Need help understanding ARC

Can someone explain to me how I determine what my ARC is in simple steps? I want to attend Hair Fair and don't want to contribute to lag that everyone complains about, but I'm totally in the dark as to how to find out ARC readings. Thanks.

If you're in the 1.20.xx viewer, open up the "Advanced" menu with [ctrl]+[alt]+D and select Advanced >> Character >> Info Displays >> Avatar Rendering Cost (Did I get that right? I'm not inworld to check. (o.o) )

The ARC score will appear over your head. (^_^)

Just, be careful and take the number with a grain of salt. I've been greatly lagged by an ARC of 2k and I have a 10k outfit that doesn't affect a thing. The number itself is a sum of assumptions and is, at best, a response to lag confusion instead of a means of pre-determining a laggy outfit. (^_^)y

Check out - http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/05/01/who-me-yes-you-couldnt-be-then-who-introducing-avatar-rendering-cost/

See the original blog post at http://blog.secondlife.com/2008/05/01/who-me-yes-you-couldnt-be-then-who-introducing-avatar-rendering-cost/

Watch the top of your screen and press ctrl-alt-D a bunch of times - you really only need to press it once but doing it a bunch of times makes what it does more obvious. Depending on which viewer you are using, you'll either see one menu option called Advanced turn up or you will see two, Client and Server, turn up.

If you see Client and Server menus, I think you'll need to upgrade to the latest viewer to see the ARC stuff.

If you see 'Advanced', click that then 'Rendering' then 'Info Displays' then 'Avatar Rendering Cost'. That's it.

ARC is not a reliable metric.

Basically it all boils down to not just how many prims you're wearing, but what sorts of textures they have on them. Any prims with alpha (transparent) textures are going to count far more heavily toward your ARC than solid textures. Prims that have moving/rotating textures are also more expensive. Flexi prims are expensive.

That's about it in a nutshell.

So from the sounds of it, I should go to Hair Fair bald, barefoot and in a bikini with no AO, HUDS or attachments of any sort. That should do the trick or at least help.

That's a pretty good idea. Hair fair was tortuous the last time I went, half the place NEVER rezzed. You can go ahead and wear some clothes, maybe even some "texture" shoes.. (I seem to recall that one of the library avatars had some texture sandals). Honestly, you'll probably WANT to be bald anyways.

I have an all-grey skin that I wear in such situations.. not only is it very fast to load, and easy on the viewers around me, but no one gives me much grief because it just looks like my skin textures won't load.

I can drop a copy on you inworld if you like.

Once you get a certain number of avies in a sim all walking around and constantly crossing sim borders, you're going to have sim lag whether they're all ruth or all normally dressed and ARC isn't applicable when it comes to sim lag anyway.

Similarly, getting a few dozen people in the same sim (along with a number of child agents from surrounding sims) is going to inevitably result in a stuck pending download and halt rezzing for everyone else on the sim. Nothing you do will have any impact on that.

As far as ARC is concerned: when you're surrounded by hundreds of unique textures at any given time (all the display signs) the handful extra that you represent isn't going to make a difference either, especially since your ARC only matters when someone is actually looking at you.

Related: since it's not much of a social event anyone can simply turn on avatar imposters (or just disable rendering avies altogether) and not be bothered by what anyone else is wearing anyway.

In short: what you wear or don't wear isn't going to make one bit of difference on your or anyone else's experience. Everyone turning their draw distance down to 64m or lower on the other hand would have an impact, as well taking off unnecessary scripted items.

Friend using it told me I am a 1 in arc, I never used it and don't have that version was curious about that myself.

According to this blog post:

http://fabfree.wordpress.com/2008/08/22/no-hair-no-problem/

There's a place where you can get some pretty funky-looking metallic skins that will render you down to 1 ARC for places like the Hair Fair. There's also a more 'dressed' (with hair) low-lag avatar of just 1 ARC at the bottom of this post:

http://fabfree.wordpress.com/2008/08/24/hair-fair-challenge/

A few weeks ago, I think it was after the Shoe Fair, someone in the Cartel Hangout mentioned a good tip they'd been given for busy places: turn off avatar rendering completely (CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + 4 if I remember rightly) - then you don't have to render all those floufy skirts and flexiprim hairstyles. And if the aisles are narrow enough then a 64m draw distance will work, as long as you walk down the middle. I did that at the Shoe Fair and it helped a lot.

I put on my ARC 1 void avatar and went to hair fair 2008.

Doesn't do any good to turn off avatar rendering. Doesn't do any good to be arc 1 either. I didn't see any red arc values in the sim i landed in. I didn't see any complex builds. The lag is obviously due to the number of avatars in the sim. I went and looked. There is nothing going on that should be resulting in such horrendous lag if the sims are real sims and not open space sims that is. Basically 10 avatars in a sim seems to be about the max limit for relative lag free experiences. Once upon a time you could get 70 in a sim without this issue. But that was before windlight arrived. Windlight knocked it down to 30 instantly with whatever they did on the sim code side. Since then there have been a couple updates rolled out that knocked it down to about 10. These are my personal observations.

Perhaps these expos need to just use 2D websites for the events. They could certainly accommodate a lot more viewers that way. And the images could be high resolution too. With slurls right to the stores in world. And the "expos" could be permanent. Just a thought.

The only people to blame for that are the people who thought it would be a good idea to put it on 4 sims laid out in a square.

40 people in a sim where most are standing still or sitting down are taxing a sim far less than 40 people who are constantly moving about and where you constantly have sim border crossings, let alone the 120 potential child agents in each sim from the other three surrounding sims.

Even if people follow the guidelines they're getting the wrong ones. Attachments that aren't scripted do nothing to impact sim lag one way or the other, it's entirely client side. Draw distance on the other hand is never mentioned while that will be one of the primary things to reduce stress on the sim (and the surrounding sims since even 128m will make you a child agent in the other three sims in the hair fair).

A different sim layout would have made the biggest difference of all. Even a rectangle layout is better than a square layout because you reduce the number of neighbouring sims. A "plus sign" layout with even an openspace in the center to connect the 4 sims together would be even better.

WindLight is entirely client side, there isn't one line of code on the sim side that deals with it.

As far as the effect of a WindLight viewer even with atmospheric shaders turned off, yes it'll be slower than a pre-WL viewer especially for older cards, but that's a client side performance issue and has no impact on the sim whatsoever.

ARC is like your score in Second Life

The person with the highest ARC when they end the game - wins.

It's the new Scarlet Letter...replacing NPOIF

My question about ARC is,
is it the users being chastised for the lack of LL compensating it's servers, capacity, overall ability to keep up w/ its' userbase?

QFT!

I went to a class the other night...no lag in the sim...6 students...and the instructor was telling everyone what their ARC score was and said mine like I had committed a cardinal sin!

I can't freaking SEE my ARC (or anyone else's) since I use (by preference) an older viewer. I did use one of the newer viewers to put together a low-lag outfit so I'm set with that. But I thought that situation was a little over the top and didn't endear me to the instructor as much as a general announcement.

In my case the "culprit" was my hair. I'm wondering if we're going to see a return to less primmy (therefore less "natural looking" hair designs in the future.

I heard that using the ARC tool .. actually slows down how fast you render avatars ..

and thus it is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

My sweetie bought me an outfit that put 6K on my ARC immediately ... frilly cuffs and skirt.

The worst I've seen was 30K - she was wearing everything but the kitchen sink. Whether she was causing the lag at Sine Wave to be even worse is a moot point ...

I went to the hair fair this morning, no attachemnts whatsoever in just a bikini, tuned graphics low etc, still really laggy, so i used the tip Sasy Scarborogh gave. rez a prim, sit on it and use edit to move around. i did this and movement for me was then lag free.

Now I wish I had some bling shoes and some poofy hair so I could win this game. Oh, well . . .

What is very strange is I was at a music show trolling the ARC's and saw one lady, SL hair, sl clothing it it seemed to me she had no other attachments on aside from little detail shoes and a simple chain necklace yet her ARC was greater than most there... in the 1000 range. This startled me and I was zooming all over to see where she was hiding her prims!

And at the same show, another person was wearing this highly complex avatar outfit and was nearing the 9k arc..... I tend to run about 1100 I am usually in the yellow and a few outfits I've made pass 2000 but seeing this has really effected my idea of design.... I tend to trim more than I did before. Less prim detail and more artistic abilities with the actual clothing templates.

I did notice in testing that using a 510x510 vs. 1200 x 1200 texture has no bearing on ARC and only prim attachments themselves are responsible.

Oh BTW I didn't notice anymore or less lag from high ARC avatars then low ones in a group....


I did say somehting to one lady once about her ARC being high, I was not rude or anything (I actually loved the outfit she was wearing) but she had no idea what it was and it was a nice littel chat we had when I told her how to do it and explained it. Nice lady btw and how you approach it makes all teh difference in the world!!!


Now what I have noticed is the only green arc avatars are basic SL avatars without any attachments.. and those can run high green to boot.

So What is LL telling us with this? They say do not go witch hunting yet, the only acceptable ARC (those in green) are basic SL avatars?

I turned it off myself now after playing with it for a few days and looking who is what but it certainly has made me aware of how I design my clothing attachments..

Flexi is what really does it, not bling etc.

hmm interesting

A lot of hair styles are radically flexi now.

Plus flexi skirts.

Your ARC is gonna increase dramatically unless you give me some of that Nandos!