One Prim Plants - Secret Lag Monsters

It must be said that the 'supposed' economical one prim plants and trees have tons of tri polygon in them. They are a FALSE ECONOMY. Yes you can put more of them on your land but at a cost.

The majority of the one prim plant sculpties that most people are using have 2048 tri polygons.
That means that 10 one prim plants in your garden have a total of 20,480 tri polygons which need to be calculated and rendered. That's an unacceptable amount of polygons for 10 trees or flowers.

This sculpty one prim plants fad is crazy nonesense, when we are in a streaming realtime 3D virtual world and lag is such an on going issue. Lag is not going to get better it's going to get worse.

On a side note if we had mesh import one plant could effectively be 6, two sided, tri polygons compared to the 2048 tri poly madness of one prim sculpties

If you have 100 one prim sculpties on your sim that could add up to 204,800 tri polygons. No wonder there is terrible lag in SL !

1. Death to Sculpties. We desperately need mesh import
2. Land should not have prim limits - land should have polygon limits instead
3. You always see something real ugly with sculpties before they eventually rez and you see something pretty

It seems a shame that something like one prim sculpty plants, instead of helping SL, are making things worse - sculpties are big fakers

Honest polygon counts, not pretend prim counts are the answer - that and only that will encourage content creators to work WITH AND FOR the system instead of against it.

One prim plants should come with a warning - may cause inexplicable lag :
' but they're only one prim ain't they ???? '

If all the 1 prim plants use the same sculpt, doesn't your viewer only need to load it once? I made a bunch of 1 prim coral and although they have different image textures, they use the same sculpt map. They seem to load pretty quickly, and all at once. Therefore, it seems to me that sculpted plants are still efficient IF you don't use tons of different maps.

Never mind the tri-polygons, feel the prims!

I have about 40 or 50 one prim plants in my garden with no noticeable lag. The best way to cut down on lag is to do away with this ridiculous 3d world idea and go back to chatting on web pages.

You can reduce polygon count with client settings like object detail.

QFT

Errmm .. you know .. each sculpty got 1024 faces (the areas that you actually see in SL) which is the same amount of faces a simple prim sphere has in SL. They don't create more lag than a normal prim does too
You are correct though when it comes to the rezzing, they just look ugly till they're rezzed fully ^^

Greetings Syah

in my experience, they do increase lag. we have had experienc on our sims where removing the one prim plants immediately reduced the lag.

we also have recently had the issue that one huge tree blocked movement for an area about 20x20m around the tree. i have run into this with smaller sculpties in the past, but it took awhile to figure out that the invisible barrier was from this one prim scultpie.

Sounds like the maker did not set the tree to Phantom. Sculpties have the collision profile of a sphere, so in most cases they need to be Phantom or they'll have a large inaccessible area around them.

Fully agree with #1 and #3, but #2 is a much more complex question. Prim count is being used as a proxy measure of "cost"--but the costs it's intended to represent are manifold. Yeah, part of it is viewer-side rendering delay, but that's far from the biggest part (if it were, there'd be like one rotating flexi allowed per 512). Part of it is download delay and bandwidth (but if that were the main thing, we should have to pay like L$1000 to upload a 1024x1024 texture). Another part is sim memory and processing--and that's a bigger deal, as evidenced by the pending per-sq.m. script memory limits.

If LL tried to charge separately for each component cost of the hosting service they call "virtual land," it would be way too complex. Instead there's this "prim" construct on which hang polygons, scripts, textures, physics, etc., all limited in a single combined metric. Theoretically it really shouldn't work at all, and yet it kinda does.

A sphere (no hollow or dimple or cut) is 528 triangles (thanks to Chosen Few for counting). So a sculpty is almost 4x as many.

With client 1.23, we expect to have small sculpty maps, which will make possible 1-prim plants with much fewer triangles. Unfortunately, this won't deal with those already out there.

The lag from plain sculpties is overstated*. It is entirely rendering (client) lag, and in some recent experiments we had to have hundreds in view at the same time to have any observable effect on frame rates (e.g./8/af/315268/2.html). Sculpt map load delays are a more serious problem.

Flexi sculpties are probably coming - plant makers will love that, but flexi is enormously more costly in lag than sculpties. Flower beds full of flexi-sculpty flower beds are a lag disaster just waiting to happen.

*...but of course plants are transparent. That makes them worse than the ones I tested, but only in a way shared by non-sculpty plants.

Linden plants are probably only one prim to encourage people to use them. It'd help if they had a non-flexi option.

What you're saying is true as far as the number of textures involved and how much overhead is involved in retrieving and downloading them; a bunch of sculpties that use the same map will download fast and rez fast. But the OP is talking about the number of triangles needed to draw the 3D scene, sort of the "complexity" of what ends up on your screen. And he makes a good point (albeit not an entirely new one); sculpties are not terribly efficient in their use of triangles.

To see what this is all about, go Advanced -> Rendering -> Wireframe and look at a few things made of different prim types.

Also, this is not anything that affects the sim or the asset servers, it's entirely a client-side thing so if you have a fast computer you generally won't notice any difference in performance.

You are incorrect. No natural prim uses as many faces as a sculpty, and I don't believe any tortured prims do, either, though perhaps some form of torus does.

As for the lag, it's only client side lag from rendering such things, there is no server lag. If your computer can handle high settings in generally, it can handle plenty of sculpts just fine.

All of this is kind of like saying: let's get rid of iron and use only silicon instead! Silicon's atomic weight is lighter and stuff won't be so heavy!

Because at the end of the day, people will still make rich content.

There where hideously high polygon count objects and places long before there were sculpties.

Try making some of those sculptie shapes out of regular prims ~ you'll get a polygon hit that is out of this world.

Watch meshes get used to make polygons, too, if or when they come. That's the whole point of having a mesh: to arrange lots of polygons in more complicated ways than the usual prims.

Quite right, unless you are in a snail farm - a hollow torus with four turns has about 8000 triangles! [A nice head of hair might have a few hundred of those, flexi and transparent too.]

Oh, this reminds me: not all sculpty "one prim plants" are the same; Caledon has some that make good use of that abundance of polygons. Those single-prim plants probably render as fast as anything else with comparable detail. (Downloading is still another matter, unfortunately.)

There is, however, another kind of sculpted one-prim plant, the visible detail of which corresponds to the old three intersecting rectangular prims. These may be the OP's real target, and indeed these plants' only virtue is saving of prim count--at the expense of download delay, rendering lag, and cache space. These could be replaced by a trivially simple mesh (or a tiny sculptmap, at least in theory).

An someone who makes one prim plants, I am intrigued by your ideas, and would like to hear more!

On one of the Sculptie threads, someone posted a 16-plant single prim. Essentially, you just cross 'separate' sections of the sculpt in various places, and texture it accordingly. Along with this, there are various trees I've seen who are made of a trunk/branch sculpt with all the foliage out of one other prim, and so on. Get creative with the placement and crossing of sections, and you can do some really awesome things.

Have a look at jira VWR-9384; image 4 (...dom.png) is a table with the expected (Viewer 1.23) behaviour of small sculptmaps. h and w are the dimensions of the maps, and s and t are the numbers of quads in the resulting meshes. I think the 8x64 map, giving 4x32 quads will make a four-plane single prim plant that is LOD stable for the three highest levels. It will have only 256 triangles, an eighth of a current sculpty.

By the way. I just looked at one of my heads of hair. 144,000 triangles. That's 70 sculpties worth, and many are flexi. Just gives a proper sense of proportion!

We should certainly be concerned about flexi sculpty plants and the consequences ....


Thank you Anti, I was going to post exactly that - so people could take a look at the actual tri polygons that everything is made of. Nothing is made of a single prim - everything is made up of polygons. We could accurately say 1 tri polygon but we can't say 1 prim as there is no equality among 'prims'


well noted Drongle and highlights my thoughts exactly


Yes my real target are these 1 prim inefficient 2048 tri polygon plant objects.
There are some brilliant, appropriate and economical uses of sculpties out there, truly innovative and marvellous work but unfortunately there is no incentive or encouragement for content developers to work with sculpties in an economical manner using 'lower levels of detail' etc . 1 Prim suggests that it is economical regardless how many tri polygons the 1 prim contains


Small sculpty maps would go some way to relieving the problem of 1 prim plants causing lag, but it must be repeated that mesh import would allow a super economical solution and a 4 plane single prim plant could be a very economical 8 two sided tri polygons. so you could save 248 triangular polygons on the lowest sculpty LOD possible or save 2040 triangular polygons on the worse case offending 1 prim plants.


The current situation of counting prims, not actual tri polygons creates a false environment. This does not bode well for the future. If you have a fast machine you can have 100 supposed 'one prim' plants in your garden and not feel the pain. But if your neignbour has them too and the neighbour next to them etc, etc where are we heading ?

But please note, in Second life you will never be able to build a large scale dense jungle or forest using these supposed 1 prim plants. You would overwhelm even the most powerful machine if each simple plant had 2048 polygons

Mesh import is the only answer. There is a good reason why the games industry uses mesh import and poly counts. It's because real optimisation is thus possible - every single polygon should only be there for a reason, especially when you are trying to build large and convincing worlds.

We are all somewhat hypnotised by the prims and sims of Second Life. This is not the only way it can be done. I love SL so much but I fear for the future. Within the next 24 months we are going to see other virtual world technology and in many of them sims will be 25 times the size and mesh import will be standard. So in these other worlds really, large scale cities and forests will be possible and this will be possible because of optimised and appropriate poly counts.

We should take note the of deceit of 1 Prim plants if we care about SL and it's long term success. I must repeat it again and say that some 1 prim plants have 2048 tri polygon in them that need to be calculated and rendered

LESS polygons GOOD MORE polygons BAD

The current situation reminds me of the story of the man who jumps from a high building and half way down shouts to his friend ......... 'ok so far !!! '

Funny, I have a low end machine, and I happen to sell low prim plants. On my former parcel I had around 450 plants, on my new sim eventually there will be around 1500 (about 600 now).

The textures I use are sometimes 512, sometimes 1024.
So if I clear cache and land at my plants parcel, there are a lot of textures to load, and 600 sculpties. Yet even on my low end machine, things go pretty smooth.

Opening a topic 'One Prim Plants - Secret Lag Monsters' is easy. Yet it irritates the hell out of me. As I make part of my money with selling them. If I knew the were lag monsters, I would create something else. But as long as a single avatar can create more lag then the 600 (identical) sculpted plants on my land, I think there is nothing wrong with the plants.

One prim plants are just a precision sculpt like chairs tables bike parts jewels parts etc etc...

How can they lag more? They are percision sculpts made of a 64x64 or 128x32 map like many other things in sl.

Well, I'm not sure how it can be stated more clearly than earlier posts in this thread. It's not that plants lag more than other sculpts (other than the inherent rendering lag of alpha textures), but that current sculpts lag more than other prims, in several ways. The focus here is mostly on rendering--hence all the talk of polygon counts--but they also cost much more to store and download than does a normal prim (lots more bits in a sculptmap texture than in the attributes of even the most complex non-sculpted prim). And certainly for many common shapes (not just plants) a mesh is a much more efficient representation for storage, transmission, and rendering.