ARC - So When Is It Too Much?

I dress to please myself.. if you want to mute me so you don't see me, fine. Otherwise, don't bother telling me to change so that your lower end computer can handle it. ^_^

All well and good, i'll render a full sim in ultra and won't worry about your prims but it's the scripts in those prims that we can't mute (not necessarily aimed at you).

If the ARC nazi's ever had their day...that was the calm before the storm which will come when the script figures get exposed.

More helpful would be for LSL to be able to query an avatar for the upcoming script load and send a suitable message and also to allow for a venue host to be able to set a limit before entry. To me this would be fair and i'd prefer that over having people arrive, be asked to reduce their scripts and end up in arguments. If you can't get in because you're over scripted, you know there's only one thing you have to do to gain entry.

Doubt we'll have anything useful like that.

But, but, but..............doesn't that require yet another script?

It all evens out. Low end computer users tend to wear blinding facelights that only fast computer users would see.

You're a ferret abuser abuser! PICCED!

For a rezzed one yes but i'm thinking of something in estate tools or parcel settings that could be set "per event" to restrict entry and allow a user definable message that explained why they couldn't get in. Not just a LL dialog "unable to complete teleport" or whatever we will get.

Personally, I've always looked better in Red than in Green - and yellow absolutely is not my color.

What she said! x

Hmmmm... methinks some mustelids are about to be hung out to dry....

I don't believe that. I have a 2007 computer with the best graphic card available at the time. I'm not buying a new computer every year to play Second Life, and I suspect that a very, very small portion of users are going to do so. (Or, we'll just say that we have a club that you are not required to buy a new computer every month to visit.)

That said, most of the responses to the thread seem to indicate that ARC isn't a very accurate indicator of what is causing graphics-based, viewer-side lag. I read the wiki article on ARC and it made sense to me (with the limited technical knowledge I have). However, when it comes to that technical information, I trust the users in this forum more than I trust the Second Life wiki. If ARC isn't an accurate measure, then I'll forget about it.

ARC is a rough hint, but nothing more than that.

The best graphics adapter available in 2007 was the Nvidia 8800GTX. It'll run SL just fine today.

If you're using something from ATI, you might be better off using one of Boy Lane's viewers with the SSE2 patch: http://my.opera.com/boylane/blog/

I, too, am on a two year old computer (but the actuall model came out three years ago). I opted out to a graphics card for this computer since I already had one that was more than adequate for use in SL (an nVidia 8600GT). Since I purchased this computer I've spent $80 for a power supply (a 650 watt to replace the 230 watt stock one) and $100 for a new video card (an nVidia 9800GTX+ to replace the 8600GT when it finally gave up the ghost and died). You don't have to purchase a new computer every two years........but upgrading is a good thing. Would you purchase a new car when your tires wore out, or your battery died? Simple computer maintenance will extend your computer's life quite a long time. And make that computer useful for SL for a long time too.

5000, and up seems excessive. Sort of like wearing perfume to the mall. You know it's going to ruin someone's day if they are allergic or asthmatic so the polite thing to do is forego it while there. Of course sometimes people just drop by while doing other things etc. and hadn't planned ahead so things don't always work out that way.

Women's hair tends to shove ARC really high - so does jewelry. I try to keep things simple but I'm probably often in the 2000 range just with hair and shoes.

But if I am going to a hair or skin fair, or any place in SL that is going to be crowded and laggy, I will do my best to remove prims. To a hair fair and skin fair I've gone in the painted-clothes skin that means an ARC of 1. It would feel dull and sad to go around that way all the time, though.

And i'ts frustrating to be flying around (or trying to) at ARC 1 when most people at those things ignore the pleas in the greeting message and rules and go around in full bling, AO, multi-prim clothing etc. with ARCs in the high four or even five digit range. But as long as those places do not actually moderate or enforce those rules, people will ignore them.

they're still rendered, but 100% transparency does reduce the processing needed by some over partial transparency.

I have never gone over 3000arc.. (I think) I am usually well in the yellow.. green you basicly have to have nothing bu system clothes on...... My jewelry I wear puts me into red... but you know what, I dont care. I stoped looking at arc scores a long time ago..

However, when I am at a place and I see (specificly now) all the holiday finery I wonder.. wow I wonder what her ARC is I bet its high! but i never actually turn it on... cause I dont care.
right now I am more concerned with all the script errors I keep seeing all over the place from peoples AO's...

I have two problems with the notion that people wouldn't complain about avatar rendering if only they had up-to-date computers:

1. Crowds. How many avatars make a crowd? The more complex the avatars are to draw, the fewer of them need to be around before even the fastest graphics card starts to lag. When there are over fifty avatars in a group, FPS is painful even after all those attachment prims and textures have downloaded, and not just on netbooks: on current, high-end desktops.

When running a venue, getting as many people in, and as comfortably as possible, is make-or-break.

2. Notebooks.
2a. Notebooks are rapidly supplanting desktops in computer sales. This is especially true in demographics with high discretionary spending.
2b. Notebooks start out with less-capable graphics than desktops. The same GPU and memory will often be clocked slower in the "mobile" version (power consumption and, equivalently, heat dissipation), and they lag the cutting edge of GPU introduction by a generation or so.
2c. Notebooks can rarely if ever be upgraded with a new graphics chip.*

...

Script memory concerns raise an interesting point here: Once limits are enforced, there'd be not much reason for anyone to look at the use of scripts by avatars, because parcel limits will be completely separate from avatar limits. But during that interval when detailed memory usage is exposed but limits aren't enforced, yeah, I can imagine some "script nazi" conversations. As a scripter, I'd like that interval to last a long time, but for users of scripted attachments that may not be best.

______
* There's new bus technology that *may* make external graphics adapters common for high-end applications on both notebooks and desktops, but that's at best still a few years from enough market penetration to be worth a GPU manufacturer adopting, and iffy at that. (Anybody else been doing this stuff long enough to remember buying separate graphics boxes from Evans & Sutherland or Matrox? The more things change...)

Wouldn't pulling the number of visible avatars (and your draw distance) way down be the best way to address this particular problem if your computer, for whatever reason, is having problems rendering complex scenes with lots of people there?

Point taken about running a venue, but I have to say that if I'm somewhere like that and someone asks me to change my hair or my boots because of their high ARC, I'm not going to try to do it there because I'm in danger of ending up bald or with odd shoes or whatever. So I'll tp out and, unless I've got a particularly good reason for wanting to go back (it's a friend's party, for example) I almost certainly won't bother to return, since there's plenty of less laggy places I can go where they don't nag me about my ARC.

Most flexi hair puts your ARC in the yellow immediately. But most of my avatars have ARC below 400.

Oh yes, I think they should default script errors to chat, so people actually see the noise they're making.

Less so these days than when flexis first came out. Designers have figured out that a very few flexis look more realistic than lots of them. But yeah, "most" probably still applies: there are a lot of very old hair designs that remain strangely popular, and some old-school designers still cling to the "more must be better" approach.
You know, actually... having it default to llOwnerSay(), in parallel with DEBUG_CHANNEL, might not be a bad thing.

Yeah, good point. TPing back to the venue would probably be at least as bad as changing right there, in terms of what it does to other viewers and the sim, and it's anyone's guess how much of one's attachments and animations are getting rendered in those situations anyway.

With annoying frequency, I end up in these monstrous huge gatherings, often at the corner of four sims, with more than a hundred other avatars to render. On the plus side, people seem to have figured out that they want to turn voice *off* at those gatherings; for a while people who should have known better were trying to use voice in place of parcel audio. But it's never a pleasant experience, even with draw distance set to minimum, preferences to aggressive imposters and otherwise low settings. There's just too damn much stuff to draw, even with my 6-month old graphics card. Can't blame that all on ARC, of course, but I know that in those crowds, the top 20% of the avatars are using 80% of the rendering.

(One other observation: Adding ARC to the point of triggering imposters does not improve one's appearance. What's shown on the local display may be very dramatically different from the mess that's showing for others. Just sayin'.)

Personally i thought ARC was a good idea to teach designers to build smart, texture recycle, limit prim count, etc...

However it seems the bad implementation makes everybody disregard it as a meaningful metric.
I don't believe "upgrade your hardware" is a good answer, i wish LL would give us a serious metric to be able to easily gauge if we are doing it "right" or if we are going "over the top".

SL runs on a wide range of hardware, in non "user created" universes the artists are given a rough "budget" of what is too low, what is good and what is too high in term of resources.

I'm going to give the example of there.com, where in order to submit a custom hoverboard model it has to fit in a very tight texture and polygon budget.
Of course sl is more flexible, still it would be good if ll would give us a good and working "guideline" of what the expected budget is.

Even better is that Emerald has a feature called "max avatars" and anything over that will be shown as imposters. You can set that as low as 1 if you wish.

That's pretty nice, does it select the 10 closest for example?

Yes so as you zoom around with the pervcam it will render them properly