prim junkyard!

Now if the OP had recommended limiting prims to 900, I think that might have been within the realm of feasibility (although far too high to significantly reduce lag, since the vast majority of avs wear far under 200 prims as it is). But 9,000? I seriously doubt that avatars toting 1000+ prims are all that common, let alone 9,000.

The idea of limiting avatar-worn prims is valid-- but only if it is in a range that it significantly reduces avatar prim abuse. Considering average avatar prim usage, I have to believe that any restriction over 200-300 prims would be too high to even bother with. 99% of the avatars on SL wouldn't ordinarily reach that high to start with.

That is a correct statement... or at least it was several months ago. We tested basic cubes vs torus. A single torus-based plant could lag significantly more than thousands of cubes.

One interesting experiment we ran was to rez some 12,000 cubes on a blank sim. Know the result? No discernable effect. We were able to move around, fly around, look around, and the sim acted like a blank sim. At the time I was using a standard Nvidia FX5500 AGP card with 64megs ram (these days I'm sporting an ATI X800XL PCIx with 256 megs).

I'd be interested in running the same test again under current conditions, using different graphics and processor systems. I wonder if, even under my current video system, I'd experience lag? I heard a rumor that LL had made an adjustment to the way graphics are handled that makes torus shapes far less offensive... but I don't know the details.

At one time it was well understood that certain "hoochie hair" designs-- made out of torus shapes-- could totally lag and even crash a sim! One hairdo!

That just can't be good. LOL

No.

You are, in effect, proposing to limit everyone's abilities based on the ability of your client. A lot of us have payed good money to be able to look at blingtards and furries without lagging, so I don't see why I should have to suffer because others dont, frankly. That's what the LoD sliders are for.

If you want the ability to limit access to your partical based on prim count, we can talk. But leave my options open.

First, that's basically what the "level of detail" system actually does.

Second, the problem is that to figure the polygon count you have to do pretty much all the CPU-side part of the rendering operation anyway. If the frame rate is dropping you need to avoid that calculation in the first place.

I'm not sure why transparent textured or 100% alpha prims are loaded (I have some ideas, but I'm not sure), and I agree it would be best if you could designate surfaces as "not rendered" rather than "100% alpha", perhaps with a special texture.

I made this retarded 9000 torus prims onto my avatar... actually, I didn't stop there. I also added more into my hud. So I had 9690 Torus prims on and TPed to FuturePerfect... it was laggy at first, but once it loaded the sim, it ran just fine.

All my setting are maxxed out, along with adding 3gb more into my page-file system.

FPS only dropped about 8. From 19 to 11fps.... BIG BLOODY DEAL!

there's a thing called Culling Render!



He's the idea... let linden labs give client's graphic option to set a avatar prim limit to view on. Just like the particle limiter thing we already have.

... or you could get a job to buy a better PC.

Yes, using ~$600 worth latest piece of hardware that most people won't put in their computers in next 2-3 years it is possible to render this kind of workload without noticeable slowdown. This is akin to argument asshole drivers who cause traffic jams are not a potential problem that should be dealt with, because a private jet can take you anywhere you want, whenever you want.


If you have framerate drop from say 5-6 fps to 2, then it means it just dropped by _more than half_. If getting half the performance thanks to extra geometry that needs to be rendered is not considered lag, then i seriously have to wonder what *is*


Certainly, you can easily lag people *even more* with more complicated shapes than you can with cubes. But to say extra million triangles doesn't make any real difference on performance (which as i read it was your original point, not that more complicated stuff is more lethal) ... is quite silly.

Indeed, 40% hit to performance when one moron decides to overload their AV with prims and happens to visit the same sim you're in is hardly anything to complain about.

Now, give your friend or a few a copy of your 9000 torus outfit, and try to render all of you at once. Because what's going to stop everyone and their kitchen sink from dressing up like that, eventually? Certainly not the common sense.

On the other hand, you're suggesting that people should set their sliders less than best quality so that others can wear absurdly large numbers of prims, without any limits?

There are always those who are against limits of any kind. But the fact is: all societies require sensible limits. SL is no different. Allowing someone to wear 1,000... 3,000... 7,000 prims just because they want to , regardless of the effect on everyone else, is detrimental to the system as it currently exists.

Like you, I wish people could just wear as many prims as they possibly want, with no problems. I wish LAND could have as many prims as people possibly want. But that's just not reality. If you were to put no limit on land tomorrow... within 3 days the system would totally crash, because people would ignore all common sense and go hog wild. They'd be putting prim buttons on tufted leather chairs, and filaments inside lightbulbs and no telling what all. The land prim limit is there for good reason. So why do people thing that an avatar prim limit is such a bogus idea? The bogus idea is no avatar limit on prims. I have to wonder how that one was overlooked in the first place.

Mind you, I'm not saying limit avs to 50 prims or 100 prims. Give them enough to give shape to their av. But you go over 500 max... it gets into "unnecessarily wasteful" stage. And I know that if every av on SL had 500 prims, we would not be able to walk, at all.

The more prims an avatar wears, the more that avatar lags everyone around him. So at that point it goes beyond what that individual wants... and gets into what's the best formula for the society in general. There is a need for balance, so that avatars are not restricted to too few prims... nor allowed too many.

At least, that's the concept. How many events have we been to where people were asked to put on simpler hairdos, remove unnecessary prims and eliminate scripting/particle counts from their avs? There's a reason for that.

Considering the data presented already, how did you manage to attach 9,000 prims to your avatar? Remembering that HUDS are invisible and do not count... the theoretical limit is 30 * 256 = 7680.

So... if someone sets their prim limit... which prims display and which do not?

Are you actually recommending that thousands of other people go out and purchase new PCs at a cost of $1000 or more each... so a person can wear ludicrous and needless thousands-a-prims avatars? Seems unreasonable to me. A far more balanced solution is to set a reasonable prim limit and have people learn to stop being ludicrous on avatar prim count.

However, something that I would suggest even more is that the SL graphics engine and code be updated and streamlined so that it's not such a resourse hog. Then perhaps it wouldn't lag all that much. But even then, restrictions on the number of avatar prims should still exist... for the sole reason of stopping some griefer clown from trying to lag everyone around him by wearing thousands of torus prims.

Now, that said, probably the ideal limit for av prims is 256 per avatar. That would be enough to take care of likely 99.9% of the avs on the grid.

HOWEVER... let no one mistake that I'm actually suggesting this. This is all just discussion, based on the initial post that limiting avs to 9,000 prims would be good (obviously not. They can't wear that many prims). So how many theoretically would be a good limit? Well, that's part of the discussion.

But actually doing that? I think someone aready mentioned Daryth's dragons. Can you imagine the screams when people can no longer wear dragons that cost them L4000, L7000 or more? So I am absolutely not going to be the one who says, "Oh, we should do this"... because there are a lot more things in SL that can be done to reduce lag. Limiting av prim count is a viable concept... but I'm not sure it's a realistic one at this time.

Experiments conducted on pretty mundane video card prove out my point:

"That is a correct statement... or at least it was several months ago. We tested basic cubes vs torus. A single torus-based plant could lag significantly more than thousands of cubes.

One interesting experiment we ran was to rez some 12,000 cubes on a blank sim. Know the result? No discernable effect. We were able to move around, fly around, look around, and the sim acted like a blank sim. At the time I was using a standard Nvidia FX5500 AGP card with 64megs ram (these days I'm sporting an ATI X800XL PCIx with 256 megs)."

Also, in real world use, 5 frames per second absolutely sucks ass, 2 frames per second sucks ass just a little more. Your analogy of the slow driver and the jet is just.. I dunno... nonsensical. Plus I was just using the formula you presented, real world results would vary a lot because of LOD sliders, occlusion and what have you. Even a run of the mill 6600 has more than enough power to render 1 million triangles 20 times a second which is about the best you can get from the card most of the time in SL. That's not an unattainable, pie in the sky card at all. Apparently even a 5500 has enough to render 12,000 cube prims and not show appreciable lag. Unless you doubt Wayfinder Wishbringer's story that is. Of course I was aware of the experiment when it was conducted and that is why I made my original statement.


But, be that as it may... you win, I concede. You are now champion and I am but a sniveling, crushed thing defeated by your argument and your command of graphic card knowledge. Hail Cesar!

actually my more recent investment was an athlon x2 4200+ with 4Gb of ram and a geforce 7900GTX

you want to know my verdict? i hardly feel myself lagging less, i though it would be a big jump of fps or something, but no.

So the peoples saying to get better hardware are just talking out of their ass

I echo those results Kyrah. I have to admit that going from an Athlon 2800+, 256 meg, Nvidia 5500 64meg system to a Intel duo-core, 1 gig, ATI X800XL 256meg PCIx system didn't bring nearly the improvements within SL itself that I had hoped. It helped a little... but considering the jump in system power, not nearly as much as I had hoped.

What I did notice of course, with the duo-core, is that now I can run SL and have my email program, graphics program and a TV-PVR all working at the same time... and SL still works. Before, if I loaded SL and Windows Paint... SL would come to a practical standstill.

But SL itself? I think I could run any decent Pentium or Athlon processor, 512 megs of RAM and at least an Nvidia 5500 AGP graphics card and do about as well as I do now. Mind you, this is an unofficial, opinion-based view; at the time I had the 5500 we did not have local lights and flexi prims. So I can't run a true, bonafide experiment to see. But I've heard this echoed from others, that serious lag seems to affect most people, no matter what computer they're using.

It has to be realized that most avatars on SL don't really tote all that many prims. I'd wager the vast majority are well under 100. So frankly, all evidence considered, I don't really think limiting avatar prim count is the main issue (although for sure, a high-prim avatar can lag everyone around him... so it is an issue). The main issue is...well, the theme of the lag threads. Things that LL can do to make SL run better and faster. And hooo-boy, is that a debate.

Ok, I've thought about what you said how it's not possible but I have done that already.

But the thing is all torus was stacked in one same spot, all over my avatar, it ran fine... that is because of the culling each others.

So what I did this time, I created another stack of torus prims with both tapers on 1 and rotated around the stack to make them exposed more. Also had more than one stack of torus in a ball, off by 0.25m to the next. So I started wearing them and it really dragged my PC from 45fps (was in space, btw) down to 3fps. I didn't even do the hud attachments yet. I figured maybe it would help if I turn the mech detail for object all the way down, but instead, it just crashes my PC. Soon as I relogged, the FPS was at 12. Then my stupid camera starts zooming closer to my avatar and crashed again. My computer was trying to pop the mech detail up as closer you get to it.

So, it IS possible to have more than 9000 prims... but not quite for anything if you actually have something culling them.

It's kinda a good way to benchmarking your PC with this retarded prims attachments. : P

If anyone want to try it, go ahead IM me for a copy... but don't say I didn't warn you. Best to detatch all quickly soon as you relogged after you crash.

My PC is...
AMD 64bit 4000+ (2.41Ghz)
ATI 256mb x1600 Turbo Sapphere (600Mhz)
1GB of Ram plus 3GB via Paging File.


"Are you actually recommending that thousands of other people go out and purchase new PCs at a cost of $1000 or more each..." -Wayfinder

uhh sure, why not? I built my own just under 975$

You went with Athalon, that's your problem.

My computer is far less than that and I don't lag appreciably in day to day situations. For reference, my "day to day situation" often involves hanging out as Luskwood. Luskwood. Furry city. 10+ furries all decked out in attachments.

And you know what? If your at an event with 20 people and the host DOESN'T tell people to start paring down their avatar, that's the host's fault.

Don't make everyone suffer all the time because you suffer some of the time.

Wayfinder, with regaurds to AV prims vs Sim prims... The game revolves around the AVs. Given a choice over where to put the limits, I think LL made the right choice.

On the other hand... don't make everyone else suffer just because you want to wear ludicrous av.

It's not a matter of people suffering "some of the time". Lag is a major issue on Second Life, and excessive-prim avatars just add to the problem. Making everyone else suffer just because one person wants to wear hoochie hair or armor with every rivet primmed in place strikes me as being not only vain-- but selfish.

No one is asking that people give up good-looking, primmed avs. Only that they keep it within reason. There's a difference between a nice looking set of decently-primmed armor-- and showing up at an event with 250-prim flapping wings.

Is it? Why should a host be required to detract from an event and be forced to ask people to do something they already know is needed? And why should it be needed in the first place when it is conceivably possible to eliminate this problem from the start by more streamlined coding, glitch fixing, and setting reasonable user limits. Consider RL: are we allowed to travel down the highway as fast as we like just because we want to? The good of the greater number is at issue.

Does it have to be either/or? Many may disagree with this statement. There are lots of users who see no need whatsoever to put 200 prims on their avatars... but would love to have extra prims to furnish their homes. The point is that to limit land to 117 prims per 512m and then allow some avatar to come onto the sim wearing 3,000 prims is totally self-defeating. It's like giving a guy a bullet-proof vest, and then handing his enemy armor-piercing rounds.

When someone tells me he's done something that is technically impossible, I know there are two possibilities: a) he's mistaken or b) he found a way around the technicalities. Since there is no explanation how you got around the factual limit of an avatar being able to wear only 7,680 prims... I have to discount the claim of having an avatar with 9,000+ prims. I would believe you got 7,680 prims to work, but not a prim more (again-- HUDS don't count, as they are invisible and handled differently graphic-wise). (And to tell the truth, considering the potential consequenses-- such as being permanently screen-frozen every time I log in, I have no desire to test that theory out. ).



Well, all I can say is there's one in every crowd.

Within your definition of reason.

Yes, it is a matter of people suffering "some of the time".

Is it selfish? Maybe. But this way retains options. The solution takes away options. For everyone, always.

reitsuki be reasonable, i mean you can't possibly belive that we will get shiny stuffs like shaders and more advanced lightings if the client choke already on the crazyness of some mislead designers hm?