General opinion thread about attachments

hmff! It's not MY fault that your computer's not man enough to handle me, Annie. Unlimber that plastic and get an upgrade.

The way I figure it, if God had intended digital women to rez fast, He wouldn't have created flexiprims or toruses.

/me winks. But I'm worth the wait.

OP: you're looking at an odd sample set by asking in the forums ... more of a technical crowd than the general populace, and also one that has been exposed to a lot of threads about performance. So, the forums have a high percentage of people who stay away from scripted attachments in general.

Myself, I generally wear limited flexi non-colorchange hair. I'll drag out the megaflexi hair for special occasions, or modeling. I usually wear jewelry but no bling and only very occasionally colorchange. I wear flexi skirts without qualm, silks when I feel like it, but often stick to slacks or nonflexi for convenience/lag. I will sometimes wear simple boots.

I usually do not use an AO, but will often use an animated stand or sit if hanging out in one place for awhile.

The most hated attachments I see commonly used: 500 prim pairs of blingy boots

/me Imagines the compulsiveness of someone who builds 500 prims into making a pair of boots, wanders off shaking head.

Well, since I would consider myself one of the general populace and I am not too caught up in the lag issues... /me is very proud of my machine. I love to wear trench coats and the like, and I prefer the skirt part to be flexi, as to add realism. I usually wear long hair, and my current hair of choice is scripted for color change. I have more HUDs than I know what to do with, and more attatchments than I have attatch points. lol Basically I will say this, I buy whatever I think I like, and wear it whenever I want to.

~Darkpoet~

We need more bandwidth. Plain and simple.

I always wear - prim hair, usually in the 100-150 prim range, my flight feather, and my ao. I also always have prim shoes which aren't that primmy. That's about it.

I wear what I like. I don't think about sim performance in terms of my attachments often but if asked in a large group to remove scripted objects and attachments, I will remove (most) of them. I like subtle bling that sparkles occasionally but not flashy blingy objects. I love flexi items including hair and prim skirts. Particles effects can be fun at a rave party or when goofing around. It's all good!!!

I don't have much of an opinion on the aesthetics here, but maybe a few comments on lag effects of attachments.

Many of the items mentioned here really have nearly zero effect on sim lag, although some can definitely slow the clients of everyone in viewing distance. Texture resolution is probably the biggest client hit, as Sardonicus mentioned, and avatar skin textures count too. (This also hits the sim to a degree, since it must download the textures to everybody viewing them; in a busy area, this can be a Big Deal--especially if lots of avatars arrive at the same time.) Sculpted prims add to this texture load, both for the sculptmap and surface textures.

High prim-count stuff (flexi or not) also impacts the sim and clients, just to download all the prim parameters and track their positions and rotations.

Bling, on the other hand, has (almost) no sim impact, and very little impact on the client; unfortunately, many bling items listen for commands on the chat channel (but usually only from the owner, so that mitigates the impact quite a bit).

Texture-selection scripts used to be expensive because a separate script was required in each prim; recently-scripted items shouldn't have that problem. (Not sure when llSetLinkColor was introduced--before my time--but maybe color-selection was once a problem, too.) Color-cycling stuff, though, must be laggy in proportion to the rate at which different colors are sampled.

In contrast, texture animation contributes almost nothing to sim lag, and shouldn't be noticeable on clients with reasonably modern graphics cards. Same with flexi prims. (Same with smooth rotation--although the underlying llTargetOmega function is woefully b0rked for attachments, and there's probably not a lot of demand for rotating attachments anyway--although pasties with spinning tassels add a certain je ne sais quoi to any outfit )

Wow thanks for the input. The reason I asked is because I was debating on having my husband script a texture changer for my jewelry. But to be fair, I was interested in people's opinions as well.

I do purchase items dependent on script time. I personally try to be kind regarding client lag because I know some people I hang around do not have the greatest computer. When I demo hair, if it brings my FPS to under 11 then I won't buy it. I think that is the extent.

Fortunately I tend to walk around bald so much that my friend calls me Ghandi. I just work on a necklace or something and have my hair off, when I am done I forget about it. It never bothers me to have my avatar bald...but I know it really can bother others. So 9 times out of 10 the client lag of hair is never an issue with me.

Thank you all!

Thanks, Qie, for this! I've always wanted a decent explanation but could never understand the geek talk enough to get it.

So you're saying that if I'm at a party and everyone's wearing bling, and it's really laggy, and then the party host says "everyone detach your bling" and the lag gets noticeably better that it's probably my imagination? Or is that because of the bling listening on the chat channels?

My general opinion on attachments is that they should match.

The light should be optional.

No bling for me, however, I do have various outfits I wear, mainly mix and match to a certain contemporary anarchistic style. One such outfit being my favourite is the most primtastic, with flexi hair & clothing, hat, boots and specs, it's around 1000 prims, the additions are flight feather and a AO

To get a better glimpse of what's happening, you can View sim Statistics. If the sim is running near 1.00 time dilation and over say 40 frames per second, it's not lagged--but people can still *experience* lag for a variety of reasons (network delay is one likely culprit). In such a situation where we know it's not sim lag (so the chat channel listens aren't to blame), and yet it improves for everybody when all bling is removed (and we know the bling particles only affect the client)--then I guess it must be a party exclusively for folks with crappy graphics cards.

Gotcha. And what if I have a pretty dang good graphics card (well it was pretty dang good back in January, heh) and a pretty dang good computer... and I've noticed a big difference between the last few versions and this new one, i.e. better now, esp using 1.18.3 (5) or the Nicholaz viewer. Is that the "memory leak" thingamajig that I've read about? What IS memory leak?

There have been *lots* of client fixes over the last couple of months, detailed in the release notes, but I think the big memory leaks were handled early. A "memory leak" is when a program allocates some memory while the program is running (maybe to store a bunch of, say, texture identifiers) but somehow the program logic doesn't always get around to releasing that memory after it doesn't need it anymore. Now, if storing a bunch of texture identifiers happens every half-second, it may gobble up a lot of memory quickly. Eventually the client computer will start having to put some stuff on disk instead of the much faster silicon, just to have enough room for everything it's supposed to keep in memory. When the disk light is on, things get slow.

Finding the place(s) in a large complicated program where memory is leaking is a notoriously difficult problem, around which have grown more large complicated programs that help track down the leaks. The difficulty is compounded when the program uses third-party libraries that may themselves have memory leaks or undocumented memory management assumptions. (This can even vary between graphics cards with different OpenGL implementations; e.g., for a while, Vertex Buffer Objects were the kiss of death for ATI cards, because of memory leaks in the drivers.)

OMG i love prim.. love the good looking higher prim hairs, nice looking shoes!
It's not something I really consider when buying an item, I consider the looks of items most when I buy them ^^ Yes and I love bling!

I couldn't care less for color changing menus though... with copy, no transfer items its easier to create multiple color versions of one item, instead of using a menu for it.


If your computer card is slow.. it may be usefull to turn particles off

It's simple: nearly all lag is client lag, so all we have to do is know how capable every graphics card is, of everyone in sight.

One question, though: isn't an AV's texture pre-baked? So, your client doesn't download all my skin and clothing textures, just the final baked product? Or does it do something with those too?

I don't care how much lag it causes, people should match.

To the best of my knowledge, the avatar and clothes are pre-baked. Attachment textures are not.

I wear a bunch of scripted objects but they are not jewellery, they are my body. My wagging tail, twitching ears, retracting claws and blinking eyes are parts of my avatar. Of course I understand the need of creating a lag free atmosphere for special occasions or specific sims, like race tracks for example. I switch the scripts off or even created non-scripted versions of some of my body parts and use them according to the sim's needs.

Yeah, I think that's right. Of course, if one puts on a jacket (or even a completely hidden clothing layer), any affected baked texture (face, upper, or lower body) has to get re-sent to everybody in viewing range.

But I don't really agree that "nearly all lag is client lag," especially not in crowded settings. If you look at sim statistics at a large gathering, you'll see time dilation and sim frames-per-second crawling along. Digging deeper, you can get a hint of the origin of the problems. Usually it'll be some combination of physics (avatars clomping around, bumping into floors, walls, and each other) and Image / Network (which usually move more or less together, as all those not-yet-cached textures and prim parameters and animations work their way down to the viewers).

Which reminds me, I meant to mention before: attachments may come and go, but usually about the laggiest thing one can do in a crowded setting is to move one's avatar around (especially if doing so invokes a sequence of non-standard animations that have to be downloaded to everybody in sight); the best thing one can do is to turn off the AO and sit on a prim.

@ Qie, I just want to thank you for all the information you provide and have provided in the past on these types of subjects. I'm not a big tech-head, but somehow you manage to explain stuff in a way that even I understand.

I also find the debate on what is client-side lag and what is not very interesting. I argued in another thread that a lot of what people perceive as lag is client-side, simply because having moved to a much higher-end system I have seen a huge difference. (As an example, when I used to go dancing at Avalon and have to wait for many minutes for everyone to appear and then even longer for danceballs to appear, these days I can be dancing withint minutes.)

Now, on that note, question on the last point in your last post: do AOs and individual dances affect everyone? If so, that would mean that simply turning off AOs and not using individual dances could cause a huge improvement at music venues for instance?

My ponytail or loose hair styles are flexi, but other than that I don't wear anything other than normal textured stuff. My jewellery is just shiny, no dazzly effects. I can put my hair in a bun, perhaps I should do that in very busy places!

According to Qie flex or non-flex makes no difference, I believe it's the number of prims that matters, so maybe a small bun?