My thoughts on Avatar Rendering Costs.

I've seen alot of complaints by various people here in the forums concerning the new Avatar Rendering Cost feature in the latest RC, and soon enough, in the general release client. People complain about lag, but what they don't realize, is that 90 percent of it is their fault. 3D games exist today, partly because computers have increased in power greatly over the last few years, but also, because of the use of creative programming and 3D modeling/texturing techniques. Residents need to understand that it's partly their responsibility to create content with rendering costs in mind. 'Back in the day', and I mean 1979, when I first got into computers, using a TRS-80 Model I, with a 2.3 Mhz processor, 48K of memory, and a simple 128x48 B&W 'block graphics' display, with no sound, we had extremely limited resources to work with, yet, there were plenty of interesting, fun games to play. Why? Because the limitations forced us to get creative when we programmed, that's why. The limitations themselves forced us to come up with imaginative ways of getting done what we wanted to do. We didn't sit around and whine about what we didn't have, we poured our energies into figuring out a way to 'cheat' the effect using what we had. That seems to be lost anymore when blingtards show up in a sim running 100 scripts in all their attachments. The Avatar Render Cost tool is there to help residents develop sim friendly products. Everyone already expects scripters to script in a low lag fashion, and the scripting community is constantly discussing lower lag ways to writing scripts. Why can't other content be held to the same standard? Avatar Render Costs is not there to impose a limitation on content creators, it's there to help them develop better content.

Johan, one thing I have learned during my time in SL is that no matter what you say, or what LL do, there are going to be people whining.

If they say they will give away L$1,000 a week to everyone who visits Help Island, people will complain that LL are ignoring the true problems of SL and trying to bribe away all the issues, and complain that the sim is always full and that this is some huge conspiracy.

Honestly, it gets to the point where you EXPECT criticism and kind of mask it out, which is a shame, because then more legitimate criticism gets lost in the vast amounts of whining that goes on.

I'm sorry but if I were to whine that much I'd wonder why I was wasting my time staying in SL and go find another more enjoyable pasttime.

change camera angles - RAC scores change

It does not count script overhead, simply graphical

I can create an avatar with a single 1 prim attachment and it can not show up on rac and yet cause server lag beyond compare

I have logged into sims where I was the only soul there, and the sim build and scripts lagged the servers down.

Right now it's looking to be a "don't look at the guy behind the curtain" device

Why thank you for creating this thread, OP. Your thoughts on this matter are quite unique and nothing at all like the myrid of thoughts already expressed in the original thread devoted to this very topic. Your example serves as a shining beacon to others, so they too will create entirely new threads devoted solely to their own thoughts instead of using old, rather useless really, existing threads. Again, well done.

You read it

I agree. But, here's my rub with the whole avatar rendering cost stuff. We get this new label that is tossed around now............."blingtard". We now have (or soon will have) this new tool that everyone can use to "measure" anyone's rendering cost and it will be used by some to virtually harass many who simply don't have a clue about what "blingtard" means...........hell, I don't really know what you mean by blingtard myself.

Let's use me as an example. I normally wear mesh clothing but a close second choice is prim skirts. I wear earrings that have bling. I sometimes wear stilettoes that have bling though mostly not (still prim stilettos but without bling). I wear flexible prim hair from Sirena.......face lights turned off. By your "blingtard" mention, I honestly don't know if I am a blingtard...........but I'm sure someone will say I am. And, my response is: Tough toe nails. AR me. If wearing clothing such as I wear is considered being unfriendly to our SL environment, I'm going to wait till SL forbids it all together...........we'll see how long the game lasts when that happens.

Another point I would like to make is from another thread (perhaps what prompted this thread) where someone posted a response to one of my posts (I know because they quoted my post in their response) with the apparently shocked by idea that I use 1024 by 1024 textures simply because I responded to someone elses statement that 256 by 256 textures is plenty for whatever you need in SL. My contention is no that size is not plenty for all you need in SL. Detail will not be the same at 256 as it is at 1024. There are legitamate reasons for the higher resolutions and as long as SL allows it then suggesting that anyone who uses 1024 sized textures is being unfriendly to fellow residents in SL is crap.

I'll relate something from real life that this reminds me of. About 3 years ago I went into a fast food resturant and ordered my lunch. I asked for salt and pepper at the time of my order to which the server put two packages of pepper and one salt on my tray........I asked for one more salt. I was told by the server that too much is bad for me and did not give me another package. It was entirely her opinion that I did not need more salt......and it was none of her business. Guess what I did...............it was not pretty.

It's the same thing with rendering cost.......mind your business. Especially when you have no idea what I do with my textures or how I dress my avatar. I guarantee the "politically correct" will voice their opinion on others with this new "tool". And when it happens to me in game, it will not be pretty........just like in that resturant.

ARC/shame is a "line of sight" client-side metric only.

Whether your it's 1 or 50,000 makes no difference to the sim, it doesn't care what attachments look like since they're all phantom.

Whether someone's ARC is 1 or 50,000 also makes no difference unless you can actually see that person. If you're in a group of 20 people only the ARC of those you choose to focus your cam on matters, the rest isn't rendered so their cost is 0 at that time.

As far as accuracy goes: it's assuming prim geometry has no associated render cost and that a plain box and 1,000 twisted and tortured toruses have the same cost (namely, zero) and that 50 256x256 textures are equal to 50 1024x1024.

The only thing it measures are prim and face properties, nothing more, which makes it somewhat indicative but doesn't it in any way suitable for comparison even on the client side.

And it's the simple fact that you don't seem to understand what it does and doesn't count that's the major objection to ARC. The only thing it's useful for is indicating the cost of certain things for builders (alpha/transparency is expensive so use it sparingly; particles have the ability to bring a card to its knees, use them sparingly; etc), but then not even in a useful quantative way.

---

Anecdote from today: "Geez, why does SL have to be so slow. We've been here for 5 minutes and textures are still rezzing."
"They rezzed for me within a minutre, what's your draw distance set to?"
"It's 512"
"There's your problem"

In a lot of cases people *choose* to experience "lag" and it has little to do with outside influence of other avies. If you want to fetch everything in a 2 sim radius around you, don't be surprised textures will load slowly .

Thank you Kitty

Thank you Peggy and Kitty

OMG, was gonna psot my thoughts but should start a new thread perhaps?

Oh, where to start?

Peggy, I suppose 'blingtard' in a literal sense means someone who wears alot of bling, but the underlying idea is someone who pays no attention to ARC, and simply thinks 'more is better'.

Kitty, I read your post a couple of times, and it never really started to make sense. Yes, textures have no bearing on the sim itself, but they area stored on the asset servers, which can get bogged down serving extra data to clients. So, your statement about it not making any difference is not valid.

And to all the idiots complaining about me starting a new post, well, at least my posts contain valid content, as opposed to the ridiculous 'ignore this post' post which has literally OVER 5000 posts to it. If I shouldn't start a new post, then perhaps I shouldn't have a 'new post' button. What, do I have to clear new posts with you?

I will ignore ARC for the simple reason it will be used as a simple finger pointing tool. No matter what is causing problems let's just point fingers at those who have a higher ARC. To me if your having a huge ARC I simply dont care. I dont have lag problems, I have asset problems. So this is already becoming a tool, that LL created, for pointing fingers.

Johan part of the problem is that it's shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted. Your points about limitations were regarding enforced limitations, which reminds me I need to check out a spectrum emulator again, but the limitations here, well they've been allowed to spiral out of control.

Education is good, I was at a Linden meeting a while back when the guy was commenting about how alpha textures drain resources. However that was the first time I'd ever heard anyone saying that, many of the clothing tutorials I see mention alpha textures, people think you have to use them and maybe you do, I'm not a clothing designer, but the point was I'd never seen this raised as an issue before.

So yes, by all means let's educate people to try and make more resource saving builds, items, clothing but let's do it in a constructive way with a campaign of good tutorials, not just a tool that looks like it's going to be used more for harassment.

Then go ahead and call me a blingtard then. My ARC is over 1700 and I'm getting 24FPS @ 256 M draw distance while staring at an avatar in front of me with an ARC over 7000.

Exactly what I've been saying about ARC and large textures all evening........if the tool is there to make those ARC raising items and larger textures then people will use them. Myself included. I actually do care about being a cause of lag........but, I'm not willing to change much in my ways when all I'm doing is using the avaiable tools. I'm not bending any rule, I'm not attempting to cause anyone trouble. Just like you haven't done one thng wrong in starting a new thread about ARC (or related issues).

But, believe me when I say, I resent the hell out of being called an idiot. And I believe you just called me that.

And, I'm still waiting for your answer about why every tutorial I've read on clothing creation says to size your textures to 512 by 512 instead of 256 or smaller. That question was asked in another thread.

A texture will be sent once and retained in your cache, it is not continuously resent.

ARC in essence, is a performance measurement for your computer rendering their data.

ARC values will punish a feeble computers performance, and have less impact on a high end machine.....more so relative to your own settings and machine specs in running the program....not theirs in feeding it to your computer.

The value is relative to what you get from that.

It's basically pointing a finger at a measurement of their program running on your computer and acting like it has nothing to do with them for it happening.

It wouldn't necessarilly matter for non-prim clothing.

We have 5 baked textures for each of our avies: iris, head, upper body, lower body and skirt.

Whenever you change clothing your viewer will bake all the textures on all the layers you're wearing into 5 textures and upload them to the sim and when other people see you they download those 5 baked textures.

Upper body and lower body are the only two we can really wear clothing on (skirt is just skirt, it's there or it's not):
upper body = skin, overlayed by undershirt, overlayed by shirt, overlayed by upper jacket
lower body = skin, overlayed by underpants, overlayed by pants, overlayed by lower jacket (socks and shoes come into it too, but I'm not sure of their order )

The reason alpha on (body) clothing textures doesn't matter is because it'll just show the texture underneath and it all gets baked into a single texture so there's no practical cost there as to whether you use alpha or not or how many layers of clothing you're wearing.

Baked body textures are 512x512, you could use smaller but the viewer would simply scale it up when baking and you'd loose out on detail you could have added (and there's the possibility of degrading when it's resized).

(Edited since I forgot about socks and the shoe base on lower body )

Again, thank you Kitty

The reason that changing camera angle (and distance) changes the RAC score is that some of the prims on an avatar get discarded by LOD (level of detail) handling; it still gives you a good idea of who are the prim hogs. The RAC score for your OWN avatar seems to be constant regardless of camera position.

Indeed. But a hard coded max or average value would be nicer. If it also included prims (It doesn't consider prim counts at all by the way only textures and other graphical items acording to the blog... so someone with all attachment slots filled by max prim items with no textures will not hit yellow..)

The tool is currently flawed, and should be set up so you can see your RAC score but not others.

Besides, got to some of the super built up sims! The sim itself will lag you out with the graphical rendering. But I guarantee most will blame someone with a couple points of RAC above the rest for it

I've seen my own ARC change. But the differences are less than 2%, so they're not significant.

ARC, not RAC. Avatar Rendering Cost, not Raspberry and Cow (now Laqroki).

Unless it gets tossed from the cache.

There is a subset of the community that thinks having a _smaller_ cache will make SL run faster. In an area with lots of big textures, you probably will be downloading at least some textures over and over as you move around.

Sort of on thread and a bit cheeky but ever since this new feature was released and read all the opinions makes me think of a bloke I read about somewhere.I can't think of the name but he had the idea of putting yellow stars on the back of peoples clothing.I always felt that this was wrong but it happened.Nothing good came of it anyway!!!!!!!!

Real good point.

I cleared my cache today, then watched as my 6900 item inventory loaded 11 items at a time...was thinking so much for yesterdays patch, then suddenly wondered how many other people were clearing their cache and considered the pummeling that would cause.

Not sure why a smaller cache would help though. Wouldn't any gain just negate itself in slowing a different process ?