My thoughts on Avatar Rendering Costs.

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

I cleared my cache today, then watched as my 6900 item inventory loaded 11 items at a time

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

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.

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.

Those opposed to it sound like Luddites to me. lol "What?!!! Something that can help us make more efficient use of resources? Well fudge that! I can run everything just fine so screw everyone else! I should be able to make my stuff as inefficient as possible and everyone else can go to heck! Down with efficiency!!!"

Crowded events asking people to remove prim attachments (already done now) and using ARC as a guide to put teeth in the request.

Better designers using ARC to make less laggy products (and advertising the ARC costs of thier products) to get a jump on the competition.

Certain segments of the SL population are going to flat ignore it entirely and some will take it to heart.

Those opposed to it sound like Luddites to me. lol "What?!!! Something that can help us make more efficient use of resources? Well fudge that! I can run everything just fine so screw everyone else! I should be able to make my stuff as inefficient as possible and everyone else can go to heck! Down with efficiency!!!"

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Wow, some folks are a touch paranoid. lol Honestly, you don't need to worry about people pointing fingers at you because of the ARC. I'm sure there are a ton of others reasons people would want to point fingers at you. ROFL

But seriously folks - this is just a tool designed to give us just a little bit more information as to what the client is doing and it can be used to help designers develop more efficient items. It is true that is doesn't do EVERYTHING, but it gives us more information than we had before and that will certainly help developers make better products.

Those opposed to it sound like Luddites to me. lol "What?!!! Something that can help us make more efficient use of resources? Well fudge that! I can run everything just fine so screw everyone else! I should be able to make my stuff as inefficient as possible and everyone else can go to heck! Down with efficiency!!!"

ROFL Y'all need to relax - they ain't gonna replace you guys with bots that whine. Your jobs are safe.

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ROFL Y'all need to relax - they ain't gonna replace you guys with bots that whine. Your jobs are safe.

According to the blog it doesn't consider prim counts for the ARC as I understand it... just the textures on it.

If the sim is lagging (in whatever way), asking someone to take off their high ARC attachment won't make a slight bit of difference. ARC is a client-side line of sight metric.

Depending on what specifically is happening with lag, you'd be better off asking people to: lower their draw distance, wait it out or restart the sim if it doesn't solve itself (gray textures, inability to wear attachments, etc, etc due to a stuck asset operation), take off high cost scripts, removing that dance floor that sends 200 object updates per second to the 50 people there, etc.

When it comes to the viewer's side, it's impossible to really do anything with general measures. If you have a slower puter, just being around 50 ruths in a complex build will likely lag you already while someone else will get 60fps with everyone going all-out crazy.

For the person who's lagging, the solution could be as simple as turning to face the other way, moving to a different side of the build, turning on imposters and lowering avatar detail all the way down, they can visually mute specific people if they can't avoid having them rendered at full detail, etc.

Expecting people to take responsability for "lag" is *not* wrong, but it really has to go both ways. If people are accountable for what they're wearing then people are accountable for their own viewer settings as well.

That's really the wrong way to go about it though. Building with ARC in mind doesn't necessarily yield a "less laggy" product, it's entirely possible to have lower ARC and a (relatively) "high laggy" linkset if you start tinkering with something to lower its ARC.

What you'd ideally want builders to do is heed a few basic guidelines rather than building against a non-comprehensive metric. ARC provides *some* guidelines, but only in what it takes into account (alpha is costly, default texture mapping is better than planar mapping, etc), not the total number which doesn't really tell you much at all.

There are many guidelines by far more qualified people than me but the ones below are ones I can think of right away that ARC won't take into account at all, even though some are rather important:
- use appropriate texture sizes
- combine textures where it makes sense (if you're texturing a crate with a 256x256 and one side has an overlay on the wood, use a 512x256 or 256x512 instead, it's more efficient than 2 256x256 for rendering
- not all prims are equal in terms of rendering cost
- (not really relevant for atachments) a linkset with all prims under a certain size won't be added to your "interest list" from a distance away, if you're adding relatively high-detail but small-sized prims, keep it as its own linkset rather than linking it to something bigger (more important if there's nothing occluding it from view)

And as we've seen, quite a few of those who "take it to heart" do so without knowing what it's really representing and what it isn't, or insist on walking around with the graphics slider set to "Ultra" and then blame someone with a high ARC for being a "laghog"

(And just for the record, I'm generally between 900 and 1500)

That seems to be lost anymore when blingtards show up in a sim running 100 scripts in all their attachments.

I dont whine and I dont worry.l I state my feelings and if they dont suit you then ignore them. I personaly dont care and care even less about ARC

One hair style I have consists of 96 torus prims and has an ARC of 15.

A default prim cube with two different (opaque) textures on it has an ARC of 20.

If ARC accounted for both prim count and prim complexity (type + twist/cut/taper/etc) then it would be a useful tool. Until it does I'll think it's useless, but please do defend it if you're convinced of its accuracy and explain why the box is more laggy than the hair.

Will we be Employees or Contractors? The IRS wants to know.

I think the point that's being missed here, and the point that I've been trying to make all along is that it's partly (mostly actually) the job of the content creation community to build their wares with ARC in mind. I've seen some posts where people were saying, 'I didn't even know about this or that' until ARC came along. Content creators need to take ARC into account weather making clothing, or objects, or whatever. Alot of people complain that SL is laggy or buggy, and a good portion of it (not all, I know) comes from people who are not taking efficiency into account.

To all the people who say, well, ARC is just a tool for finger pointing' I say, no, it's not. It will be used that way, but all things can be used in good ways and bad. We can generate electricity or blow up a city with nuclear power, so does that mean that we shouldn't use nuclear power because it can be used to blow up a city? Of course not. I agree that ARC can and will be used to finger point, and there's not much that can be done about it, but I dont think LL should be blamed for residents misusing ARC. The intention of LL was to INFORM content creators so they could better make content for SL.

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.

The tool would be helpful if we were told what configuration of system the scoring is based on. Is it based on the minimum specs for running SL? Gawd I hope not.

Until then it is just numbers and how your individual machine handles it.