Hiro's report on culling preview

Hiro, if you can find an example where having it set to 50% causes a significant and detrimental effect, then I'll totally join your side. Until the default is raised or the culling rules are modified.

You know, this is just going to end with people putting big transparent prims in their attachments to override the culling...

Sorry but I have to laugh when people talk about how many 'accounts' there are, knowing full well that there are many alts and it isn't an exact number of how many DIFFERENT PEOPLE are in SL...

Shhhhhhh!

What? It's gonna be one of those things that everyone knows about anyway. It's just gonna be up to an individual's morals whether they do it or not.

Because everyone in SL mules accounts like no tomorrow.

Of course it isn't an exact number, but i sincerely doubt SL users are pumping over 1000 alts a day into the system. The constant growth of the main continent (and estates) disproves that handily.

Also, the number of concurrent users consistently tops 5000 a night now, whereas merely 3-4 months ago, a log-a-thon couldn't even acheive that (they got to like, 4000 i think).

So yeah, I guess it's not 120,000. But it's not 300 people with 400 alts either.

Yep. So it'll kill furries and blingtards with weak machines.
It'll prolly try to cull my STLKR suit too, I'd try and cull per-prim or per amount of polys, but I guess that'd be more CPU overhead.

Yes, because builders' refusal to adapt to change must affect us all.

Ya know, the biggest complaint LL gets from new users is the local framerate issues and when LL doesn't focus on making SL "prettier" you got drama threads like the culling threads poping up. Yet, these are the same people who want SL to perform better too. You can't have high end graphics without sacrifising performance and vice versa. You can have a middle ground though, wich is what the default settings are set for. Honestly you can't go anywhere without someone knowing how to config the client for better performance as it is, how is adding this to the list of things like Local Lighting Off, Draw Distance 64, etc. gonna hurt anything? Simply its not, its just another thing to add to the notecard thats floating around and general ingame answers for performance issues.

I'm surprised the drama llamas ain't b!tching about the default not being set to what we already know. Oh wait, then they can't b!tch about culling. That means they shouldn't be bitch about culling. I think I just created a paradox, enjoy.

So i just add bling into the formula of my AV and I should be good to go?

I saw the word 'Size' in Karens' explanation, so ran my own test with LOD setting of medium while standing by two other AVs

The Pan Avatar when zoomed out on at full distance loses its leg attchments which make up the fur coverings

So in the end I have nada to even worry about Id assume.

alright, proof that at 50% there is a difference. I don't think that's really a problem but i do think the default should be no difference even if it's a small one. So LL, change the default to 60 or 70%.

It'd be better if they got the hardware detection working properly and set it according to what the computer can handle. But that's just wishful thinking I guess.

What "side" is this?

I did a review of the feature. It's pretty positive toward the change, and I said it needing tweaking. I would assume we're all on the same "side" already - trying to make SL a better place.

It doesn't need tweaking. If I manually set detail to minimum then it's a fair bet I need it set to minimum. You don't have a god given right to put shit on my screen and drop my FPS. If you think you do then I'll just ctrl alt shift 1, 2, and 4 like I so often have to do at large events

Blurb, observation, read it or don't. Have a nice day

I'm noticing a rather bad trend here. Lately it seems that when a user brings up a point of concern and writes those concerns out for discussion on the fourms. Some ppl seem to group together and call that concern "dhrama". If we cannot discuss basic issues and concerns without those concerns being labled as "dhrama" then I see no point in discussing any concerns or discussions. I found nothing "dhramatic" about Hiro's posts. I found concerns written out in plain english for ppl to discuss. Aren't we infact "culling" ppls ideas and concerns when we label a topic as "dhrama" a point I find currently ironic considering the the discussion at hand.

I personaly am very interested in this topic, and it does cause some concern. Thanks Hiro

The topic is culling avatars in the next update. Just my 2 cents.

We really won't know the result of the update until this afternoon, like any update I expect some small bugs that will be discussed. I however don't expect to see any dramatic news coming from this update. Crosses fingers, let it be smooth lol.

Cat

I think the reason you find people will respond negatively to expressed concerns has to do completely with the delivery. While this thread is calm, certainly, the original thread was rather over the top. It wasn't just "I am concerned about this..." it was "OMG THIS IS A VIOLATION OF FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION", and had the usual "THE SKY IS FALLING OMG THE END IS NIGH WHAT ABOUT THE CHILDREN OMGLOLBBQ" feel to it since Hiro had not seen the actual implementation and was just wildly speculating. It's all about the approach, honestly - if you fly off the deep end about a topic right out the gate (especially uninformed), it will most likely be met with equally over the top responses. Forum nature, I suppose. This thread overall has been more calm because of Hiro's approach, combined with the fact that this time around he actually did the research and was not just speculating.

I still don't find the results with the slider turned all the way down to be shocking or cause for any alarm at all- if someone needs to turn it all the way down for performance reasons, I would rather they see avatars a little strange from far away than not be able to use SL at all. However, this thread is far more reasoned than the original "OMG CULLING ATE MY BABY" thread

I am sure they will continue to tweak the culling, but I am glad to see them making some efforts to allow more adaptive performance - especially since LL has to deal with users adding more and more prims to their avatars - a problem that did not exist to this degree until the past year, combined with the continued population growth. I am also glad they responded to requests for a preview, and interesting, it was a preview on the live grid, which was unusual. Expressing concerns about something is not a problem - ranting and raving uninformed and predicting doom and gloom is something else entirely.

Eggy, have I mentioned lately how much I think you rock?

Hehehe.

Keep cutting through the bullshit man, it really makes my day.

Good points Cristiano and I agree with them. Carry over threads are a pain because they confuse matters, I could do without them personaly. If this will help reduce the lag problems then I am all for it. Eggy is right too sort of I think. I believe ppl can wear 300 prim hair and all the bling bling they want. On the other hand putting the tools in the hands of the users is a good thing for individual system preformance.

I see both sides of this and believe it or not I agree with both of them. Sometimes issues and resolution of those issues, are not black and white. If ppl want to see everything they were meant to see, with little to no lag, 100% of the time. Then they must upgrade their systems to the max. LL recommendations. I think it will be a while before the majority of uses have those types of systems. So LL is taking steps to help, via the sliders.

Cat

A few comments:

So, at the default setting, this does nothing but improve efficiency... that's A VERY GOOD THING. Over 95% of the people in SL don't tweak their settings, so to me, this is pretty much a non-issue. If my personal avian overlord Psyra says he doesn't see it being an issue - then I'm okay with it!

The creation of alt accounts within SL won't even chart on the total number. I'm guessing less than one in one hundred people create alt accounts - just the super-duper die hard types like us do! Let's not forget, most people are fairly casual users, not the 80 hours per week type addicts most of us on these forums are.

Eggy created 100 alt accounts and culled attachments in beta.

LL is also improving the efficiency and frame-rate at the Welcome Area (finally!). After many weeks of pointing out how beautiful but badly created the Welcome Area is, changes are being made. To wit:

- many textures in the W.A., including the flowers, were uploaded as 1024x1024 32-bit targa images! Sorry, but for the flowers, 128x128 would have been MORE than enough.

- just about all the textures - including the solid ones - were uploaded as 32-bit targa images. 32-bit targa images should only be uploaded if an alpha channel (transparency) is necessary. Even the solid walkways were uploaded as 32-bit targa, which causes the Second Life application on your computer to do the "math" associated with transparency (figuring out what's being it, what order they should be displayed in, etc)... this causes a lot of math to be done on the client, causing framerates to drop significantly, even when the texture isn't truly transparent.

Whoever created the new W.A. sure has an eye for artistic beauty, but needs a big lesson in efficient building! For the first impression of Second Life, framerate needs to be addressed, and I'm glad to see the Lindens starting to do that both with attachment culling and improving building efficiencies at the first place everyone sees!

Regards,

-Flip

Given Hiro's original post on this topic, calling it "drama" is at best an understatement, and you have to understand how that message would color later responses.

My thoughts exactly.......and TY Hiro for taking the time to show us EXACTLY what U were talking about.

Interesting!

I'd never thought of that before, but I suppose it makes sense... If there is an alpha channel in the image, the game isn't smart enough to tell if the alpha channel is fully opaque or not. Iiiiinteresting.

I'd always assumed since everything gets converted to JPEG2000, it didn't matter the format you uploaded in.

I think I have some textures I need to re-upload now...

I'm interested in measuring this. Can anyone out there mail me a set of textures so I can run some tests and come up with a comparison of 24 and 32 bit targas?
[email]eggstasy@gmail.com[/email]

This sums up Catherine's post rather nicely and I wholeheartedly agree. LL should put any and all tradeoffs and settings within our reach, even if we have to hack around the INI files to do it.

I've sent ya the same graphic, 512x512, saved as 24 bit and 32 bit (though its solid).

Any Lindens care to weigh in on:

- how much un-necessarily large textures affect frame rate given different hardware configurations (card / CPU / RAM)
- when a 32-bit targa is converted to JPEG2000, and doesn't need an alpha channel, the alpha channel is still maintained (as seen in the Welcome Area). Any way to detect and discard the alpha channel when its not actually in use? This would cause a lot less CPU power to be drained on a completely un-necessary task.

Regards,

-Flip

Probably a bad idea to jump on this one, but gimme a break. Or rather lets put it this way...

You don't have a god given right to tell anyone they cant have attachments, and if you dont like it, then either dont come to the large event, turn your LOD down, tweak your settings, or (god forbid) go out and get a better graphics card/computer.

Who are you to impose upon everyone else what we can or cannot put on our AV's?

Just a though to Mull over.