Avatar Rendering Cost: Change Your Habits?

Why? what else is wrong with it? it worked perfectly except i didn't know it caused unnecessary pipelining.

Not at all. The day my computer starts slowing down in SL I will just upgrade as I have always done.

LOL What's so funny is I knew before I even hit the bottom of page 1 of this thread, that after ONE person said "No"...the next few posts were gonna say it too. Just a www forum trend I noticed. Real funny ta me cause Chicago's a lot like that (where I live). No wonder everybody always says how "nice" Chicagoans are, huh? I ain't sayin those posters don't mean what they posted, but that just made me crack up.



Right? heh. BUT that's what's got me & my crew playin around w/ the ARC every time we turn around...tryna figure out if there's any worthwhile way 2 even USE this tool. I mean, I put on a few full-prim costumes/avatars/characters...and my score was still "1".




The sad thing is I can imagine that as a reality more than a "what if" kinda thing. Folx can get real stupid over the internet, lol



Yeah more like I need a whole new computer. Funny part is, when H4 "week" hit...I didn't lag for about 4 days straight, which was a "record".



Who cares about him? I'm just cuttin back for me & other bums who don't have this year's model PCs & Macs yet

As far as the avatars, you're right, I guess a giant dragon, or mech wouldn't qualify. I had a lotta full-prim avs that I tested just yesterday w/ friends that did though. Even some that I made, and I saw where I could bring the score down. Technically if u just wanna mince words, we're all made outta "Ruth" so we can ALL be cut down. heh... But nah I feel u.

Yeah, these are computers not a standardized game console like a Playstation, which is one thing they "forgot" 2 mention, which is a funny ommision when u read all they DID have to say in that Blog, huh. A game console like a Playstation is sent out w/ each model holdin' the same amount of Graphics memory as the last one, whereas SL users are on so many different rigs, that it took years for the user-base to get THIS stable. I remember some folks could hardly run SL even before flexi-prims...now we got WL, flexies, and a lotta folks wear all these HUDs all the time...how the years fly by...



I ain't "Einstien" here, but I agree 100% with your whole post. Well...ok actually they should have done this ARC thing BEFORE Windlight but I digress. (been readin the dictionary)

I like the meter, but now I'm kinda disappointed as I go along and find out more and more that it's "broken"...or in other words, just inaccurate. The ARC detector has a few "bugs" that need ta be knocked out, preferably with a multi-color sequined codpiece. Just for comedy value of course.

MY whole reason why I'm "so interested" in it, is that the 2 major things that I am used to doin' in SL as hobbies are ridin' motorcycles , target/skeet shootin', and combat practice. All 3 of my SL past-times (however u spell it), are trash if I'm laggin and choppy. I definitely do need a new machine, yeah. On the other hand, when "H4 week" came around, I didn't lag at all for about 4 days. I mean at all. It was like an XBox game or an anime, just smooth. A few days later I "got choppy", and it's been bad ever since. Whatever.

My crew thanks me for lettin' em know about the ARC, because everybody rides smoother now, and they don't look much different from how they did before. Only my av does, because I'm used to fillin' up almost every attachment point. But really I don't need ta wear 3 belts at the same time, or 2 necklaces.

I'm ALWAYS in the green now, and I still smoke all the time, wear shades, wear an ammo belt, prim boots, full-body tats, a shirt and vest, jeans, hat and/or prim hair, and sometimes a few spikes.



I like the way you worded that, heh! If anybody ever complains about my attachments, I got a comeback now. "Let everyone else suffer for my beauty." ...then I'll play my "satanic laugh" sound, and hit em with a football.



(o.o) is right! lol. ..blast from the past...

You know it's too bad but I agree w/ MortVent Charron, after learnin' a lil bit more about the ARC. "It needs work before being called a tool."

...on the other hand, the ARC does give me at least a LOOSE idea, of how much I'm contributing to my friends' lag, when and if they lag, since well...half of us are sickly "bums" in RL, who can't afford to upgrade all the time, so we buy new video cards and go one step at a time.


I know a lotta folks thing there's no poor folks on the internet (hear it all the time..."no gangstas", no bikers, etc...wrong!), but we're here. Actually, the folks I know personally in RL who use the internet the most, have all been arrested in the last 2 years for violent or disorderly crap, and party hard, or they have some kinda serious illness(es), that keep them at home.

Anyway, yep I guess in short a LOT of folks just need new computers. From what I've heard here, on Slex, and everywhere else, very few designers are thinkin' "Low-Prim", because they say they don't lag at all. On the upside, might create a niche for "low prim attachments" that can be filled. So either way, it ain't like it's "the end of the world"

(I'm hopin' that was coherent...I'm on new meds here )

what the heck. Wet Ikon was still available at Yadni's in the freebie of the month section last i checked. why the heck wouldn't i use it until last week?

Nope I find it interesting to compare but I never mention readings to other people unless they are good, it's none of my business really as, some of my Avatars are pretty high on the scale, whereas my normal one isn't.

LOL...relax Adz, it's just kinda... "nostalgic" for a lotta folks who have been on SL for a few years.



I getcha. Me & my crew just really got into playin around w/ it cause bein' avid "SL bikers", we tend to look long & hard at anything that might keep us on the road more often than not.

Interesting my version of Wet Icon I got given was a HUD.

You can turn off particles in the client. While a lot of bling doesn't create a server site load, some does, although it's only script lag. There are still many bling items listening on channel 0, and some that respond to collisions. So you can't get rid of the entire impact in the client.

However, it's not always acceptable to turn off particles in the client. For example, if you're at a fireworks show, you really need particles enabled, and you certainly don't want bling stealing from the show.

Besides, bling is just an affectation that's so 2005. I put it in the same category as flashing text on web pages, a fad that thankfully has died off.

nope, bling is still with us.... all that old stuff being given away to the newbies...

I know... I know.... (=_=)

It's just that it does have known lag problems (even before ARC came out) and those "/ao off" "/ao on" commands are a bit spammy compared to the ZHAO HUD.

And, since ZHAOII came out, I couldn't imagine using anything else unless LL put in native animation configurations in the Edit Appearance menus. (^_^)y

You could have attached the Wet Ikon to a HUD attach point as well .

(Attach to hud, right-click on something attached to your hud that's visible, turn on Show Transparent, zoom out on the HUD, drag the Wet Ikon over to an invisible side, zoom it back to normal and done )

I wonder if someone can figure out what the highest arc value is. Let's see it!!

That would require a couple thousand textures... or simply doing all of the max prim lag monsters with alpha textures...or better yet individual textures per prim and turned to transparency

Well, while my rendering cost is high-ish (about 1500), it's about what I expected for a full-prim avatar so I'm not likely to change it. I just wish that invisible prims were ignored when rendering rather than having a high-cost as they do, since I've got a few for things that aren't always visible on my avatar, but which are built into the body due to limitations on attachment points.

This is one place where optimizing for ARC would be a Very Bad Idea: one could rescript the attachment to change scale and position of the prims to hide or show them, instead of going full alpha or opaque, effectively moving a little bit of client-side rendering lag to a whole lot more server-side script lag plus extra update bandwidth to all viewing clients. So, the anti-ARC folks can make of that what they will.

750-1500 (with some spikes to 2000 depending on the attachments) really seems to be about average though among "established" residents (or at least with people I come into contact with).

I don't think I've really ever seen anyone go far above 2000 except for people wearing the crazy alpha textured "flat" hair.

I usually run into more like 900-2500 myself, but as long as I don't stand right next to 'em, don't seem to make much of a difference.

Well, except for concerts. Santuary Rock, where everybody wears a million spikes, lag me out...but most concerts don't lag me much at all, even the Live ones where the band pours a huge & steady stream of particles into the crowd.

I'm still playin around with it, this ARC is kinda confusing, some of what they said in the Blog don't seem like it adds up right when u test in-world.



Wow. Never saw that one.



Very True

Do you have a "for instance"?

The only thing I noticed about the blog post that's not correct is the fact that "- 10 base points for having the prim" should be "- 10 base points for having the attachment" (and the fact that sculptmaps count as a texture isn't explicitly mentioned).

Also make sure that you spot the difference between things that count per prim (for instance flexi and glow) and per face (for instance alpha) which is unintuitive in some cases (flexi is a prim setting so that makes sense, glow however is a per face setting while it counts only once per prim regardless of how many faces have glow set).

But the script only needs to execute once whenever the visibility is changed, while the avatar needs to be re-rendered whenever there's movement that affects it. I would expect changing the scale and changing the alpha to have pretty similar server-side costs. I'm not positive about repositioning it, but with phantom prims it shouldn't be much either.

Likewise, there isn't a huge difference between updating all of the clients with a new alpha and updating it with a new set of size and position information. It would make more sense not to send information about invisible prims to the client, but then Show Invisible wouldn't work.

I only change my habit when engaging in nunplay.

perhaps, but even more of a joke are people who don't understand the first thing about graphics or graphics rendering and who have also utterly failed to read any of the information provided by the lindens yet, despite the yawning gulf of their ignorance, are perfectly willing to declare ARC broken because transparent surfaces are harder to render than non-transparent ones.

Go figure.

Except for my hair....I dont tend to pile on a bunch of prims stuff. The only exception would be for a costume party or a photo series.....but I usually do my photo work at my home studio so there's no lag issues.

I think the information provided is just a way to help residents understand cause and effect in game. It doesn't mean we can't use all the cool stuff.....or even that using it is rude.....it just educates people to how their avatar effects performance. This forum, for the most part, is full of people who understand a lot of the technical aspects and graphics......it's often like preaching to the chior when posting here. But.....in-world I encounter more people who really have no clue about some of the most basic stuff.....and not necessarily newbs.....just folks that aren;t interested. As long as they can get in world, they're happy.

So.... I find myself helping people all the time...explaining cause & effect.....prims.....windlight (this is a big one...sooo many people have no idea about windlight and graphics settings and so on) The Lindens really have to make educating people a constant flow in order for SL to maintain stability. You can't reach everyone.....and some of those you can reach, still wont 'get it'. So all these little tidbit blog posts about cause & effect are just 'one' way to try and reach people and help them.

Lots of people don't even read the web site after they join.....they have no idea the information available to them......and many more have no idea about the forums. I send people to these forums all the time...and to the web site..... But lets face it....people are gonna do what they want to do because SL gives us all that freedom.

Overall, my habits have not changed at all and my look has only changed a bit. But yes, I had one of those crimp hair styles. Yes I love it and won't part with it. I know of no other way to get taht soft fuzzy look. However, my hair was originally ARC of 3500 all by itself, not all that uncommon for hair like this sadly. After a bit of a haircut, the same hair is down to 900. So while I haven't really changed my habits or appearance, I am significantly down in terms of my ARC consumption. As it turns out, the only other things I had that were costly were also pretty obviously going to be ugly and I already didn't wear them to public places.

From my informal testing and polling, here's what I've learned.

a) It's all about the hair. Really. Furry parts.. *pfft*. Skirts/dresses/bling? *pfft*. For most (not all) of the people I've run across with scores above 3k, it's the hair. What's kind of sad and also encouraging about that is my experience. I was able to cut my hair from 3500 to 900 with almost no visual sacrifice. If only the hair designers had known... or cared...

b) Men are almost always OK... although every now and then I run into some guy wearing nothing but swim trunks and clocking in at 10k ARC for no apparent reason *laughs*. This kind of stands to reason so no surprise there.

c) No, people are not going to change their habits. I've asked and talked to a lot of people. The bottom line is that everyone cares about how they look to themselves more than they care about anything else. I've come to decide based upon people's utter indifference that the only real solution here is an option in the client to force avatar impostering on anyone over score xxxx. That way, someone else's fashion sense doesn't need to impact my frame rate... everyone wins. And, the best part is that these people are so selfish that they really don't care that while they look gorgeous, only they can see it since everyone else seems them as EGA graphics.

d) ARC really does matter. I have a beast of a computer, 4gb RAM, Core2, 8800GTX, etc. That being said, I can watch my framerate change. Of course this is highly variable, but roughly eyeballing it, on my computer, every 5000 arc points is about 2fps. Now, of course, in a real setting, most of those avatars are getting impostered anyway so it really doesn't matter (thank you lindens for that).

I use modified Wet Ikon AOs for my "Matrix" and modded "Iron Man" AVs, the origonal script never worked so I replaced it with the FlipModded version of the script, the exact same script in my tiny AO and the one you get at the NCI AO class.

All of the commands are on a silent channel and my Reset gesture works with all of them (this gesture turns the AO off and back on, in case of animation conflicts in things). And no outside commands from other people can't override my commands, even if you are using the corret channel, it was scripted to only work for the person it's attached to.

Wet Ikon AOs have an easyer set up than the ZHAO ones and no HUD clogging my UI (I tend to have several windows up at once during builds, HUDs just get in the way). Not to mention I can put the script, note card, and animations into almost any attachment, as long as it still works.

Right, so this is the question, and I've seen precisely contradictory advice about this from the texture experts: do textures set to 0.0 alpha render at all? (That's as opposed to textures that are full alpha, set to some non-zero alpha value. Well, you know what I mean. )

I was operating on the basis of the latest thing I read on this subject, that zero-alpha textures don't render at all, in which case it would just be a shortcoming of the ARC measure to not catch that boundary condition. But you're right, if instead there is extra cost to rendering such textures, then actually adjusting the size and scale of the prim could be a net win compared to flipping the alpha.