Prim jewelry question

I have noticed a lot of really beautiful, intricate prim jewelry for sale lately in SL, and it made me wonder something. Does prim jewelry, by nature of using very small, cut, hollowed spheres, torii, etc.. have a negative impact on the servers, or did the drawing surface improvement they made a few versions back to address the hoochie hair problem also negate the impact of prim jewelry? Please note this is not a bash on prim jewlery - some of what I have seen is extremely impressive - I am just wondering what impact it has.

Hootchie Bling Baby!

if I'm not mistaken, all avatar attachments are now rendered as one "piece" -- thus negating not only hoochie hair, but obscenely intricate jewelry. Well, to a point, obviously. I still get bogged down if I happen by a club.

LF

Hi ano. You're talking about impact on the server and "drawing"? This is confusing.
Physical prims have more impact on the server if they are large, if they have concave surfaces, and if they are colliding.
Attachments, like jewelry, are supposedly non-physical objects and even though they don't explictly set the phantom flag they will never be collidable.
Furthermore, smaller objects have less impact on the client, due to LOD and interest list prioritization. The smaller/more distant an object is, the more they are simplified by the LOD and the less priority they have, so they and their textures are supposed to be streamed last.
At least that's how it is for standalone objects, I don't know if attachments are an exception to those rules.
The problem with attachments is that people can wear an entire sim's worth of them, and so you often have more prims in people's hair than in your entire parcel.

I'm glad you asked that question, Cristiano, as I've wondered the same thing. So the answer is - what? - That it's all right? I'm still a bit* confused especially with Eggy's statement the "The problem with attachments is that people can wear an entire sim's worth of them, and so you often have more prims in people's hair than in your entire parcel." That puts me right back to thinking there IS a problem.

*a lot, actually, I reckon

I don't mean to confuse you. Your last sentence touches on what I actually meant - what is the impact of having so many things attached to an avatar, both on the client and servers?

to explain this to me, if it's right. When I was working on the Numbakulla build, I was told that torii are a problem, and the smaller they are the worse the problem. We had ample demonstration of this fact, when the hoochie hair belonging to one of the builders continually crashed the server, until we held her down and shaved it off.

The explanation that the calculation involved in smaller twisted torii was more difficult than that for larger torii seemed to make sense at the time...I don't understand how or why this has apparently changed, if it HAS changed.

It would really help non-techie builders like me if there were some good and understandable information available somewhere...I really try to minimise lag and problems, but that is becoming more and more difficult.
BWS
Cali

I wondered that as well when I started making prim jewelry. ( recently) Comparison-
When hoochie hair first came out I bought a rather large primmy hair ( really long wavy ) somewhere that was simply beautiful and as close to my r/l hair as I have seen, but when I wore it I noticed a drastic spike in lag. BTW. the creator did offer a low lag version of the hair. * sigh* I was very disappointed. Even now, I can put it on and notice a big difference in the lag. Since I have started making jewelry and wearing it I have not noticed a difference in the lag at all. I don't add bling, but it's mod so you can if you want to just because the bling causes lag. I say that because when you go to an event that is going to be popular first thing they tell you to do is take off bling, & ao's.


Anyhow.. my 2cents worth.

Z

A film of this might have been as popular as Numbakulla itself.

I rarely use torii. Once in a great while. Most of mine is sphere and cylinder.

For jewelry, I am assuming it all comes down to polys or triangles (tris). Boxes are rather simple with just 12 tris - two for each side. Spheres, cylinders and torii (primatives with curved surfaces) are little more complex and may require many, many more tris to give the impression of a curved surface. Hollow then adds more tris and twisting and skewing add even more.

I don't really know if there can be any fast and easy rules aside from avoiding using tortued spheres, cylinders and torii. (Of course wearing the maximum number of box prims that are all extensively tortured may be just as bad.) It might be nice if when we selected an object or group of objects and the debug menu was active, it would give you a triangle count. For example, selecting a house would display: 4 Objects 278 Prims 12,272 Tris.

Currently, it might be possible to go off to a secluded empty spot or skybox. Use the stat bar to get the current amount of tris in view and then start rezzing things and watch the tri count.

I would assume that for attachments, the server doesn't care much at all how many or what kind of prim it is. The clients do, only because tori tend to use many more tris than (say) cubes. I can't think of any reason why smaller tori would be worse than larger. If anything it should be the other way round, since the smaller ones are more likely to be simplified by LOD stuff if you're not near to it.

I suspect that a prim heavy hair attachment blown up to 10m scale would cause a huge amount of lag.

So all these posts and we still don't know?
And not even the great Egg can guide us?
Zounds!

My understanding is that lag all comes down to the polygon count.

This explains why the rule that "the biggest cause of lag is avatars" works (avatars are very high polygon objects), and why tori or twisted/tortured anything lags (more polygons). In theory the small stuff (jewelry) or zooming out on stuff, should lower the amount of polygons to render and therefore lower the lag.

What is not clear to me is whether the lag is the same on all clients, or whether the lag can be alleviated by rendering on the server (trees for example) and how that actually works anyway. It seems to me that the client should still be seeing and having to render all those polygons if this model is correct.

It would be nice to get a definitive answer to this question from LL and for the life of me I dont know why they dont hire just *one* person to troll the forums and answer stuff like this when it comes up. It would help immensely to do so.

I think Cristiano just wants some pretty new jewelery

Yes, I need something to go with this dress to wear to Barnes' wedding:

umm.. think ya may need to borrow a pair of Elton John's sunglasses.. screw the jewelery!

I decided to do a simple experiment. I found an island and flew up to an altitude of 1500m. I looked around to make sure there were no other objects in sight. I stripped down to my underwear (avoiding clothes that change my body shape). I then looked at my avie from the front and took some measurements.

Far was where my avie was about 1/4 of the height of the screen, medium was where my avie was 1/2 the height of the screen and close was where my avie filled the screen. If you got closer, the tri count started to remain the same or go gound as the client was no longer drawing your entire avie.

Hair Style: Tris Drawn

Mouselook: .3k (Interesting, 300 tris for the sky dome?)

No Hair (bald) (These are tris that make up your avie)
Far: 3.7k
Medium: 7.7k
Close: 11.8k

Simple
Far: 5.4k
Medium: 10.1k
Close: 22.7k

Medium
Far: 8.9k
Medium: 13.5k
Close: 45.5k

Complex
Far: 10.7k
Medium: 17.8k
Close: 39.2k

I don't own any hoochie hair and it probably puts my "complex" hair to shame when it comes to tri count.

Jewelry (Not that I really ever wear jewelry in SL)
Close 33.4k

Yes, just one piece of jewelry with nothing else on.

And a "real" number to compare the other numbers against.

Clothes, glasses, simple hair and all
Close 46.5k
Forgot to check at other ranges first.

I already posted everything there is to say about it...
There are three kinds of lag. Sim, client, and network.
Ano asked about physics (sim lag). I explained what factors influence physics-related lag, and gave reasons why attachments shouldn't make a dent on it.
I also explained how LOD (level-of-detail) simplifies smaller prims, such as jewelry, so as to contain less polygons for your card to draw.
I further explained how, on the server-side, there is something called an "interest list", which AFAIK is a list of things you are "interested" in seeing. At least for standalone objects, this list prioritizes streaming by how visible something is, a calculation based on size and distance.
Jewelry is tiny, so it should have less impact. Though if it blings a lot, and the script is badly coded, such as triggering the particle system on a timer, it may force your client to download a lot of updates. I don't know if this works the same for attachments, I don't know any bling queens
I then proceeded to explain how in spite of these mitigating factors, hoochie hair (and jewelry) have practically no limit as to how detailed they can be, since an attachment can have up to 256 prims.

READER'S DIGEST VERSION: Jewelry does not necessarily have to have as much impact on your performance as some other things can. However, if it's A LOT of it, and if it has badly coded scripts, it may.
You are welcome to make or wear jewelry, as long as you keep it sane. If you and your two friends are wearing 4000 prims each, it will lag. If you're only wearing 40 prims each, it will not lag. It depends on the situation and your graphics card, but it's mostly a rendering and network issue, rather than a server one.

Thanks for doing this work, but you lost me after ....

Hahaha

True, but by the time you see jewelry, it's often too late. There is a correlation between prim usage and client lag, but I bet that you can still make someone's video card scream with just 40 prims if they are tortued enough.

Maybe I am playing SL wrong, but usually I am looking right over my avie's shoulder. So, if you have jewelry and I am close enough to you to chat, I can probably see it. Is everyone else just zoomed out really far?

Oh I did find some "interesting" hair. From far to close range, it was 12.3k/38.3k/96.7k tris. Wow. Amazing that my hair has over 800% percent more complexity than my whole body without the hair at close range. With clothes and shoes I would hit about 120k-ish tris. Almost a 200% increase over my normal self.

I am looking down the street of a very nicely made sim and the view is about 70k tris with myself included. The Welcome Area with all of its curved structures is about 200k tris with a couple of basic avies included in that total. Throw a several avies in there with really elaborate hair and attachments and I can see how people clients can start to stagger when trying to render all that.

I am thinking of a new name for the prim hair, prim wing, prim shoes and prim jewelry angels -- Angels of Lag.

I stand around and wait for them to show up sometimes. It's funny to see the bald women for a bit. If they only knew, how they looked when they first appear. They might drop the hootie hair lol