Non User AV

people can't be online 24 hours a day

Peter Pan's got to sleep sometime.

Everything in a 3D environment is made up of two dimensional surfaces. It's partly why looking at something from the inside of a non-hollow prim doesn't show the prim itself. The best way to illustrate this is by pretending everything in every 3D environment is made up of triangles.

A cube would be made of twelve triangles, two for each side.

With a sufficient number of triangles, you can create a reasonable approximation of any shape in existence. With enough triangles, you can make something that the human eye can't distinguish between, and the real thing.

If you take those triangles, and start connecting them at their points at different angles, keeping the triangle itself flat, but curving multiple triangles over an imagined surface, you can create the illusion of a three dimensional surface. Much like creating the side of a cube with just two triangles. The more complex the surface, the more triangles are required.

Now, modern day graphics cards have evolved beyond that. They have more than just mere triangles that they can render. They can cheat, and do outright squares, making a cube only six polygons instead of twelve. That's half (or close to it) the number or required operations to draw that polygon on your screen. More code includes things such as vertices and such.

But the plain and simple fact is, the more 'detail' in a 3d object, the more time it takes for your card to render it. This is represented as a number known as FPS, or frames per second.

The absolute best way to give you a concrete example of how this works is for you to go to a sim at the edge of the grid, or better yet an island sim, fly to the extreme edge, so you're staring out into the simless ocean, and then log out.

Then log back in and keep staring. Logging out and back in guarantees me that SL will stop rendering everything you just flew through that's now behind you. So keep staring out into the ocean. No prims in front of you. No avatars. Just some ocean, and maybe some clouds.

Make sure your debug menu is on. If it isn't, hit Ctrl+Alt+D.

Turn off your minimap if it isn't. It's something like Ctrl+Shift+M.

Then hit Alt+1. This will bring up a bit of data on the right side of your screen. The three main categories should be something like Basic, Advanced, and Simulator. If Basic isn't open, click the word Basic (the bar won't do, the word is the only thing that will open it). I'd also recommend you close the Advanced and Simulator readouts, just to make sure you don't read the wrong value.

See the large graph with a green line moving inside a red area? That's your graphics card's FPS. Be SURE you're not reading the SimFPS, which is the speed your simulator is running at. If you are, you need to close the Simulator heading and open the Basic one.

Look at the number next to the word FPS. See it? It should be something higher than 10. Probably something more like 20 or 30ish. That's how many frames of graphics per second your graphics card is rendering. The only polygons it's really having to render is your one avatar, and maybe some water, and maybe a bit of the land and prims around you. Nothing much else.

Now, play an animation. See how smoothly the animation runs? I can almost guarantee you will be shocked at how smooth it runs if you've never stared into the ocean before. Especially right after logging in.

Now find a party. The bigger, the better. I'd recommend Club Elite, but since that place closed down (yay!), just any old party with a large number of avatars will do.

Go to it. Be sure to fly around the area a bit. Then land, and look and make sure you can see -everyone- who's at the party. Be SURE you can see them! Now look at what your FPS is. Low, isn't it? Probably something like 10, or 5, or maybe even lower. And how many people are there? How choppy their animations are? Log out. Log back in. Look again. It's still low, isn't it?

If all those avatars were PERFECTLY STILL, your FPS would still be as low as it is now. Even if they were... say... mannequins (check your spelling, Shadow), your FPS would STILL be just as low. Because your graphics card is having to render dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of polygons for each individual avatar. And if 30 or so avatars manage to slow down your graphics -this- much, just think how much 200 in a large mall would. Hell, it might even bring people's systems to a screeching halt. Might overheat their graphics cards and burn them to a crisp if they aren't cooling them properly.

i dunno. i kinda like knowing that everyone i'm going to meet in sl is a real person. it wouldn't be any fun to interact with a walking mannequin or whatever.

that's fine. Peter Pan's got to sleep sometime.

Oi, we've been down this particular road before.

Since one avatar is made up of nearly 10,000 polygons (or so one non-Linden user estimated), 30 of them (and you KNOW people'll use 30+ in stores or builds like Neverland, which I still haven't seen yet because my account is disabled... bah... and I never got the group invite for the preivew. ) would be equivilent to 15,000 cubes which is an entire simulator's worth of primitives, all being rendered at once. Add into that the custom textures for every single last fake avatar, and you have very bad framerates, pretty much exactly like the ones you see at parties.

It's a nice idea, and MIGHT (I stress the "might" part) be possible if/when Linden redesigns the entire renderer, but that's a major project (that they might already be working on) but is FAR (FAR FAR FAR FAR FAR) from guaranteed.

And that doesn't even touch the whole "Am I talking to a real person?" thing.