Attachment 1.8.2 culling: Violating Freedom of Expression and COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL

We have a constitional right to be heard, (in RL not SL) but we dont have the right to make any person listen.

People have the right to dial whatever phone number they wish, but they do not have the right to make another answer the phone.

We have the right to send junk mail but do not have the right to make the recipient read the mail.

We have the right to message anyone in an open directory on AIM, YAHOO etc, but we do not have the right to stop them from blocking us.

We have the right to emit tons of poofs and particles from our avies in SL, but we do not have the right to stop other members from turning off alpha.

We have the right to build whatever we want in SL, (well not everyone in actual practice seems to enjoy this right,) but we do not have the right to require people to maintain a draw distance to see our builds....or signs.....or attached prims.

People may hate to be ignored but we all have the right to ignore one another in chat, in posts, and in looking at prim attachments.

Autonomy and individual freedom of choice seems very much in keeping with the theoretical objectives advocated by LL for SL!

Actually, that does annoy me.

END OCTAGONS NOW! Polygons must be free!

It's been mentioned once before, but... DEBUG MENU HA HA.

I just think it's kinda odd that when some guy is buying up plot and sticking big annoying blue signs up, a way to "block them" is the natural and right thing to do to prevent one's SL experience from being besullied with ugliness... yet when it's avatar attachments they're taking our right to free expression away.

It's not even a user-based filter, but a further implementation of already existing level-of-detail techniques, making it quite eglitarian; all you're likely to need to do to get around it is crank the "avatar detail" slider all the way up... which I do anyway.

Is this one of those "I'm consistent, you're stubborn, he's a jackass" kind of things?

This all seems to boil down to what takes priority in terms of 'rights'...
Your right to try and impress me with your 600-prim avatar that you put a lot of time and effort to, or my right to better performance, useability, and the option of not being impressed by your stuff until you're closer. (Since we have no idea how close 'closer' is, I won't make any wild speculations about whether it's going to be 10m or 100m.)

Almost everything else in SL gives me the option of not having to be impressed at the expense of my own framerate. I can adjust draw distance, I can select detail level of terrain and avatars, I can disable or lower the amount of particles I want to see, I can disable local lighting and bumpmapping and far clip, and I can turn off everything from the sky to the ground. None of those things have been railed against as inhibiting freedom of expression, and I don't see why culling prim attachments is any different. Our avatars are not the only thing we express ourselves with in SL.

IE doesn't default to everything off, however. This 50% setting, we don't know what it means.

Should people be able to turn features off? yes; well, they already can. But should it default that way? That's another issue.

And to whoever was going on about 'polygon conservation' and 'unskilled artists' -- The 'skilled 3d artists' you speak of have access to creating characters via meshes. We don't. We have to use primitives. Which means extra non-visible triangle faces no matter what you do. Even two linked cubes end up being very inefficient. It's not like you can run a poly reduction routine or use shaders to make up for poly reduction in SL.

And to many folk's chagrin, this will not only affect furry avs. It'll also affect giant robots, and pusher robots as well.

...

I am definitely worried about how this is going to affect my avs, especially my full prim avs. I think those of us that build attachment avatars are going to have to get together and make a giant tech support folder for info on how to deal with the hordes of customers complaining about their avs hehehe.

I'm really hoping it won't be so bad as some are saying but... we'll see I guess.

That would be me. And yes, the fact that other games use mesh models was assumed to be common knowledge and has been discussed on these forums hundreds of times. That still doesn't eliminate the optimizations that can be done with prim building. I mentioned the earlier 200 prim facial piercings and suggested a texture as one way to cut down the prim count. It is also possible to devote a little more time to thinking about how one prim can replace ten. Some people don't explore what can be done beyond basic solid prim shapes. Just a week or two ago an SL friend and I built similar sculptures; theirs was over 80 prims and mine was under 30. A thoughtful builder will also realize not to use a sphere when a cube will do, in consideration of the face counts.

I have been instructed to remind you about shover robots as well, or I will be helped down the stairs.

Woah, cant believe I just read this entire thing...

My brain hurts...

- Sam

not to fuel this funfest anymore but im with chip from a few pages back

i currently run a Geforce2GTS (agp pro 500/500mhz +ddr) and at ground level i average 10-15 fps, why the hell would i care if your 40m tall dragon isnt rendering the backside polys from 50m away,
10m away? i dont go to clubs becuase of the hair the shoes the bling my fps drop to 0.X oh yea thats fun and, eventho my video card has 128mb of ram alot of AV's use so many high rez textures that my lod kicks in and everyone is just a blurry color blob anyways (ill use a 512x512 texture for 1 strand of hair x 80 av's) I really only see the other av's in full force thats near me (like within a 10m circle)

You could blame this on my perticular card but we have here a GF4 TI and a FX5200 that do the exact same thing (with a few less fps)

So la de da that orange and white blob in a av shape overthere is missing 8 polygons per sphere or its missing a finger

Oh and btw ive got a 6600GT in the mail!!! (YEA BABY NO MORE 2002 TECH FOR ME)

Yes, the FX5200 is a much worse card than the Geforce2 GTS.

It's slower than the Ti4200 as well.

And the Tony goes to...

Ah, so when I join a new sim, you're saying I need to right click and click "do not render avatar" on each of the users there in order to not get lagged out the wazoo? Sounds like you're not thinking this through.

Really? Is that why when web developers design a website, they have to take into consideration that the end user's broswer may have javascript disabled? Images can also be disabled. Hell, I might be viewing it through lynx for all you know.

A web server only sends what the browser requests. One item at a time. It's up to the end user's browser to make additional requests for style sheets, images, javascript, flash, etc. And up to the end user's browser on how to render it. A website may look completely different in MSIE than it does in Opera.

So you're actually making a case FOR culling, rather than one against it.

There are still lots of tools, like greasemonkey, that allows you to modify websites.

Hiro, old bean, you picked a REALLY bad example.

It was blasted by more because it was just plain ugly. There were MUCH better tools using proxies that let you write comments on websites without having to be using a specific browser, and they didn't get complaints. Unfortunately, Third Voice managed to poison the well for the whole class of applications.

The bottom line is, when I load a website, I load no more than what I need to load. I'll use a browser the author didn't know about, I'll turn off Javascript, I'll use Firefox plugins or proxies to filter the code, to use a different font that I can read better, to add links and annotations. When a browser can't override a webpage for a user, that's considered a bug, not a feature.

Err, not only do yu get EXACTLY that option, but when we designed PNG we spent a lot of time working to make this possible to do efficiently and still look good.

The really stupid thing is, I agree that this has the possibility of being a Very Bad Thing. Your over-the-top drama is just making it harder to rationally discuss it.

We're comparing documents, and a virtual world, as if they're the same thing.

They aren't.

It isn't a "constitutional" or "rights" or "expression" issue; but it is a feature nerfing issue.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE PUSHER ROBOT. PUSHING IS THE ANSWER.

DO NOT LISTEN TO THE SHOVER ROBOT. SHOVING IS THE ANSWER. GRANDMA IS PROTECTED.

katy,

again, this is not about the right to choose whether or not to view someone, but it's about whether or not to view someone in a manner than the person did not intend.

And rights aside, it's still potentially going to lead to some really sloppy bugs - as I've listed examples.



There's no reason poly reduction couldn't be done equally over all attachments, rather than selecting which attachments not to display.


Agreed, if we were going *by prim* as a standard that would be a great, even way to reduce quality. But as the announcement stands, this is entire attachments.

Uh huh.


But that's another bug. Making *more* things buggy doesn't do any good. It's also a result of textures more than geometry. Culling removes the geometry (and hence the textures on them). I'd much prefer to limit textures by setting a bandwidth cap at which each avatar transmits textures, unless there is a lot of extra bandwidth available.


Incorrect.

I mean, incorrect.

The 800 prims of jewelry is negligible on download time - most jewelry have only a few small textures that are repeated over and over - which is the bulk of upload. The geometry is neglible data compared to textures.

The major reasons why primmy stuff is laggy is not because of download time, but because of CPU time. The geometry slows down your graphics card's ability to draw the screen. And the scripts on the attachment will hit the Server's performance no matter what - and that is not affected by the upcoming patch.


I love Philip like the next fanboi, but:
(a) Philip is one guy who's very very busy running a company and no CEO can be expected to know every nuance of every bug with every unreleased update to software.
(b) He very well could have been talking about the 2.0 renderer, which uses polygon reduction, and is absolutely gorgeous.


(He denied it for another reason, but I suppose this is irrelevant to this conversation.)

Still getting my head around the 'freedom of expression' thing... far as I can see you can still express yourself - just I don't have to watch.

I PUSH HIRO DOWN THE STAIRS. HIRO IS PROTECTED FROM THE TERRIBLE SECRET OF SPACE.

I've already started editing the notecards that come with my avvies to note this.

So basically, nothing is really going to be added, it's just that the Avatar Rendering is going to be set to 50% default? As in...



?