Sculpties and lag

My new build contains a large number of sculpties, roughly 250. Since putting it up we've noticed an increase in lag. This is over the last 2-3 days. Now obviously with SL's general problems recently it's hard to tell what's causing it, I doubt it is the sculpties, I've been in other places with loads of sculpties and not had a problem, but has anyone else found large numbers of sculpties causing lag?

sculties use an extra 256 or 512(does this size work? hard to tell what the lindens do do) sized texture, that then renders on the client with more polygons than a normal prim.

so you have two things that can cause 'lag' persay. and an extra 250 textures as large using the default sizes will defiantly slow down loading time. the extra polygons could slow down some computers I imagine(though if they're running second life fine it should be ok)

i find a lot of them together take forever to form while the sculptie texture downloads. and it eats a lot of bandwidth and feels laggy.
try deleting your cache and see if it gets worse.

I visited a sculptie furniture store once and it was lag central. I'm sure it wouldn't have been as laggy if it was regular prim furniture.

I think sculpties are good when used in small groups together (i.e. attachments or a regular-sized living room's furniture) but cause problems when a ton of them are used as mentioned above.

May I ask why you have so many sculpties? Did you make them yourself or are they someone else's work?

I've never really had a problem and at any given time I have 50-100 scuplties out on my 1500sqm at any given time (I create jewelry with sculpty elements).

I'd be more concerned about scripts.

UNLESS you're talking about initial load lag. If so- Do check and make sure that you're using optimized sculpties if at all possible (most of mine are 2-5kb in size, very small load times). Smaller textures load faster... also make sure that the cover textures are 512x512 or lower.

The more unoptimized and variety of textures you have in a build the slower the initial load time is....

Sculpty use is not likely to be the culprit for major sim lag problems beyond loading though- that's more the area of scripts.

Anyone having trouble with sculpty loading, come drop by my shop and let me know if it's particularly laggy. Haven't had any complaints from the neighbors but if it's bad I'd really like to know so that I can work on cleaning it up to load faster. Nothing worse than a shop that feels impossible to shop in- unless it's the owner not even having a clue. (Search "Rainy Day" in places it should be there)

All my sculpty textures are 64 x 64 pixels. They simply can't cause lag. Mathematically sixtyfour sculpty textures load in the same amount of time as one 512 x 512 regular texture. And in every sim there are LOTS of 512's and sometimes even higher. The calculation might not exactly be right, but as a comparison I don't think small sculpty textures can cause any lag at all.

I had forgotten how much lag trees cause (or at least wind-waving ones). But I was reminded when I made a garden in the sky above my land. I had perfectly lag free AO walk until I put trees on - so I took them off and lag disappeared.

Sculpties have a lot more polygons than regular prims. Every one of them has 1024 polygons (compared to 6 for a box prim). I hope at some point we get sculpties of varying resolution. 1024 is overkill more often than not.

Any sculptie lag would be client lag though, right?

Aside from having a couple textures per sculptie to get from the server, is there anything else about them that adds server lag more than non-sculpted prims do?

Sculpties are usually the last to rezz, and several stores now have signs up advising customers that the furniture they cannot see might be along in a minute or two!

Rock

Actually it's twice that, 2048, because every square is rendered as two triangles. And oddly enough, a box prim turns out to have 108 triangles if you look at it in wireframe. An uncut solid torus has 1152. An uncut hollow torus has 2304.

I think Qarl had talked at some point about having a LOD for sculpties that does 24x24 as well as the current 32x32 maximum and 16x16 lower version. At that LOD a sculpty would be the same hit as an uncut torus.

This all contributes to the client side lag, sculpties should generally be better for the server than normal prims because they have just 2 textures, one of which that should be very small.

I'd really like to see lower resolution sculpties not just through LOD, but as maximum resolution. Many things I've made with sculpties haven't needed 1024. in many cases, half or even a quarter that many polys is plenty.

It's not the texture, but the triangle count. A 64x64 will produce a max 8K triangle mesh, a 32x32 a 2K trimesh (and the lowest LOD). That can mean 500,000 to 2,000,000 tris on 250 sculpties in a close proximity, not including tris from land, avatars, particles etc. You need a beefy video card and fast CPU to keep up with those numbers. LL said sculpties won't bog the scene down, but the math would suggest otherwise.

I have been using 32x32 pixel sculptmaps for most of my sculpties, in hopes of making them a but more efficient. I don't see any important differences visually between them and a 128x128 pixel map.

So do different sized sculptmaps create different number of faces on the resulting sculpted prim? I had assumed that the number of faces on the object was a constant..

So a build with 250 sculpted prims have a similar number of faces as one head of Hoochie, twisted tori hair?

It is. The only thing using a smaller sculpt map will save you is a bit of texture load, at the expense of accuracy.

I see. Thanks for the clarification.

I think I need to do some more testing now that I have made some more sculpties. My results with the 32x32 maps are good, but maybe I am missing out and should try 64x64 again and check the differences..

It maxes out at 32x32 mesh, it won't do a 64x64 mesh.

Depends what you mean by a normal prim. A torus is normal and has the same number of polygons has a sculpty.

Also, boxes use more than 6 polygons. I'm wondering if LL may have added more polygons to each face to help improve the vertex lighting on large boxes/walls. As it would be impossible to light the center of a face if it had just a single vertex per corner.

The build is a largish cave, made up entirely of sculpted rocks. The rocks were bought, and I assembled them into the cave. There's also some sculpted water. It looks really good, but I was just interested in the increased lag.

The initial lag when loading is quite marked, but I expected that. Its lag of the normal variety, low frame rates, freezes, etc, that i was interested in. It's not enough to be a huge problem, but is noticeably worse than before the massed sculpties went in. Most of the sculpties came ready made, so I don't know the size of the textures. The few I have sculpt textures for are 64x64.

Don't think it can be scripts causing the problem, we've just cleared the land so there are fewer scripts there than normal. Could be elsewhere in the sim I guess.

Thanks for the info, answer seems to be it might be the sculpties, or it might not. I'm inclined to think it is, the lag increase seemed to be very closely linked to when they went down. Still, not bad enough for me to get rid of my cave.

Hrm, it might be rendering issues- especially if the structure is large enough (and it seems to be). You don't load the entirety of the scuplties at once because they're beyond your field of vision so as you walk forward and into the cave you're constantly sending back to the cpu to "load" the new textures. Instead of a big lag at the start with a 250 scupltie statue or something of the sort, you're loading them each chunk at a time as you walk so you never really escape loading lag until it's all cached, and even then there's still a certain amount of drawing and loading lag.

There was a Relay for Life display like that, it was pretty horrific to lag through. Pretty if you stood still, but it crashed me every time I tried to walk through it.

A box prim actually has more than six polygons. The faces are divided into more than one polygon so that lighting works better. It's still less than 1024 though.

Scripts do not cause physics lag. Scripts do not cause low frame rates. They don't make you walk slow, or cause the screen to move in jerks as you turn.

Physics lag is caused by the sim, mostly too many or too complex objects, especially moving objects. Low display frame rates are caused by too many polygons (among other things, but mostly that).

Scripts cause *script lag* -- meaning that something clicked or sat on doesn't work right away. I suspect scripts can also contribute to chat lag. Other than that, scripts do not cause lag.

(So says the scripter as he grumbles and moves on ... )

Unmentioned is how many of the 250 sculpts are using the same sculpt map.

I have at least that many (most with different maps)
and my lag is horrible.

It's ever been a rare day when my lands' sim wasn't laggy (with or without sculpties). I bought the casino next to me thinking it was the culprit, still quite laggy lol

I rebuilt all my 128 maps as 64's with no noticable increase or decrease in lag.

How many maps? hmmm, not sure, but can't be more than 8 or 9. Probably 200 of the prims are spread between 4 or 5 maps. The prims are all different sizes, but I wouldn't think that has much if any effect.

I use sculpties in Serenity Woods a lot. I haven't noticed more lag then pre-sculpty. Of course SW is always laggy anyway.