Av render cost (revisited)

I was just recently introduced to the avatar render cost function. I know it's old hat around here, and I did go back and read some of the threads about it.

Has it died off as a social witchhunt? I encountered it for the first time tonight, aside from a few places requesting no bling or jewelry (though I've never been in a club that asked people to leave their *hair* at the door). I was in a place earlier with about 15 avs present. One shouted to everyone "if you're wearing attachments, please remove them, you're lagging the sim!"

I turned on ARC, just to check it out. She was about 820... I was at 1500... a male nearby was at 2800 (no hair but a lot of bling). I'd noticed that I'd started lagging pretty badly just a few minutes prior to the shouting. I checked the avs closest to me.. one was at 8500 and the other 16,412. I went home and everything was fine again.

I was going to ask for the highest ARC anyone had ever seen, but I googled it and saw the article about the woman with 131,000. Anyone top that yet?

Disclaimer: apologies for bringing up an old topic, but it's new to me.

I'm not at all sure it ever was a social witchhunt.

It's a useful tool, but unfortunately people don't pay much attention to their own reading, I would say. It's useful when trying on hair and things - if you care to not be over the top and deep in the red.

Some places are just laggy and need all the help they can get I guess.

What is an ARC? (/me waits for the noah jokes...)

ARC= Avatar Render Cost. It's a display function in the Advanced menu.

... or did you know that, and want a deeper explanation?

I didn't know that, no.

I'm still learning a lot. Thanks for the definition. :^)

I think it's a useful, if flawed tool. I have used it to put together a couple of "low-lag" outfits so that if a place is lagging I can do a quick change and still look ok. I have never seen it used as part of a "social witch-hunt", but I can see how that could happen.

The things in my inventory that raise it the most are my Random Calliope jewellery - 3000 points for one necklace (with no bling or even textures!)

I did go to a club once (long time ago - it doesn't exist anymore) where we all took our hair off. It wasn't demanded or anything - we did it voluntarily because we could hardly move. It spoke volumes about that club and the crowd there that we would all do that so we could carry on having a good time rather than just look pretty and let the venue grind to a halt.

Holy sh...

Without hair: 446
With hair: 2710

There is no way I'm going bald though. The hair stays!

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Avatar_Rendering_Cost

It's a pretty flawed tool actually.

Too easy to be off the charts due to a few transparent textures... and yet max linked sculpty prims with no textures doesn't register to high at all

Your hair has textures that are semi-transparent.. If you can find hair you like that doesn't have those sorts of textures, your ARC will go down a LOT.

There will always be witch hunts in SL. Long before ARC came about, I'd have people, tricked out people with 200-prim hair and all sorts of bling &c, telling me I was a lag monster because I was an all-prim critter. For some reason, they think a wing made out of 50 prims is somehow more evil than hair made from 200..

The problem with ARC is... the people with the highest numbers don't even know the tool exists and would not care even if they did.

Banning bling as a lag inducer is ignorant. Anyone who's bothered by bling can turn it off on their client. Bling does not lag the server. (The WHOLE POINT of bling is to offload the processing to the client!) Of course, objects that change their bling frequently use server resources, but I don't see a ban on objects with too many server updates. There's a beacon you can turn on to see what objects are annoying the server with updates; that's what the witch hunters should be looking at, not bling!

I saw an av once with ARC over 20K, but I don't go looking very often. I'm happy to have the tool; hope it isn't abused, and also hope that it can be made more accurate without adding much to its runtime cost.

In most cases, if a class 5 server is lagging on a region with under 20 avs, the cause is probably something other than the avs' ARCs unless there are a number of real high fliers. My guess is that the sim has other problems to solve.

If I were a club owner, I'd request that people "take off unnecessary attachments and HUDs" in a high-lag situation. Frankly, I'd hate to see a bunch of bald, shoeless women prancing around!

So many kinds of lag, so many contributing factors ... it's a difficult problem.

A setting, not a beacon..

Advanced -> Show Updates. https://support.secondlife.com/ics/support/KBAnswer.asp?questionID=4636

Maybe clubs should have a "Best In Red-Neck Sinead O'Connor" contest.

This "what is lagging me" question makes me wonder a bit about how to detect it. The other night I experienced.. .7 FPS - not even ONE but .7. There is a huge mall next door. Whenever I moved to that side of the house my FPS wd drop- I tried at different areas of the land with a 1 ARC outfit and it was consistent - what could be done to address that? I mean, i realize a lot depends on the owner of the Mall- but hell i couldn't even move in the Mall so personally I would not shop there- I cannot be the only one either. There were over 3k running scripts, now grant you, we are guilty of some of it too- sculpted trees, poses, etc.. but the lag was def strongest by the mall.

yep, the witch hunt is the fact arc only applies to avatars

There is no way for most to see teh lag effect of the sim's contents other than avatars

I think of it as more useful when applied to oneself. A person can choose lower ARC hair, for instance, when going to a big event. I think it would be best as part of a suite of tools, but I doubt LL will bother making more if we don't use what we have got now.

Or use a viewer that doesn't have it.

The highest I have seen was around 24,000 and that was during the PoE hunt in December. It was due to the white fuzzy bits on a slutty Santa outfit the bimbo was wearing.

I always tend to have a quick look at the ARCs when I'm lucky chair stalking and they are taking forever to load. Its amusing watching the people with ARCs in the thousands complaining about the lag and time the chairs take to rez.

That would include me (I think you and I will be the last die-hard Nicholaz fans!)

In the Gimp class I am currently taking, we each have to be no higher than 500 ARC due to all the textures we are dealing with, etc. At first I was just putting together outfits and avatars (such as Immy's attachment point AV...LOVE that and it's our instructor's favorite!) to comply with the class requirement. Now I'm having fun seeing what combinations I can put together to keep my ARC in the green (not necessarily 500 when not in class) but still look stylish. It has really made me more aware of purchases, particularly hair.

However, I *do* have to jump over to the Beta Grid to check it out.

A person with 131,000 ARC can be standing right behind you and it will not affect you if you are not looking at them, because they are not rendering on your screen.

If three people look at them, with low end, mid range, and high end computers, the worst suffers most, mid to high end perhaps not at all, depending on how good the computers are.

It doesn't measure lag, just gives you a number to note where your computer specs are now struggling to keep up.

Kitty Barnett once explained it wonderfully, along with a million other things.

I once saw a lady with 120k (she may possibly have been the 130k lady) several months back in an infohub. I couldn't get close enough though. As soon as I tried to zoom in, to see why it was so high, my viewer decided to fall over and die.

/me ahems "ze numbers they do nuthing!"


*runs away*

also note the ARC number isn't a set number. For example if you have like 1000 arc and you zoom out you will notice the arc will drop to like 900 or less. If you zoom in the number rises.

So ARC isn't just some number set in stone that dictates lag, but distance to that avatar will raise or lower the ARC also.

mine is like 1100ish but when I zoom out some it drops to 900's with outfit i picked up at bare rose

Not to mention that an avatar with an ARC of 1 isn't 100 times less lag than an avatar with an ARC of 100, because the avatar mesh and clothes are worth at least 6000 off the bat.